CONTACT AND DISCOVERY 15from east to west, and identified these as the “islands
that Master Christopher Columbus discovered.” And
because he also believed that Columbus had reached
the East Indies, Contarini placed the elongated island
of “Zipangu” (Japan) just west of the West Indies.
No doubt he struggled to resolve the existing
geography of Cathay (China) with new reports
from recent voyages.
The wide and open sea that surrounds these
islands reveals the belief either that Columbus had
reached Asia, or that a passage to Cathay existed to
the west of these islands. The map mysteriously omits
geographical knowledge of the North American coast
that was attributed to Vespucci’s second voyage.
Perhaps this was left out because Contarini and
Rosselli—like many—doubted that voyage had taken
place. Or they may have rejected Vespucci’s new
information when it did not fit their existing picture of
the world. Considered together, their dogged attempt
to integrate disparate and partial information
captures a moment before the eastern outline of
North and South America was fully understood.
The Contarini–Rosselli map, which now
exists only in the British Library, documents a
fundamental paradox. The arrival of new knowledge
forced a reconsideration of world geography, but
that knowledge was understood within existing
frameworks. These circumstances directly shaped the
earliest attempts to map the voyages of discovery.
This presents a thorny but fascinating question:
Is the Contarini–Rosselli map in fact the first map of
America, when the mapmakers themselves believed
they were representing Asia rather than a new and
unknown land? Within just a few months, as we shall
see in the next map, Martin Waldseemüller would
delineate a more recognizable picture of the western
hemisphere. But the Contarini-Rosselli map captures
the intellectual challenge posed by the voyages of
discovery. The map itself states this in a way that was
truer than its makers knew: “behold new nations and
a new-found world.”