The large island in the South Pacific roughly where Australia can actually be found must have been a lucky guess, Van Duzer says, as Europeans wouldn’t discover that continent for another century.
But southern Africa is oddly shaped like a boot with its toe pointing to the east, and Asia is also twisted out of shape. Its depiction of Europe and the Mediterranean Sea is more or less accurate, or at least recognizable. But their understanding of the world was quite different from ours, and Martellus’s map reflects that. In the process, they’ve discovered new clues about the sources Martellus used to make his map and confirmed the huge influence it had on later maps, including a famous 1507 map by Martin Waldseemuller that was the first to use the name “America.” MARTELLUS AND COLUMBUSĬontrary to popular myth, 15th-century Europeans did not believe that Columbus would sail off the edge of a flat Earth, says Chet Van Duzer, the map scholar who led the study. Most of it has faded over the centuries.īut now researchers have used modern technology to uncover much of this previously illegible text. The map, created by the German cartographer Henricus Martellus, was originally covered with dozens of legends and bits of descriptive text, all in Latin. In fact, Columbus likely used a copy of it in planning his journey.
This 1491 map is the best surviving map of the world as Christopher Columbus knew it as he made his first voyage across the Atlantic.
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