A
mong the most enduring myths of American history
is that in 1492 Christopher Columbus reached a land
that was sparsely populated. Decades of research by
scientists, anthropologists, and historians, however,have established that the Americas were home to between
50 and 70 million people organized into multiple and diverse
societies by the time Columbus arrived. By comparison,
Europe had a population of between 70 and 90 million. The
most sophisticated of these societies were the Aztecs of
Mexico, whose civilization included well-developed cities,
complex social and political structures, and above all a dense
population. Further north, the continental expanse that would
become the United States was home to several native tribes,
from the Iroquois Confederation in the Northeast to the tribes
of the Mississippi Valley and the Pueblo and Hopi villages
of the Southwest. The population of these tribes together
numbered perhaps 7 million. The Pueblo villages had
developed sophisticated agricultural systems that involved
canals, dams, and terracing.
If we acknowledge these established societies throughoutthe Americas, then the traditional account of “discovery”
becomes far more complicated. This chapter examines the
first century of European exploration in the Americas by
tracing the struggle to map this unknown territory. We open
with the world as it was understood by Europeans in 1490,
using a map that influenced Columbus as he planned his
voyage to the Far East. Just a few years earlier Bartolomeu
Dias had sailed down the western coast of Africa in an effort
to reach the Indian Ocean. Dias demonstrated the possibility
of reaching the East by sailing south, though the sheer length
of the journey reinforced Columbus’ belief that it would be
quicker to reach the Indies by sailing west from Spain. In his
mind, Japan was 2,400 miles from the Canary Islands, though
his advisers believed it was at least four times further.
Our first map shows the logic behind Columbus’ decisionto sail west, for contemporary knowledge framed the world
as consisting of Africa, Asia, and Europe. He was wrong, of
course, for it was not Asia but the New World that lay west of
the Atlantic Ocean. This error led to the European discovery
of America. Columbus sought Asia, and only inadvertently
discovered the Caribbean. Yet, because of his worldview,
Columbus went to his death believing that he had in fact
reached the East Indies rather than an entirely separate
hemisphere. In his mind, the islands of the Caribbean
were near the land of Japan that Marco Polo had described
centuries earlier. This conviction that Asia lay west of the
Atlantic Ocean shaped the maps drawn in the early 1500s,
as geographers and mapmakers tried to assimilate the
information brought back by the Atlantic voyages. For some,
it was clear that this was an entirely separate land, but
others tried to reconcile this new geography with the existing
knowledge of Asia. This assumption produced a number of
fascinating and profoundly confusing maps drawn in the early
sixteenth century.
One of the most notable of these was issued in 1506 by
Giovanni Contarini and Francesco Rosselli (page 14). Their
map attempted to integrate knowledge brought back by the
voyages of discovery within existing geographical frameworks.
Europe and Africa appear in their familiar form, yet to the
west we see an open sea that bears little resemblance to the
western hemisphere. If we remember, however, that Contarini
and Rosselli followed Columbus’ belief that Asia lay west of
Europe, then the picture begins to make sense. A few years
later, the world map drawn by Vesconte Maggiolo on
page 20 shows continued uncertainty. One the one hand,
the coastlines of North and South America have begun to
take shape. Yet at the same time Maggiolo seems unclear
as to whether these landmasses are separate from—or
connected to—Asia.
The naming of North and South America also came
somewhat inadvertently, when Martin Waldseemüller sought
to honor Amerigo Vespucci by attaching the name America
to the southern continent in his ambitious map of 1507
(page 16). A comparison of these three maps made after
1500 highlights just how fluid geographical knowledge of
the western hemisphere remained until the 1520s. While
Waldseemüller pictured a narrow western hemisphere,
Maggiolo and Contarini suggested a wide landmass that
was perhaps connected to Asia. Throughout this period,
we see the struggle to integrate new information with
inherited worldviews. That conflict is symbolized at the top
of Waldseemüller’s map on page 18, with a portrait of theContact and Discovery