Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [36]
The greatest cartographic treasure in the Library of Congress actually sits a block north of John Hébert’s vault, in the grand exhibition gallery of the library’s opulent Thomas Jefferson Building. In 2001, the library paid a German prince a whopping $10 million (half allocated by Congress and half from private donors) for the only surviving copy of a 1507 world map by a cartographer named Martin Waldseemüller.
Why did the so-called Waldseemüller map command a price of almost ten times what any other map had ever fetched at auction? For one thing, the map was believed lost for centuries; of an original print run of one thousand, it seemed that not a single copy had survived. Some geographers even claimed that the much-ballyhooed map had never existed. “No lost maps have been sought for so diligently as these,” proclaimed the Royal Geographical Society. “The honor of being their lucky discoverer has long been considered as the highest possible prize . . . in the field of ancient cartography.”
That prize was finally claimed in 1901 by Joseph Fischer. Father Fischer was a Jesuit scholar researching early Viking navigation when he happened to come across a map folio in the south tower garret of Wolfegg Castle, near the German-Swiss border. As he paged through the pristine map sheets, Fischer realized he had unearthed a lost treasure. The map depicts a Western Hemisphere divided into two continents, north and south, separated by a narrow strait and the Caribbean Sea. Westward, there’s a vast ocean separating this new continent from (a rather sketchily defined version of) eastern Asia. And in the northern part of modern-day Argentina was inscribed one fateful word: “America.”
These are familiar sights on a world map today, but in 1507, they weren’t just unexpected—they were revolutionary. Christopher Columbus had gone to his grave the year before still convinced he had visited the East Indies on his four voyages, but here was a vast new continent stretching almost from pole to pole between Europe and Asia. Europeans wouldn’t glimpse the Pacific across the Isthmus of Panama for another five years, yet there it is on the map. The western coast of South America hadn’t been explored at all yet, but Waldseemüller’s simple rendering is extraordinarily accurate—within seventy miles at several key points, John Hébert tells me.
Scholars will no doubt be studying the map’s remarkable verisimilitude for years to come, but its chief historical claim to fame—and the reason that Congress would pony up the cool five mill to rescue it from its German tower prison—is that single “America” at the lower left. This isn’t just the earliest surviving use of the term; the text that accompanied the map makes it clear that, when we peer at the map, we are witnessing the word’s coining in action. “A fourth part of the world has been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci,” wrote Waldseemüller.* “Since both Asia and Africa received their names from women, I do not see why anyone should rightly prevent this from being called Amerigen—the land of Amerigo, as it were—or America, after its discoverer, Americus, a man of perceptive character.”
Columbus’s biographer Bartolomé de Las Casas huffily insisted that the new continent “should have been called Columba instead,” after its real discoverer. But Vespucci was a different kind of proto-American: a showman and a shameless self-promoter. He was a Florentine