A new world

The saga of the 16th-century map that gave America its name and paved the way for a modern view of the cosmos

November 01, 2009|Michael Washburn, Globe Correspondent

By any century’s standard, the mash-up of logic and folly that characterizes human history is strange. Origins are plural, their effects lasting, and our inability to remember this can congeal into a worldview, one requiring a revolution so that we may disenthrall ourselves from the errors of our intellectual inertia.

Such are the lessons of Toby Lester’s beguiling “The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map that Gave America Its Name.’’ The map in question is the once lost Waldseemüller map, the first document to christen the land masses of the Western Hemisphere “America.’’ Of greater importance, though, the map was the first to depict these new lands as surrounded by water, revealing America as a newly discovered continent, not an extension of the exotic east so avidly sought by Columbus and his contemporaries, thus rendering our longstanding conception of the world void. By using the map as a lens through which to view a nexus of myth, imagination, technology, stupidity, and imperial ambition, Lester has penned a provocative, disarming testament to human ambition and ingenuity.

From the conversion of Rome around the 4th century until relatively recently, Western maps asserted a peculiarly Christian topography, one of both space and time. (Early maps illustrated the inevitable advance of Christianity across the world; maps were clocks for the end times.) From zonal and medieval T-O maps to more advanced “mappaemundi,” cartographers ceaselessly refined their image of the geocentric cosmos. Intuitive and “observable’’ to the naked eye, the idea that the universe revolved around the Earth proved tenacious.

As the limits of the known world expanded and cartographers drafted road maps for religious, mercantile, and imperial - in a word, European - expansion, the realm just outside the limits of the known became a canvas of fear and wishful thinking. As Lester writes, “Two distinct but overlapping kinds of geography guided [the Age of Discovery]. . . . One was a literal, empirically based conception of the world, as laid out [in] . . . marine charts and Ptolemaic-style maps. The other was a figurative, spiritually based conception, as laid out in the Bible,’’ populated by legend and myth. Inspired by the tales of John Mandeville, Marco Polo, and less powerful raconteurs, map makers conjured lands with riches surpassing worldly comprehension and savage cannibals. These tales, as well as the Christian worldview, persisted into the Age of Discovery when they were wedded to innovations in the observable features of the world.