Hunt-Lenox Globe

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The Hunt-Lenox Globe or Lenox Globe, dating from ca. 1503-07 or 1510^[1] , is the second or third oldest known terrestrial globe, after the Erdapfel of 1492. It bears a striking resemblance to the Globus Jagellonicus, also tentatively dated to 1510.

The Lenox Globe is 13cm in diameter and made from copper. It is notable as the only instance on a historical map of the actual phrase HC SVNT DRACONES (i.e. hic sunt dracones, "here be dragons"). The phrase appears on the eastern coast of Asia.

The globe was purchased in Paris in 1855 by architect Richard Morris Hunt, who gave it to James Lenox, whose collection became part of the New York Public Library, where the globe still resides.

The earliest known articles on the globe are:

B. F. da Costa, "The Lenox Globe," Magazine of American History, vol. 3, no. 9 (Sept. 1879), pp. 529-540.[2]
B. F. da Costa with additions by Gabriel Gravier, "Le Globe Lenox," Bulletin de la société normande de géographie (Oct-Dec. 1879), pp. 216-228.

However, neither article links hic sunt dracones to dragons. Da Costa writes:

In this region [i.e. China, called East India on the globe] near the equatorial line, is seen "Hc Svnt Dracones", or here are the Dagroians, described by Marco Polo as living in the Kingdom of "Dagroian". These people... feasted upon the dead and picked their bones (B.II. c.14, Ramusio's ed.)

In his translation of Da Costa's article, Gabriel Gravier adds that Marco Polo's Kingdom of Dagroian is in Java Minor, or Sumatra, well away from the spot indicated on the Lenox Globe.

The flat drawing of the globe which accompanied the early articles is reproduced as map 7 in Emerson D. Fite and Archibald Freeman's A Book of Old Maps Delineating American History (New York: Dover Reprints, 1969), and as figure 43 in A. E. Nordenskiöld's Facsimile-Atlas to the Early History of Cartography (New York: Dover Reprints, 1973). [Note: map illustrations 6 and 7 are reversed in some copies of Fite and Freeman.]

A photograph of the globe itself can be found on page 81 of Ena L. Yonge's A Catalogue of Early Globes Made Prior to 1850 and Conserved in the United States (New York: American Geographical Society, 1968); however, the side with the inscription faces away from the camera.