A History of America in 100 Maps

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 throughout

the 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’ decision

to 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 the

Contact and Discovery