14 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPS
Imagine you were living in Europe around 1500.
The voyages of discovery that began with Columbus
brought back an avalanche of information, and
eventually revealed an unknown world. But the new
hemisphere came into view very slowly. Columbus
went to his death insisting that he had reached
the East Indies. Thereafter, John Cabot, Amerigo
Vespucci, Pedro Álvares Cabral, and Vasco da Gama
each brought back pieces of a geographical puzzle
that still did not quite fit together. The problem was
that new information was difficult to reconcile with
existing geographical frameworks. Many Europeans
continued to believe that Asia lay west of Europe,
so when mapmakers initially tried to integrate new
discoveries with older assumptions they generated
more than a little confusion.
That confusion is on display in the first
printed map to show any part of America, designed
by Giovanni Matteo Contarini and engraved by
Francesco Rosselli in 1506. Contarini designed the
map in either Florence or Venice, most likely as the
opening image of a new atlas that was never realized.
He adopted a conic projection oriented around the
North Pole, one that is simulated by placing a cone
over the earth and then unwrapping it. Contarini
may have used this as a way of working around the
uncertainty that came with integrating the new
discoveries and assertions of Columbus with the
Far Eastern voyages of Vasco da Gama.
Encircling the North Pole at left is a large
peninsula. Most likely this is Contarini’s attempt
to square Cabot’s voyages to Greenland and
Newfoundland in 1497 with existing knowledge of
the Far East. In other words, the new discoveries
were understood to be explorations of Asia rather
than an entirely separate continent. These attempts
to reconcile Asia and America demonstrate just how
fluid geographical knowledge was during these
voyages of discovery.
Toward the south at the bottom of the map we
see an enormous landmass that reflects the voyage
of Pedro Álvares Cabral to the eastern coast of Brazil
in 1500. The most revealing aspect of the map is
the depiction of islands just north of this landmass.
Contarini drew the West Indies as a chain extending
A GENERATION OF CONFUSION
Giovanni Matteo Contarini and
Francesco Rosselli, “Mundu
Spericum,” 1506