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Someone named Jean Fontaine just posted on Maphist (see text reproduced
below) a message that provides an Internet link to a scan of an enlarged
portion of the Green-Quiri globe that shows the name "America" not just once
BUT FOUR TIMES -- once on the mainland region we know as Brazil, again on NW
South America (more or less Columbia), thirdly on Central America and
finally and astonishingly on North America as depicted on this map. Frankly.
I
could not detect the last one on the scanned image which is fabulous and
Fontaine needs to point out more precisely where "America" appears on the
depiction of what we know today as North America.
In any case the other three "Ameircas" on the globe are quite
clear although the one placed on what we know as Brazil cannot be seen in this
particular scan but it is indeed on the globe (see full image at the
Bibliotheque Nationale web site).
All this is quite mind-boggling and I am glad that I never
hesitated in including the Green globe in my book, The Magellan Myth on my
Table A
list of 18 pre-Magallen (many pre-Balboa) which show a southern water
passage and South America as a cone-shaped n island-like continent. I hope to
include this great view of the Green-Quiri globe in further copies of my
book.
This new information provided by Fontaine which I have never seen
before anywhere would trump Mercator regarding the earliest "America"
nomenclature for North America and intensifies the importance of issues which
I
have been exploring via my research, lectures and publications since 2002.
And it means that while the decision at the Bibliotheque Nationale to
redate this globe to 1507 or thereabouts and attribute it to Waldseemueller
may be challenged, it raises the stakes Big Time.
From my perspective, all these developments make me and my book
look very very good and underscores my observation that the recent
exhibition at Princeton University dealing with Magellan was a disgrace in
that it
never came to grips with the full range of new historical research bearing
on the question of European perceptions of the New World -- what they knew
about it and when they knew it in the crucial watershed period from Columbus
(1492) to Magellan (1522).
The bottom line in the narrow cartographic sense is that (as I
have argued in my book) the proliferation of printed maps naming the strait
for Magellan suddenly in the mid-1530s drove out or overtook prior
different names given to the Strait which Magellan said he was not the first
to
discover and also more broadly drove out or deflected the attention of later
scholars to earlier pre-Magellan even pre-Balboa cartographic depictions --
such as the Green-Globe along with the Lenox Globe, Rosselli's world map
and many others I list in Table A -- that reflected a more rapid European
synthesis concerning the geography of the New World.
Let's wait and see how Lawrence Bergreen reacts to this new
revelation given that he dismissed in his Magellan book all pre-Magellan maps
and
globes concerning South America as as merely "provocative geographical
cartoons".
I think that I shall have the last laugh and nothing could be
sweeter than that.
Peter
Message: 10
Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2011 02:54:22 -0500
From: Jean Fontaine <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [MapHist] Tony Campbell 2008 message: Green (Quirini)
Globe - the first to have the word America, in 1505-1506?
To: Discussion group for map history <[email protected]>
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; CHARSET=US-ASCII; format=flowed
Paulo Alfonso wrote :
> Tony's intriguing posting near the end has this sentence (verbatim):
> --------------
> Incidentally, this globe also carries the name America, so if it does
date from 1505-06, then it is
> the earliest map/globeto carry the name.
The name America appears four times on the Green Globe, including the
oldest known instance of the name on the North American continent.
Here is a close-up view of the Green Globe, showing North America,
Central America and a bit of South America, each part bearing an
instance of the name America:
http://pages.globetrotter.net/jfontain/Green_Globe.jpg
The fourth instance of the name America, not visible on the image, is in
the middle of the South American continent.
The image was scanned from the book "The Mapping of America", by Seymour
I. Schwartz and Ralph E. Ehrenberg, Wellfleet Press, 2001 edition, p. 35.
Jean Fontaine
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