Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [37]
The fateful word on the Waldseemüller map. America finally releases its long-form birth certificate, proving that the continent wasn’t born in Indonesia or Kenya.
Unlike Columbus’s dull, G-rated journals, Vespucci’s letters are obsessive and vivid on the subject of native sexuality. “They . . . are excessively libidinous,” he leers, “and the women more than the men; for I refrain out of decency from telling of the art with which they gratify their immoderate lust.” But—luckily for us—he doesn’t refrain for long! “It was to us a matter of astonishment that none was to be seen among them who had a flabby breast, and those who had borne children were not to be distinguished from virgins by the shape and shrinking of the womb; and in the other parts of the body similar things were seen of which in the interest of modesty I make no mention. When they had the opportunity of copulating with Christians, urged by excessive lust, they defiled and prostituted themselves.” Check it out, Europe: Caribbean women are all hawt ! And, like, total sluts!
Vespucci’s letters went on to be printed in no fewer than sixty editions; Columbus’s journals, only twenty-two. So Waldseemüller could be forgiven for thinking that Amerigo was the one who deserved the naming honors. After all, Vespucci wrote that the land he’d visited (the “New World,” he called it) “is found to be surrounded on all sides by the ocean.” Readers like Waldseemüller got the distinct impression—which turned out to be right—that there was a new continent out there, over the horizon. The new map may never have reached Spain, where Vespucci lived until his 1512 death, so he probably died without knowing what his legacy would be. But what a legacy! This Renaissance rock star had managed to get 28 percent of the earth’s land area named after him—in his own lifetime.
When he drew his map, Waldseemüller extended conic projection used in the first century by Ptolemy to the new ends of the Earth, so Europe, Africa, and the Near East look pretty good but eastern Asia and the Americas are distorted, as if seen through a fish-eye lens. The effect is oddly immersive as I walk toward the map; it rises out of its case to engulf me on all sides like a Hunter S. Thompson hallucination. The library has spared no expense in preservation—the case, modeled on the ones that house the Constitution and Declaration of Independence over in the National Archives, cost $320,000. The map sits in dim light behind an inch and a half of glass, the air inside having been replaced with inert argon gas. Gold letters on the case read, “America’s Birth Certificate.”
That tagline isn’t just a politically canny way to raise $10 million for a single map—it’s also a very perceptive statement about maps in general. The history of the world is just as much a history of places as it is of people—cities and nations that were born in obscurity if not bastardy but later grew into greatness. The English comic poet E. C. Bentley once observed that “The science of geography / Is different from biography: / Geography is about Maps, / But Biography is about Chaps.” The Waldseemüller map—in fact, the whole of John Hébert’s vault of wonders, its portolans and panoramas and powder horns—reminds us that history is about both. It makes us wonder: if one map can change the world, what can five and a half million do?
They have power only if we use them, of course. I wonder how many dusty drawers of the Geography and Map Division might hold unseen treasures like the one that Father Fischer found in a German castle garret. We’ll never know if nobody looks. As we walk out of the Waldseemüller exhibit, our footsteps echo on the marble floor. Today, the vast, dim gallery that houses the world’s most valuable map is,