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I hope and trust that I have clarified what my real concerns were even if
that was not made so clear in the initial statement. I have been
victimized in the past regarding my scholarship in two cases outside the field
of
geography/cartography and in one case with regard to my original analysis of
the Waldseemueller map.
In any case, I did add the clarification quickly after reading the
first reaction that I saw yesterday.
As far as circumnavigation is concerned, I was attempting in the
second of my posts to get a sense of the minimum sailing/travel time to get a
handle on whether there was enough time for information to flow back to
Saint-Die circa 1506-early 1507 to influence the project there -- both with
respect to that apparently last minute and oddly inverted L-shaped wood block
addition off the west coast of India to Waldseemueller's world map and
then also the question of the shape of South America found in this world map
and also Waldseemueller's small gore gores which clearly shows a southern
water passage which he conspicuously excluded from the world map.
My calculations were rough based on what I could sense concerning
time travel from India/Calicut back to Lisbon and then also estimations of
sailing time to reach the Strait/cruise the west coast using accounts of
Magellan and also Vespucci's own statements about his first voyage for the
Portuguese.
In the former case, the time interval between the Battle of Cannanore
off India's west coast and the completion of the Waldseemueller map is
only 13 months - not impossible to overcome but a bit tight unless the world
map was not quite ready in April 1507 and finished and sold perhaps in May
or June of that year.
That said, I think that this wood block was the last information
inserted into the map. There is still no hint of any post-1507 information
in this map even though the surviving version owned by the Library of
Congress might have been an impression made circa 1515-1516 from the original
blocks made in the 1505-1507 period.
One really needs a nautical expert to study this question in terms
of the maritime expertise in this historical period to calculate minimum
sailing/travel time. But surely there are considerable records in Portugal
that would show what was the typical sailing time for voyages to and back
from India for which there had to have been many after the spice trade
flourished following Da Gama's famous voyage in 1498.
Peter_______________________________________________
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