Waldseemüller map
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The Waldseemüller map, Universalis Cosmographia, is a wall map of the world drawn by German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller and originally published in April 1507. It was one of the first maps to precisely chart latitude and longitude, following the example of Ptolemy, and was the first map to use the name "America". Waldseemüller also created globe gores, a printed map designed to be cut out and pasted onto a sphere to form a globe of the Earth.
Waldseemüller was working as part of the group of scholars of the Vosgean Gymnasium at Saint-Dié-des-Vosges in Lorraine. The maps were accompanied by the book Cosmographiae Introductio produced by the Vosgean Gymnasium.
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[edit] Wall map
The full title of the map is "Universalis cosmographia secundum Ptholomaei traditionem et Americi Vespucii aliorumque lustrationes". It is believed by some that it was based on several earlier maps (chiefly those of Ptolemy and the Caveri planisphere and others similar to those of Martellus or Behaim). The Caribbean and what appears to be Florida were depicted on two earlier charts, the Cantino map and the Caverio map. Whereas the earlier maps do not make it clear whether or not their map-makers thought the western lands were part of Asia or separate, the Waldseemüller map shows America separate from Asia.
The map depicts North and South America as two large continents. The main map shows the two continents slightly separated, while the small inset map at the top shows them joined by an isthmus. The name "America" is placed on South America, this being the first map known to use this name. As explained in Cosmographiae Introductio, the name was bestowed in honor of Amerigo Vespucci.
In depicting the Americas separate from Asia, it shows a great ocean between the mountainous western coasts of the Americas and the east coast of Asia. However, the first Europeans to set eyes on this ocean, the Pacific, were Vasco Núñez de Balboa in 1513 or, Ponce de León in 1512 or 1513 - six years after Waldseemüller made his map. Until this time, it was still erroneously believed that the lands discovered by Christopher Columbus, Vespucci and others formed part of the Indies of Asia. Thus, there seems to be no way that Waldseemüller could have known about the Pacific. The historian Peter Whitfield has theorised that Waldseemüller incorporated the ocean into his map because Vespucci's accounts of the Americas, with their so-called "savage" peoples, could not be reconciled with contemporary knowledge of India, China and the islands of Indies. Thus, Waldseemüller reasoned, the newly discovered lands could not be part of Asia but must be separate from it - a leap of intuition that was later proved uncannily precise. Additionally, Mundus Novus, a book attributed to Vespucci and widely published throughout Europe after 1504 (including by Waldseemuller's group in 1507), first introduced to Europeans the idea that this was a new continent and not Asia, hence, Waldseemüller's separating America from Asia creating the Pacific Ocean.
The wall map consists of twelve sections printed from wood engravings measuring 18 x 24.5 inches (46 x 62 cm). Each section is one of four, that form one of three zones. The map uses a modified Ptolemaic coniform projection with curved meridians to depict the entire surface of the Earth.
[edit] Extant copies
Of the one thousand copies of the wall map printed, only one is known to still exist. It was originally owned by Johannes Schöner (1477–1547), a Nuremberg astronomer, geographer and cartographer. Its existence was unknown for a long time until its rediscovery in 1901 in the library of Prince von Waldburg-Wolfegg-Waldsee in Wolfegg Castle in Württemberg, Germany by Joseph Fischer. It remained there until 2001 when the United States Library of Congress purchased it from von Waldburg-Wolfegg-Waldsee for ten million dollars. There has been some suggestion that it is from a second edition produced about 1515. Its preservation seems to be due to the several sheets being bound into a single cover by Schöner.
Four copies of the globe gores are known to exist. The first to be rediscovered was found in 1871 and is now in the James Ford Bell Library of the University of Minnesota. Another copy was found inside a Ptolemy atlas and is in the Bavarian State Library in Munich. A third copy was discovered in 1992 bound into an edition of Aristotle in the Bibliothek Stadtbucherei Offenburg, a public library in Germany. A fourth copy came to light in 2003 when its European owner read a newspaper article about the Waldseemüller map. It was sold to Charles Frodsham and Co. at auction for a world record price for a single sheet map.[1]
