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Waldseemueller Map Mystery Resolved - A Critique of a Critique
The terse argument from one Maphist commentator today there is no
concrete or credible historical evidence that the strait had been found or
a circumnavigation never taken place is total rubbish.
This kind of argument is an exercise in ultra-cherry picking around
the solid documentary evidence and Magellan's own statements that belie
that argument.
Just for starters you have a problem of the high accuracy (90-95
percent) of Waldseemueller's depiction of the distinctive ice cream cone
shape of South America as I established in two essays in 2002 in Exploring
Mercator's World.
What are the odds of him doing that totally blind, out of pure
imagination? Virtually zero.
One's chances of being right in saying "it was just a lucky guess"
or a mere coincidence are less than one in million or billion. Those are
horrible. terrible odds.
If there was nothing else, no other evidence that suggested
Waldseemueller's depictions were based on knowledge, then perhaps you could
cling
more easily to your slender one in a million chance that Waldseemueller or
for that matter the creator of the amazing Lenox Globe just got lucky with a
total stab in the dark 6-7 years before Balboa.
But you are stuck. There is indeed evidence that is internally
consistent with the argument that Waldseemueller's depictions were not
fictional, not merely speculation on his part.
You have the humiliating task before you of trying to explain why
-- if no such discoveries were made and no such voyages ever took place --
there is this growing mountain of other evidence -- 18 pre-Magellan even
pre-Balboa maps that show a southern water passage and/or the distinctive
cone-like shape of South America. Plus the fact that King Manuel moved heaven
and earth to try to thwart Magellan's voyage in 1519.
You also have to willfully ignore all this and clear statements by
Ringmann in 1507, Magellan, the Valentine Fernandez legal deposition of May
1503, Glareanus' in explicit statement about "the End of America in the
Southern Sea to the west entirely explored" in his circa 1510 copy of
Waldseemueller's maps, plus the amazing depictions in Lenox globe and Rosselli
map
to say nothing about W's uncanny depiction -- and continue to pound on the
table and insist as follows:
"All this evidence was a mere by-product of delusional minds. All
these guys with their statements and various maps and globes were dreamers
living in a total fantasy land.
What you are also doing with an argument like this is saying to the
world:
"Trust me, I know better about what was the true situation 500 years
ago, much better than those guys living at that time. Do not believe what
they said or what you see in their various maps and globes. It was all
based on nothing."
Now this kind of argument -- they were all "provocative geographical
cartoons" in the words of Lawrence Bergreen who has endorsed Lester's book
-- is total rubbish. It is hyper-hutzpah on the part of any person
living in the 21st-century.
It amounts to massive denial substantial evidence assembled in one
book for the first time by me in 2007 that indeed certain things did happen
-- even if it is difficult to know more given the loss of records and
because in this case concealment was something that the Portuguese were forced
into by their particular or peculiar circumstance -- namely that they could
not acknowledge having gone that far into the Spanish zone and also they
did not want anyone to know that there was an alternative route (albeit much
longer) to the riches of Asia.
If nothing ever happened, you would NEVER have the substantial
pattern of internally consistent evidence from a wide variety of sources and
locations throughout Europe all saying or pointing in the same direction in
this period of roughly 1504-1510. A pattern of evidence like this cannot be
breezily attributed to a spontaneous emergence of fantasy or pure
imagination on the part of so many different persons in different European
locales
about the shape of this new southern continent.
That is a rubbish argument. But when you are desperate, and have a
lot at stake but are in fact stuck with a losing hand in this debate -- in
fact have no real cards to play in a foolish attempt to prove a negative --
then you are mired in hopeless situation which will never get better for
you.
It is much better to admit defeat and embrace the truth.
Peter Dickson
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