CONTACT AND DISCOVERY 21AMERICA LOOMS INTO VIEW
At the end of the nineteenth century, the British
Museum (whose library later became the nucleus of
the British Library) acquired a mysterious portolan
atlas measuring about eight inches by eleven inches.
Portolan atlases were designed to aid navigators
by charting coastlines through compass directions
and distances. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth
centuries, such charts were among the most
jealously guarded of state secrets, for they recorded
geographical intelligence at a time of constantly
shifting—and potentially erroneous—knowledge
about the New World. The quest to control this
information was so intense that in 1504 the king of
Portugal issued a death sentence for anyone who
removed Portuguese maps of areas south of the
equator from his kingdom.
The competition was fiercest, of course, between
Spain and Portugal. That is precisely what makes this
particular portolano so unique, for it is one of the few
to integrate knowledge of the New World from both
sources. The atlas is believed to be the work of the
Genoese sailor and mapmaker Vesconte Maggiolo
(1478–1530), or perhaps a copy of the same. Drawn
between 1508 and 1510, the atlas opens with this
captivating map of the world followed by thirteen
portolan charts, including the first Italian one to
identify any part of the North American coast.
At the far left Maggiolo used the letter P
(Ponente) to indicate “west,” while a Greek cross at
the far right denotes the east. The right half of the
map is an easily recognizable and delicately lettered
eastern hemisphere. By contrast, west of the Atlantic
Ocean we find a geography that is simultaneously
strange and familiar. At upper left is a ghostly
landmass that seems to emerge out of a fog. Along
its eastern edge Maggiolo identified Labrador and
Greenland—which were well known by then. Yet he
and his contemporaries still struggled to understand
the nature of this landmass. Was this newly
discovered land the eastern part of Asia, as Columbus
had claimed, or its own continent, as Amerigo
Vesconte Maggiolo, map of the world,
from his atlas of portolan charts,
circa 1508
Vespucci was to insist a few years later? Notice that
at the opposite end of the page, at the Far East,
Maggiolo depicted the Asian landmass as extending
past the end of the map. This no doubt reveals
Maggiolo’s own confusion as to whether Asia was
a separate continent or one connected to the
regions described by Vespucci. Like many mapmakers
encountering unknown terrain, he fudged a bit to
cover his uncertainty.
Maggiolo named the northern land in the
western hemisphere “Septem Civitates” (seven
cities). This term was likely taken from Juan de la
Cosa’s portolan chart of 1500, the first to identify the
New World. But, beyond that, Maggiolo’s depiction of
this geography remained vague. The sheer size of the
landmass nicely—if unwittingly—captures the width
of North America, whereas Martin Waldseemüller had
depicted it as a small peninsula (page 18). Note that
Maggiolo did not identify this land as “America,” for
Waldseemüller had attached that name only a year
earlier and the practice had yet to spread.
Further south is an enclosed Gulf of Mexico,
which was speculation on Maggiolo’s part since
this was not yet definitively established. Especially
revealing is his depiction of a large bay in what is now
northern Brazil, most likely the mouth of the Amazon
River. Given that the Spanish had yet to explore
the region, Maggiolo must have been relying upon
Portuguese sources to guide his depiction of the
area. This is important, because his general outline
of the Americas was taken from Spanish sources
such as Juan de la Cosa’s portolan chart.
This integration of disparate and confidential
sources is a kind of smoking gun, indicating that
Maggiolo was working with maps influenced by
Amerigo Vespucci. In 1508 Vespucci was hired as the
Spanish pilot major, bringing his knowledge of earlier
voyages undertaken on behalf of Portugal to his new
role. One aspect of that role was his contribution to
Spain’s first “Padrón Real,” a highly secret master
map of the world created in 1507 or 1508. Vespucci
was the only man in the world who had access
to both Spanish and Portuguese intelligence, a
“human bridge between Portuguese and Spanish”
geographical knowledge. The Maggiolo manuscript
map and atlas—held only at the British Library—
captures that unique hybrid intelligence better
than any world map of its time.