Maps & State Secrets

This is the so-called Cantino Map, a chart stolen by an agent of an Italian Duke from the Portuguese Crown in 1502. It provides an interesting follow-up to our discussion of the first map of the continent of Africa



As you can see, Portuguese navigators knew dramatically more about the contours of the globe in 1502 than some of the most advanced scholars in Central Europe half a century later. Note too on the left the first data on Brazil which, amazingly, Cabral had only discovered two years before this map was stolen. See too the rough outline of Columbus's islands in the Caribbean.

But here's another aspect of this map. As I said, this was not the work of scholars but sailors and government bureaucrats trying to provide as clear a data as possible about where things actually were. And if you look closely at the map it seems to follow in the tradition of the so-called Portolan Charts that sailors had used in the Mediterranean for centuries. As the name implies, these were port maps, given sailors details about which ports were where, what they were called, a rough sense of distance between them and sometimes information about depths and other safety obstacles.




http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/artifacts-2-maps-and-state-secrets