Sea Monsterson Medieval and Renaissance Maps Chet Van Duzer THE BRITISH LIBRARY First published 2013 by The British Library Acknowledgements 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB ISBN 978 0 7123 5890 3 Text © 2013 Chet Van Duzer Exploring what we can learn from the sea monsters that decorate medieval and Renaissance maps Illustrations © 2013 The British Library Board and other named copyright holders has been a deeply rewarding experience; throughout the research and writing of this book I have felt lucky to be working on a subject so visually, emotionally, and intellectually engaging, and at the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data same time so fruitful of insights into cartographers’ sources and techniques. A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library It is a pleasure to thank here those who have helped bring this work to fruition. I am grateful to Catherine Delano-Smith for perceiving that my research would find its best expression as a book, Designed by Bobby Birchall, Bobby&Co. and to David Way, Publisher at the British Library, for his guidance and furtherance. My thanks go Printed in Hong Kong by to the staff of the Map Library at the British Library, particularly Peter Barber and Tom Harper; and Great Wall Printing Co Ltd to the staff of the Stanford University Libraries, particularly John Mustain. For their suggestions, corrections, and assistance I am indebted to Ilya Dines, John Friedman, Jacqueline Leclercq-Marx, Margriet Hoogvliet, Natalia Lozovsky, Kimberly Merritt, Rosemary Marcus, Klaus Barthelmess (†), Gregory McIntosh, and Hana Šedinová. And finally I would like to thank many other friends and colleagues and my family for their enthusiastic support for this project. Chet Van Duzer Los Altos Hills, California, 2013 Contents Acknowledgements 5 The Sea Monsters of the Earliest Surviving Terrestrial Globe 68 Introduction 8 The Sea Monsters of Waldseemüller’s Map of 1507 and Schöner’s Globe of 1515 71 Lighting a Fire on a Whale’s Back 76 Classical Antecedents 13 The Earliest Medieval Maps with Sea Monsters: BeatusMappaemundi 14 Pictorial Excursus: The Cartographic Career of the Walrus 78 “Let the Waters Bring Forth Abundantly”: Sea Monsters in the Creation 23 Sea Monsters in the Harbor of Brindisi 25 The Debut of the Sea Monsters of the Renaissance 80 An Imagined Mappamundi with Sea Monsters 26 Olaus Magnus and the Most Important Sea Monsters of the Sixteenth Century 81 Sea Monsters on the Ceiling 27 Mercator’s Globe of 1541: The Influence of Olaus Magnus 86 Giant Sea Monsters on Two Small Mappaemundi 28 The Ulpius Globe: Sea Monsters Before Their Time 88 “A Vast Sea Where There is Nothing But the Abode of Monsters” 31 The Monster that Stops Ships in Their Tracks 89 Two Monumental Mappaemundi with Few Sea Monsters 33 Three Sea Monsters Battling in the Atlantic 37 Pictorial Excursus: More Whimsical Sea Monsters 92 Pictorial Excursus: The Dangers of Sea Monsters 38 From Sea Dragons to a Sawfish: The Rylands Library Map of 1546 94 Evidence of a Sea Monster Specialist 97 Sea Monsters on Nautical Charts: Giant Octopuses, Sirens, Sharks 40 The Curious Career of the Flying Turtle 98 How to Buy a Sea Monster 48 The Eclecticism of Giacomo Gastaldi 100 Whaling Between Myth and Reality 50 The Sea Monsters of Gerard Mercator’s Great Map of 1569 103 A Nest of Sea Monsters at the Bottom of the World 52 Sea Monsters Cavorting Among the Mediterranean Isles 105 Whales as Big as Mountains 54 The Sea Monsters Surrounding Iceland in the First Atlas 108 Terrifying Monsters in the Indian Ocean 55 A Haunting Sea Monster Reappears 112 A Skeptic about Sea Monsters: Fra Mauro 56 Whales Fantastic and Realistic at the End of the Sixteenth Century 112 Two New World Sea Monsters 114 Pictorial Excursus: Whimsical Sea Monsters 58 Conclusion 116 Invented Sea Monsters in the Circumfluent Ocean 60 Endnotes 120 The Manuscript with the Most Sea Monsters 61 Index 142 Sea Monsters in Printed Editions of Ptolemy 66 36 37 Fig. 22 A swordfish, whale, and perhaps a killer whale on the Gough Map of Britain Fig. 21 A swordfish, Scylla, and Charybdis in the Mediterranean on the Hereford of c.1400 (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Gough Gen. Top. 16). mappamundi of c. 1290-1310 (Hereford Cathedral). shark (fig. 22).92 The whale and swordfish are both lifelike, particularly the swordfish—much more so than that on the Hereford mappamundi discussed above (fig. 21); in fact it is the earliest lifelike depiction of a swordfish in any Western source that I know. I would dispute the identification of the third creature as a thresher shark, as it lacks the very long upper tail fin which is the most distinctive feature of threshers, and generally looks un-sharklike: a killer whale seems like a much more plausible identification. It has been Three Sea Monsters Battling persuasively suggested in the Atlantic that the fight of the whale against the two smaller sea creatures may represent The Gough Map of Britain, like the Hereford and Ebstorf England’s struggle against Wales and Scotland.93 If maps, is a separate production, and we know little about this interpretation is correct, the sea monsters on the the circumstances of its creation. The map measures 56 × Gough Map play a unique role among sea monsters 115 cm (22 × 45 inches) and was traditionally dated to c. on maps, representing almost heraldically the political 1360, but recently has been ascribed a date of c. 1400.91 It relationships of the countries mapped nearby. The image is the earliest surviving map to depict the road network of the swordfish also stands out for its lifelikeness, and of Britain, and also the first to give an accurate rendering it seems probable that the cartographer painted the fish of the British coastline. In the ocean to the east there are after having seen one firsthand, rather than relying on an three large sea creatures that seem to be fighting; they illustrated book on natural history. have been identified as a whale, swordfish, and thresher SEA MONSTERS ON MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE MAPS SEA MONSTERS ON MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE MAPS The38 Dangers of Sea Monsters 39 1 A sea monster known as a physetera or spouter, a type of whale, 2 A whale eating a ship off the coast of Norway, on Olaus Magnus’s 5 Two sirens, both of whom hold mirrors and comb their hair to 6 Sea monsters attacking a ship off the coast of India, from Abraham attacking a ship by vomiting water on it, from a map in the 1538 Carta marina of 1539; compare figs. 67 and 71 from the same map indicate their vanity (compare fig. 84), practise their wiles on a ship Ortelius’s Theatrum orbis terrarum; the image derives from Olaus edition of Solinus, who describes just this type of attack by sea (from the copy of 1572, Stockholm, Sveriges nationalbibliotek, which is west of the Strait of Magellan on Diego Gutierrez’s 1562 map Magnus’s reproduced on the opposite page, perhaps by way of the monsters (52.42). From C. Julii Solini Polyhistor ... Huic Pomponii Melæ shelfmark KoB 1 ab). of the Americas (Library of Congress). similar scene in Diego Gutierrez’s 1562 map of the Americas. (British de situ orbis libros ... adiunximus (Basel, 1538), between pp. 150 and Library, Maps 9.Tab.9, map 94). 151 (British Library, 216.b.1). 3 Whales attacking a ship, on Olaus Magnus’s Carta marina; the sailors 4 A sea monster eating an unfortunate sailor—perhaps Jonah—in the 7 Jonah being cast overboard to the sea monster, from Ortelius’s map 8 A huge sea monster attacks a galley in the Aegean, while the jettison barrels and a man on the ship plays a trumpet in order to scare Mediterranean off the northern coast of Africa in Sebastian Münster’s of the Holy Land in his Theatrum orbis terrarum. There is a similar image seamen try to fend it off with spears, on Nikolaos Sophianos’s Totius the monsters away (Stockholm, Sveriges nationalbibliotek, shelfmark Cosmographia of 1540 (British Library, Maps.C.1.c.2., No.15). on John Speed’s Canaan, As it was Possessed Both in Abraham and Israel’s Graeciae Descriptio of 1545 (Basel, Öffentliche Universität Bibliothek, KoB 1 ab). Days (London, 1595). (British Library, Maps 9.Tab.9., map 97). AA 89). SEA MONSTERS ON MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE MAPS SEA MONSTERS ON MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE MAPS 92 93 Fig. 80 An anonymous manuscript world map by a member of the Dieppe School, made in 1546 (Manchester, John Rylands Library, French MS 1*). From Sea Dragons to a Sawfish: realistic than those on Olaus Magnus’s Carta marina (see mammals: a map in Guillaume Le Testu’s manuscript On the 1546 map there are some sea monsters west The Rylands Library Map of 1546 fig. 67).237 Incidentally another map by a cartographer of Cosmographie universelle of 1555 has a scene of a ship of the large hypothetical “Java le Grand” continent in the Dieppe School has a depiction of a hunt for aquatic hunting dolphins, one of which has a harpoon in its side.238 southern Asia. West of Java Minor there is a beautiful A large manuscript world map (126 × 256 cm, or 49.6 × 100.8 inches) dated 1546 and preserved in the John Rylands Library in Manchester (fig. 80) was in the past attributed to Pierre Desceliers (c.1500 - c.1558), but serious doubts have been raised about that attribution.233 These doubts are confirmed by the differences between the sea monsters on the 1546 map and those on Desceliers’s two signed maps, those of 1550 and 1553: those on the 1546 map are more varied and their depictions more detailed.234 The most famous sea monster on the map is the whale in the Atlantic between northern Newfoundland and southern Labrador, which is shown being harpooned by five men in a small boat; we are no doubt to understand that the men came from the sailing ship just to the north (fig.