The Monsters of Olaus Magnus’ 1539 Map

Monsters and maps.  (Click here for an interactive version.)
Olaus Magnus, Carta Marina..., 1539.

In 1538, after twelve years of work, Swedish Catholic priest Olaus Magnus (1490–1557) had his large map of the Nordic northland published in Venice.  The numerous sea monsters, land creatures, and vignettes immediately capture a viewer's attention.  The Carta Marina, as it was called, is made up of nine large woodblock-printed sheets, measuring about 5.5 feet wide and 4 feet high (1.70 m by 1.25 m).  The editions that have come down to the present, housed in Munich and Uppsala, are delightfully covered.

The full name of the map is: Carta marina et Descriptio septemtrionalium terrarum ac mirabilium rerum in eis contentarum, diligentissime elaborata Anno Domini 1539 Veneciis liberalitate Reverendissimi Domini Ieronimi Quirini ("A Marine map and Description of the Northern Lands and of their Marvels, most carefully drawn up at Venice in the year 1539 through the generous assistance of the Most Honourable Lord and Patriarch Hieronymo Quirino").  It was the first map printed in the south of Europe to show extensive and accurate detail as well as place-names.  Olaus Magnus also penned a book titled Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus ("A Description of the Northern Peoples"), which was printed in 1555.

Scholar Joseph Nigg has just released a book about the Carta Marina with the University of Chicago Press called Sea Monsters: A Voyage Around the World’s Most Beguiling Map.  The online newsmagazine Slate has posted a short introduction to the map, complete with a fully zoomable and clickable depiction of some of its monstrous creatures.

Chet Van Duzer, a scholar at the Library of Congress, has also recently published a book about sea monsters on maps titled, Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps.  As Van Duzer notes: "The creatures look purely fantastic. They all look like they were just made up.  But, in fact, a lot of them come from what were considered, at the time, scientific sources."

• "Here Be Duck Trees and Sea Swine: An interactive Renaissance map filled with strange and wonderful monsters," Slate, by Joseph Nigg
• "Here Be Dragons: The Evolution of Sea Monsters on Medieval Maps," LiveScience, Tanya Lewis
• "The Enchanting Sea Monsters on Medieval Maps," Smithsonian.com, Hannah Waters

The Influence of Greco-Roman Mapping on the First European Age of Exploration

Ptolemy's world map, reconstituted from Ptolemy's Geographia in the 15th century

The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University is hosting an exhibit on the legacy of Greco-Roman mapmaking, and, since many of our surviving examples of such maps are recreations from the Renaissance, how the cartography of Greece and Rome was rediscovered and utilized in a whole new era.

The exhibit, titled "Measuring and Mapping Space: Geographic Knowledge in Greco-Roman Antiquity" is located in Manhattan and runs through January 5, 2014, but has a very strong web presence.  Included online are copies of the printed material, online resources, a YouTube video, and an extensive checklist of objects on display.

Roger S. Bagnall, a director at the institute, noted that "Our exhibitions and digital teams present a 21st-century approach to the ancient mentality concerning geographic space and how it is represented."  Scholars should, when possible, try to see the world in the eyes of the historical subjects they are researching.  One of the exhibit's guest curators said that "Geography is not just maps.  There is also the cognitive side underlying mapping."

As John Wilford Noble notes in a New York Times piece on the exhibit, the worldview and conceptions of the classical thinkers deeply influenced the explorers of the first European Age of Exploration.  Wilford notes: "Even Ptolemy’s errors were influential. Instead of sticking to Eratosthenes’ more accurate estimate of Earth’s size, Ptolemy handed down a serious underestimate that later apparently emboldened Columbus to think he could sail west to reach China or Japan."

• Measuring and Mapping Space: Geographic Knowledge in Greco-Roman Antiquity at ISAW
• Measuring and Mapping Space video on YouTube
• "The World as They Knew It: The Legacy of Greco-Roman Mapmaking," New York Times, by John Wilford Noble

Penn Museum's Great Voyages: Travels, Triumphs, and Tragedies Lecture Series

Gilgamesh, the first explorer?
(Source: The Chaldean Account of Genesis, 1876)

The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, commonly called Penn Museum, is hosting a monthly lecture series through June 2014 titled Great Voyages: Travels, Triumphs, and Tragedies.  The series will feature a range of topics by experts in several fields.  The upcoming lectures are:

November 6
Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, Associate Professor, History, Bryn Mawr College
Ferdinand Magellan and the First Circumnavigation of the Globe, 1519–1522

December 4
Paul Cobb, Professor, Islamic History, University of Pennsylvania
Traveler's Tips from the 14th Century: The Detours of Ibn Battuta

January 8
Steve Tinney, Associate Curator-in-Charge, Penn Museum Babylonian Section
Gilgamesh: Journeys to the End of the World

February 5
Robert Ballard, Director of the Center for Ocean Exploration at the Graduate school of Oceanography at URI, and President of Ocean Exploration Trust
Lost History Beneath the Sea from Titanic to the Iron Age

March 5
Clark Erickson, Curator-in-Charge, Penn Museum American Section
Thor Heyerdahl and Kon Tiki: A Grand Experiment in Archaeology

April 2
Peter Struck, Associate Professor, Classical Studies, University of Pennsylvania
The Odyssey, Nostalgia, and the Lost Home

May 7
Brian Rose, Curator-in-Charge, Penn Museum Mediterranean Section
Searching for the Golden Fleece with Jason and the Argonauts

June 4
Michael Weisberg, Associate Professor, Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania
Darwin's Beagle Voyage

Check out Penn Museum's website for further details.

• Great Voyages: Travels, Triumphs, and Tragedies at Penn Museum
• "Voyages and volcanoes star in Museum series," Penn Current, by Maria Zankey
• University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

Osher Map Library Presents "To the Ends of the Earth and Back"

Mercator's view of the North Pole.
Gerardus Mercator, Septentrionalium Terrarum descriptio, 1623.

The Osher Map Library at the University of Southern Maine in Portland, Maine, is now hosting an exhibit titled: "To the Ends of the Earth... and Back: Selections from the Jay I. Kislak Polar Collection," highlighting the centuries old quest to understand, map, and explore the Earth's polar regions.

"To the Ends of the Earth" showcases more than eighty maps, charts, photographs, and other artifacts, from the Jay I. Kislak Polar Collection.  The exhibit is on view through February 27, 1:00 to 4:00 p.m., Tuesdays to Thursdays (with tours available by appointment).

• "To the Ends of the Earth... and Back: Selections from the Jay I. Kislak Polar Collection" at the Osher Map Library
• "Osher Map Library Exhibition Looks at Polar Exploration," University of Southern Maine
• "Osher show puts polar exploration on the map," Portland Press Herald by Bob Keyes

Atlas of True Names

Atlas of True Names: World Map (2008) from Kalimedia
(click to enlarge)

Explorers and cartographers, and those who study them, like members of the Society for the History of Discoveries, are often awash in place-names.  Toponyms tell us about the history of a place, who named it, why they named it, etc.  Explorers, like Columbus or La Salle or Cook gave names, recorded indigenous names, and mapmakers adopted and/or altered the geographical information they received.

But what do the names mean?  Stephan Hormes and Silke Puest at Kalimedia have created a wonderful series of maps they call an "Atlas of True Names."  They've replaced place-names like Reykjavik and and Washington with their true meanings, "Smoky Place" and "Marshton."  The Atlantic Ocean becomes "World Stream by the Mountain of Mountains."  Portugal is "Warm Port."

Check out their world map of True Names
And visit their website for more examples from their Atlas of True Names

Society for the History of Encounters?

"Islands and ice, mostly," says Bill Rankin of his map Actual European Discoveries.
(Click the link below for a larger version to see detail.)

In the past few decades, there has been a discussion amongst historians, geographers, anthropologists and the like about just what to call what was going on in the “Age of Discovery.”  Was it “discovery”? “exploration”? “encounter”? “invasion”? “reconnaissance”?

The term for the longest time has been discovery.  Older histories (and the general public still) used “Columbus’s discoveries” or “Columbus discovered America” and the like.  But this has been pointed out to be Eurocentric.  Columbus ran across places that other people had already discovered!  They were discovered by the indigenes who lived there!  So scholars, like Brian Harley, used terms such as the “Columbian encounter.”  The word encounter, indeed, has become the popular term used in academe these days, though it has its detractors.  “Encounter” is here to stay alongside “discovery.”  As Marvin Lunenfeld writes in the introduction to 1492—Discovery, Invasion, Encounter: “The neutral word encounter has recently come into general scholarly use.  Encounter seems friendly enough, evoking the idea of social gatherings….  If all that happened in 1492 was that Columbus ‘encountered’ the Amerindians, the historian would successfully escape the ethnocentric connotations of a discovery and the violent implications of an invasion.”

Dr. Bill Rankin, Assistant Professor of History of Science at Yale University, has constructed a map titled Actual European Discoveries for his website Radical Cartography that shows just what little Europeans actually discovered in the sense of no other humans were there to greet them.  As Rankin notes (a tad sarcastically, he admits): “Every Columbus Day, we’re reminded of the difference between discovery and “discovery”—and rightly so.  But let's not sell Europe short; after all, European explorers found plenty of diminutive islands that no human had ever seen before, along with extravagant amounts of ice and snow.”

If the Society for the History of Discoveries was holding its fourth annual meeting this year instead of its fifty-fourth, would it be named the “Society for the History of Encounters”?

• Actual European Discoveries by Bill Rankin at Radical Cartography
• A large .png file of the map

Speakers at the Fifty-fourth Annual Meeting of the Society for the History of Discoveries

A depiction of what might be Florida from the 1502 Cantino map.

The following is a list if speakers for the Fifty-fourth Annual Meeting of the Society for the History of Discoveries (SHD), which will be held this year in Tampa, Florida, at the Tampa Bay History Center (TBHC) from October 31–November 3, 2013.

Speakers

ALTIC, Mirela (Croatia): "Missionary Cartography of the Amazon after the Treaty of Madrid (1750): A Jesuit's Contribution to the Demarcation of Imperial Frontiers"

BECK, Lauren: "A Moroccan Ambassador’s Travelogue in Spain (1690-91) and Its Legacy"

BLICK, Jeffrey: "The Case for San Salvador as the Site of the 1492 Columbus Landfall: Principles of Historical Archaeology Applied to Current Evidence"

COWDREY, Peter: "Mapping La Florida"

DELIZ, Michael: "The Digital Reconstruction of El Mapa Militar de Puerto Rico: An Analysis of the Spanish Military Topographic Project in Puerto Rico, 1872-1897"

EDNEY, Matthew: "The Transatlantic Circulation of Geographical Maps before 1763"

GASPAR, Joaquim (Portugal): "The representation of the Western Indies in the early Iberian cartography: a cartometric approach"

MATTHEWS, Jim: "Love Letters and Lesser Beings: Travel Accounts of French and Moroccan Diplomats during the Ancien Régime"

McGUIRK, Don: "Is North America REALLY pictured on the Waldseemüller World Map of 1507?"

MILANICH, Gerald T. (Florida Museum of Natural History): "Early Encounters by European Explorers with Native Americans in Florida"

PFLEDERER, Richard: "Exploring the Manuscript Cartography of Florida and its connection to Exploration and Settlement of the Territory"

SKURNIK, Johanna (Finland): "Circulating exploration knowledge: tracing the discussion of the interior of Australia in the 1840s"

TOUCHTON, J. Thomas & KITE-POWELL, Rodney (Tampa Bay History Center): "Charting the Land of Flowers: 500 Years of Florida Maps" – An introduction to the temporary exhibition at the Tampa Bay History Center

WALKER, Jim: "Alterity and Allegory: Cannibalism, Early Maps and European Conceptions of Amerindian Civility"

Essay Contest Winner

MARCOTTE, Josh: "Culture, Contact and the Agency of Appropriation in a 1741 Map of Nagasaki"

Key Note Speaker

FRANCIS, J. Michael (University of South Florida, St. Petersburg): "Colonial Martyrs: Franciscans, Indians, and the Spiritual Conquest of Florida"

• More info about the Annual Meeting