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Given that only so many MapHisters will be able to attend my lecture on the Waldseemueller map at the New York Public Library on November 14 as earlier listed by the Secretary of the New York Map Society, Heather Kinsinger, I felt that I should share for everyone a short item drawn from my book about a key, indeed the crucial issue or question concerning this famous map. Entitled separately America's Godfather and His Poem, it highlights below for generalists and specialists an awesome piece of evidence that clinches my well-documented argument that a Portuguese circumnavigation of South America no later than 1506 was indeed known at Saint-Die and lies behind Ringmann's remarks and also Waldseemueller's highly accurate depiction of the distinctive ice cream cone shape of South America which I originally proved in 2002-2003 in Exploring Mercator's World. For a book to be "the best" or definitive work on the Waldseemueller map, it must address in a serious fashion all the available evidence concerning the revolutionary geography for the New World which is the hallmark feature of this map. For those Maphisters not able to attend read and hopefully enjoy. For those who can attend, I promise a gripping presentation which I hope will be memorable. America’s Godfather and His Poem © Peter W. Dickson, 2009 America’s most precious documents, the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, are encased in argon gas for permanent display at the National Archives. But in December 2007, a third artifact gained such an exalted status with the same protective measures. This is the first map to bear the name ”America” – the famous Waldseemueller map of 1507 for which the Library of Congress paid $10,000,000 – the most ever for an acquisition. On display at the Library, the map is known as the “the Birth Certificate of America or the Americas”. But what has puzzled scholars since this map was discovered 1901 is how could the mapmaker -– Martin Waldseemueller -- show a second ocean, the Pacific when Columbus had been dead less than a year? What explains this cartographer’s uncanny depiction of the distinctive ice cream cone shape of South America and also a southern water passage on a small companion globe? And how could Matthias Ringmann -– Waldseemueller’s colleague who named this new land “America” in honor of Amerigo Vespucci -- assert without any details in a companion book Cosmographiae Introductio that it was “like an island surrounded on all sides by the ocean”? Scholars long insisted that Ringmann (the Godfather who baptized the New World) was in dreamland or delusional. As for Waldseemueller, he “just got lucky” with a blind stab in the dark when he drew the shape of South America. They were only guessing. No European saw the Pacific before Balboa crossed Panama in 1513 or circumnavigated the continent before Magellan found the strait in 1519. This insistence became much more difficult after this author proved via mathematical analysis this depiction of South America was 90-95 percent accurate in terms of latitude and longitude. There was widespread media coverage following the publication of an essay in the journal Exploring Mercator’ s World in late 2002 that established this accuracy. Waldseemueller located the exact spot where the west coastline abruptly shifts where Peru and Chile meet at a place known as Arica with high accuracy. How could he know that and the overall configuration of this continent so well in 1507 without direct observation? Was it still just a “lucky guess”, was it merely "a provocative geographical cartoon" -- a term of derision voiced by the Magellan biographer, Lawrence Bergreen? Or did Waldseemueller learn something from the Chinese in whose favor Gavin Menzies argued in his controversial book, 1421 The Year the Chinese Discovered America? Or was my claim correct that the Portuguese -- dying of curiosity and hoping that a (second) southern water passage to Asia might fall on their side of the maritime treaty line -- got to the strait first, as Magellan had asserted? Whatever the truth, there are in fact 18 pre-Magellan, some other pre-Balboa, maps and globes that show a west coast and/or the cone-like shape of South America with arguably the oldest (the famous Lenox Globe in the New York Public Library) being made before Waldseemueller's creations. But long overlooked is how Ringmann buried in a little poem conclusive evidence that he and Waldseemueller did NOT consider the latter’s depictions as hypothetical or a lucky guesses but real geography based on sensitive information obtained from Portugal. In August 1505 Ringmann attached his poem to an edition of Vespucci’s sensational account of a voyage to South America, to underscore the new emerging cosmology that challenged Ancient Wisdom. And Ringmann describes this new land to the West below the Equator being explored by the fleets of the Portuguese King Manuel as “a land in which a race of naked men dwell.” When Waldseemueller completed the large world map in April 1507, Ringmann decided to recycle the poem again as a companion item. However, he concluded the poem required an update. It was no longer enough to tell the reader that “a race of naked men” populates this land. So he rewrote the poem, inserting a new line noting that looking south from Europe “to the right stretches a land surrounded by an immense ocean” -- another discovery explicitly attributed to King Manuel’s navigators. Ah! Clearly Ringmann signals here that since 1505 he and Waldseemueller had learned much more from Lisbon -- that this land was an island-like continent, meaning a southern water passage, which Waldseemueller clearly shows in the small companion globe gores, had been found. Otherwise, there would have been no need to update the poem. When we catch Ringmann self-consciously altering his poem, we enter into his non-delusional mind. We are right there with the Godfather of America when he concludes that the poem needed to reflect the latest geographical knowledge. The calculated deliberation inherent in the rewriting of an old poem confirms what Waldseemueller’s highly accurate map and also others hint: namely, the Portuguese had achieved a double circumnavigation – first with Vasco da Gama for Africa in 1498 and then for South America no later than 1506. Now we can understand why Magellan insisted to the Spanish that he had seen a strait on a map for the Portugal King made by the famous Martin Beheim who died in 1506. And when young, Magellan served as a clerk from 1495 to 1505 in the Casa de India. There was where maps and sea charts -- sensitive information -- were kept and where Beheim worked. The second circumnavigation needed to be kept secret. The ultra-curious Portuguese illegally had strayed far too far into the Spanish maritime zone. There were any number of capable Portuguese navigators who could have achieved this circumnavigation -- Cristobal Jacques, Joao de Lisboa, Gonzalo Coelho, etc. -- and Vespucci refers to numerous expeditions launched from Lisbon to explore the coastline of this new land in the far southwest in his oldest surviving letter from Lisbon in 1502. But perhaps the most revealing fact is that the man who financed many of these expeditions far down this coast in the 1501-1506 period was Cristobal de Haro - an agent of the wealthy German family, the Fugger. It is no mere coincidence that de Haro financed entirely on his own Magellan's voyage to reach the Strait in 1519 but this time for Spain. In any case, knowledge of a west coast and the Pacific leaked out long before 1519, seeped into some pre-Magellan, actually pre-Balboa maps such as Waldseemueller’s map and globe, the Lenox Globe and the Rosselli map -- all three made in separate parts of Europe circa 1505-1508 well before Balboa. But this stunning Portuguese achievement also leaked no less from the pen of America’s Godfather into what he described as “a little poem – but no less cosmographic than poetic” to affirm against the Ancients such as Ptolemy that there was a new island—like continent and a second vast ocean that they never knew. The above essay is an adaptation, derivative from the author's book, The Magellan Myth: Reflections on Columbus, Vespucci and the Waldseemueller Map of 1507.
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