CONTACT AND DISCOVERY 17If the previous map leaves us searching for any sign
of the western hemisphere, here and on the following
pages a more familiar picture begins to emerge. We
recognize a vaguely identifiable southern continent,
and an outsized Caribbean off the coast of a second,
northern landmass. Our own struggle to identify this
geography mirrors that of Martin Waldseemüller,
who published this massive New World map in 1507.
Nearly five feet high and over seven feet wide, the
map reflects Waldseemüller’s effort to present the
entire world based on inherited information as well
as the latest news from Spain and Portugal.
Waldseemüller was part of a new school of
cartography and cosmography formed in the
Rhineland, where he and his colleagues were
riveted by the Spanish and Portuguese voyages of
discovery. They devoted themselves to integrating
this new geographical information with the classical
worldviews of Claudius Ptolemy, which framed
the world as made up of Europe, Africa, and Asia.
The overseas explorations of the 1490s and 1500s
gradually disrupted this view, forcing Waldseemüller
and others to reconcile what they thought they knew
with the new information that was circulating
through Europe.
The map is an ambitious attempt to synthesize
this information on a single page. The use of latitude
and longitude allowed Waldseemüller to depict the
continents more precisely. In depicting India and
southern Africa, he drew on the maps of Henricus
Martellus, but it is his rendering of the New World
that sets his map apart from its contemporaries.
Waldseemüller adopted the information
brought back by Amerigo Vespucci, whose voyages
convinced him that the continents of the western
hemisphere were separate from Asia. On Giovanni
Matteo Contarini’s map issued the year before
(page 14), for instance, the landmasses and islands
to the west of Europe are understood as Asia and
not as a “new world” at all. By contrast, at the left
edge of Waldseemüller’s map both the northern
HOW AMERICA (INADVERTENTLY) GOT ITS NAME
Martin Waldseemüller,
“Universalis Cosmographia,” 1507
and southern continents have distinct western
coasts, though confusion persisted regarding their
relationship to Asia. And Waldseemüller revealed his
own uncertainty regarding the relationship between
North and South America: on the large map, he
depicted a break between the two, stoking the hope
of a navigable passage to the Far East. On the smaller
inset map at the top, however, he joined the two
continents firmly together.
Waldseemüller so strongly admired Vespucci
that he attached the name “America” to the
southern continent (see detail at lower left).
To drive the point home, he depicted Vespucci
alongside Ptolemy at the top of the map, the two
figures presiding over the world. In that pairing,
Waldseemüller symbolically connected the world
of classical geography with the discoveries of his
own day. In the narrative that accompanied the
map, Waldseemüller further honored Vespucci’s
contribution to geographical knowledge.
Waldseemüller sought to disseminate his new
picture of the world through central Europe. Within
a few years, however, he experienced a change of
heart, and in his 1516 world map he rejoined America
to Asia. Moreover, his admiration for Vespucci had
cooled, and he removed the name “America” from
the map altogether. But by that time the name
had not only caught on, but had spread to both
continents of the western hemisphere. Gerard
Mercator, for example, attached the names
“N. America” and “S. America” to these respective
continents in 1538, and Abraham Ortelius used
the same in the many editions of his popular atlas
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum.
Though scholars had long been aware that
Waldseemüller made a large world map in 1507, the
sole known surviving copy was not discovered until- It had originally been acquired by a German
globe maker, and later passed to the family of Prince
Waldburg-Wolfegg. Inadvertently responsible for
“naming” America, Waldseemüller’s 1507 map
commanded tremendous attention and value from
the time it was rediscovered down to our own day.
In 2003 the Library of Congress paid $10 million for
this copy of the map, which John Hébert termed the
nation’s “birth certificate.”