World History 1500 Present Instructor: Prof.

Dane Kennedy Waldseemller Map

Neel Shah 1/23/2014

The majority of the human race believes that much of the world was not mapped during the early sixteenth century, however the antithesis is true. During this time in history, much of the world had indeed been seen and mapped by humans. In 1507, a German cartographer named Martin Waldseemller produced a massive map of the world that was extremely detailed and accurate. This map is integral to understanding what the sixteenth century Europeans knew of the world since it is an astonishingly accurate documentation of most parts of the world, however, it does fall short when depicting certain regions. The Waldseemller Map is currently housed in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. It consists of twelve wooden sections that are eighteen by twenty-four and one half inches large, which combined, makes it a total size of fifty-four by ninety-eight inches large. The map is massive while also being very ornate and detailed. In this revolutionary map Waldseemller included information about the entire world and was also the first cartographer to include a separate western hemisphere separated by an ocean. This proves that at this time, our knowledge of the world had increased greatly. Concrete evidence about the Europeans knowledge of the world can be provided by the Waldseemller map. Explorers had been discovering the vast oceans and lands of Earth for centuries prior to the creation of the Waldseemller Map. Some explorers, such as Ferdinand Magellan, even circumvented the Earth. Waldseemller documented the explorations of Magellan and other explorers and composed a collection of all the geographic knowledge of the time. His map shows us that at this time in history the

Shah - 2 geographical knowledge of Asia, Europe, and Africa was the most developed. Out of all the landmasses on the map, those three continents/lands are most accurately represented. Trade and communication between the three continents aided in development of geographic knowledge about them. The map has a very accurate representation of the lands that the Europeans were in contact with, however the Eastern Hemisphere and Oceana are not as accurately represented. The Eastern Hemisphere and? Oceana are distorted in the Waldseemller map. This is expected due to the fact that these regions were fairly new to Europeans in the sixteenth century. At this time, the Europeans had not yet explored the vast quantity of land that the Western Hemisphere holds. The map shows a small sliver of land in the place of North and South America, which implies that the two continents had been discovered. However, the lands Atlantic coasts, the coasts closest to Europe, were depicted; the New Land was still New Land. Oceana is composed of a variety of small islands but it appears that its depiction is more accurate than that of the Western Hemisphere. The Eastern Hemisphere seems to be very accurate, but the Western Hemisphere, or New World, is rather lacking in accuracy and completion. The Waldseemller map is a truly revolutionary map because it is the first map in the world that contains a separate Western Hemisphere. It is vital to understanding what the Europeans of the sixteenth century knew of the world. It shows that European knowledge of the Eastern Hemisphere, or their home, was startling accurate while simultaneous demonstrating that their knowledge of the Western Hemisphere, the New World, was lacking in accuracy. This map is revolutionary since it is so accurate about the world, but it proves that the Europeans still much to explore and research about the world.