trading ships that began to sail between Mex-
ico and the Philippines about this time would
now have a better idea of what lay north of
Baja California, but Spanish authorities con-
sidered the Cabrillo-Ferrer expedition to be of
limited importance. For Mendoza, the voyage
was simply another expensive failure to find
any riches or routes to Asia or the AtlanticCharting the Coast of California B 123
Improvements in Mapmaking=
Great improvements in cartography occurred in the 1500s, as increasing explo-
ration revealed the dimensions of the Earth more accurately. The most influen-
tial mapmaker of the era was Gerardus Mercator, a Flemish (modern Belgium)
cartographer. In the mid-1500s Mercator was the first to represent the curved
surface of the Earth on a flat
map. His invention, called the
Mercator Projection and still
used for many maps, enabled
navigators to plot their sea
courses as straight lines for
the first time.
The first European map of
the world depicting the Pacific
Ocean with any accuracy was
made in 1529 by Diego Ribiero,
a Portuguese mapmaker work-
ing in Spain, who used new
information provided by the
survivors of Ferdinand Magel-
lan’sglobal voyage. Through-
out the 1500s encyclopedias
called Cosmographie (world
writings) incorporating the lat-
est geographical knowledge,
maps, and navigational data
from the entireworld were
published by printers in Ger-
many, Portugal, Spain, the
Netherlands, and Switzerland.
In the 1600s similar treatises
became more common in
Fr ance and England, as those
countries began to compete
with their contemporaries in
exploration and colonization.\
Gerardius Mercator’s well-known map of the
world was first published in 1569. In the portion
shown here, the cartographer’s use of what
would become known as Mercator projection,
in which longitude is drawn as parallel lines
meeting latitudinal lines at right angles, is
evident. (Library of Congress, Prints and
Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-92883])