Chet Van Duzer Martin Waldseemüller’s ‘Carta marina’ of 1516 Study and Transcription of the Long Legends Martin Waldseemüller’s ‘Carta marina’ of 1516 Chet Van Duzer Martin Waldseemüller’s ‘Carta marina’ of 1516 Study and Transcription of the Long Legends Chet Van Duzer Lazarus Project University of Rochester Rochester, NY, USA ISBN 978-3-030-22702-9 ISBN 978-3-030-22703-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22703-6 This book is an open access publication; the preparation and open access publication of “Martin Walseemüller’s ‘Carta marina’ of 1516 – Study and Transcription of the Long Legends” were made possible thanks to generous support from the Jay I. 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This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Acknowledgements It is a pleasure to thank here those who have supported me in my work on this book. My research on the Carta marina was generously funded by a Kislak Fellowship at the Library of Congress from November 2011 to March 2012 and June to July 2012, and I offer my enthusiastic thanks to Jay Kislak, Arthur Dunkelman, and the Jay I. Kislak Foundation for their support. I also wish to thank Barbara Tenenbaum of the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress, who was Curator of the Kislak Collection during my fellowship; Mary Lou Reker of the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress for facilitating my work; Ralph Ehrenberg, then Chief of the Geography and Map Division for his encouragement, and Eric Frazier of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division for his unstinting generosity. And I thank my intern in the Kluge Center, Chelsea Jimenez, for her help and good humor. I owe particular thanks to John Hessler of the Geography and Map Division at the Library of Congress, my co-author on the book Seeing the World Anew: The Radical Vision of Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 & 1516 World Maps (Delray Beach, FL: Levenger, and Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2012), which contains some of my research on the Carta marina that is presented here. Working on the Waldseemüller maps with John, who wrote about the 1507 map, was an exciting intellectual adventure. And I offer my thanks again to the Jay I. Kislak Foundation and to Arthur Dukelman for generously funding the release of this book in open access, which I trust will facilitate the enjoyment and study of Waldseemüller’s map by a wider audience than would otherwise be possible. Sadly, Mr. Kislak himself passed away on October 3, 2018; may he rest in peace. Providence, RI, USA Chet Van Duzer v Contents 1 Introduction to the Carta Marina ................................... 1 1.1 Introduction ............................................... 1 1.2 Martin Waldseemüller and His Works ............................ 2 1.3 Comparing and Contrasting the 1507 and 1516 Maps ................ 5 1.4 Waldseemüller’s Textual Sources on the Carta Marina ............... 10 1.5 The Carta Marina’s Iconographical Program, and Its Sources .......... 19 1.6 The Development of Waldseemüller’s Cartographic Thought ........... 39 1.7 The Cutting of the Woodblocks for the Carta Marina ................ 43 1.8 Evidence for the Diffusion of the Carta Marina ..................... 44 2 The Long Legends: Transcription, Translation, and Commentary .......... 55 2.1 Sheet 1. North America, Caribbean, North Atlantic (Plate 2.1) .......... 56 2.2 Sheet 2. Newfoundland and Europe (Plate 2.2) ..................... 58 2.3 Sheet 3. Northern Asia (Plate 2.3) ............................... 63 2.4 Sheet 4. Northeastern Asia (Plate 2.4) ............................ 79 2.5 Sheet 5. Northern South America and the Caribbean (Plate 2.5) ......... 91 2.6 Sheet 6. Western Africa (Plate 2.6) .............................. 97 2.7 Sheet 6A. Western Africa (Plate 2.6A) ........................... 103 2.8 Sheet 7. East Africa, the Red Sea, Arabia, and the Western Indian Ocean (Plate 2.7) ........................................... 105 2.9 Sheet 8. Southern India and Southeast Asia (Plate 2.8) ................ 118 2.10 Sheet 9. Cartouches in the Map’s Southwest Corner (Plate 2.9) ......... 126 2.11 Sheet 10. Southern South America and the South Atlantic (Plate 2.10) .... 132 2.12 Sheet 11. Southern Africa and the Southwestern Indian Ocean (Plate 2.11) ............................................... 135 2.13 Sheet 12. The Southern Indian Ocean (Plate 2.12) ................... 139 vii Introduction to the Carta Marina 1 1.1 Introduction This book is devoted to an imposing world map, printed on twelve sheets and rich in detail, that was designed by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller in 1516, whose only surviving exemplar is in the Jay I. Kislak Collection at the Library of Congress. This map, the Carta marina, has tended to live in the shadow of Waldseemüller’s earlier world map, that printed in 1507, which is famous for being the first to apply the name “America” to the New World. The Carta marina lacks some of the striking audacity of the 1507 map, on which the cartographer not only debuts a new name for the newly discovered lands in the west, but also represents all 360 degrees of longitude at a time when the interior and the western reaches of the New World were unknown, and the vastness of the Pacific was still undiscovered by Europeans. On the Carta marina, by contrast, he more prudently omits as unknown everything between the eastern coast of the New World and the eastern coast of mainland Asia. Yet the Carta marina is the fruit of a cartographic boldness that is equally impressive: a willingness to discard almost all of the research done for the earlier map, and undertake the laborious creation of an entirely new detailed and monumental image of the world based on a new philosophy and a new projection, and using new sources. The map is a remarkable testament both to the cartographer’s determination to show the true form of the world and to the dynamism of early sixteenth-century cartography. One of the many differences between the 1507 and 1516 maps is that there is a larger number of long legends on the latter. In the long text block in the lower left corner of the map (see Legend 9.3), Waldseemüller lists many of the sources that he used in creating the map, which are also the sources of many of the long legends. He clearly viewed the textual element of his map as very important, and yet in the more than one hundred years since the rediscovery of the Carta marina, few of the legends have been transcribed and translated, they have never been studied together, and their correlations with the sources that Waldseemüller lists on the map have not been explored.1 Thus an essential aspect of this important map, and of Waldseemüller’s effort to convey information to the map’s viewers, has remained uninvestigated. We know little about Waldseemüller, and the general lack of scholarly attention devoted to the Carta marina represents not only a failure to address one of the masterpieces of the most important cartographer of the early sixteenth century, but also a lost opportunity to study the development of his cartographic thought, and thus add to our knowledge of the man. By examining how he used his sources, we can gain insight into Waldseemüller’s methods and character, and by seeing how his cartographic thought evolved, we can come to appreciate his intellectual openness and flexibility. In this introduction I offer a detailed discussion of the Carta marina, focusing on a comparison of that map with the 1507, and also with the maps in Waldseemüller’s edition of Ptolemy’s Geography published in 1513, in the interest of revealing all that the later map can tell us about the development of Waldseemüller’s thought. Following this general discussion of the map comes a transcription, translation, and study of all of the long legends on the Carta marina, with particular attention devoted to the determination of their sources. My hope is that the book will be of use not only to readers with a direct interest in Waldseemüller, but also more broadly to any scholar working on early sixteenth-century cartography, and to anyone interested in seeing how an experienced cartographer of that period went about constructing a new image of the world.