The Waldseemüller map or Universalis Cosmographia ("Universal Cosmography") is a printed wall map of the world by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, originally published in April 1507. It is known as the first map to use the name "America". The name America is placed on South America on the main map. As explained in Cosmographiae Introductio, the name was bestowed in honor of the Italian Amerigo Vespucci. The map also was first to depict the Americas as a distinct landmass clearly separated from Asia by the Pacific Ocean.
The map is drafted on a modification of Ptolemy's second projection, expanded to accommodate the Americas and the high latitudes.Snyder, John P. (1993). Flattening the Earth: 2000 Years of Map Projections, p. 33. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. A single copy of the map survives, presently housed at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
Waldseemüller also created globe gores, printed maps designed to be cut out and pasted onto spheres to form globes of the Earth. The wall map, and his globe gores of the same date, depict the American continents in two pieces. These depictions differ from the small inset map in the top border of the wall map, which shows the two American continents joined by an isthmus.
Wall map
Description The map was meant to document and update new geographical knowledge from the discoveries of the last years of the fifteenth and the first years of the sixteenth centuries. It consists of twelve sections printed from woodcuts measuring . Each section is one of four horizontally and three vertically, when assembled. The map uses a modified Ptolemaic map projection with curved meridians to depict the entire surface of the Earth. In the upper-mid part of the main map there is inset another, miniature world map representing to some extent an alternative view of the world.
Longitudes, which were difficult to determine at the time, are given in terms of degrees east from the Fortunate Islands (considered by Claudius Ptolemy as the westernmost known land) which Waldseemüller locates at the Canary Islands. The longitudes of eastern Asian places are too great. Latitudes, which were easy to determine, are also quite far off. For example, "Serraleona" (Sierra Leone, true latitude about 9°N) is placed south of the equator, and the Cape of Good Hope (true latitude 35°S) is placed at 50°S.
The full title of the map is Universalis cosmographia secundum Ptholomaei traditionem et Americi Vespucii aliorumque lustrationes (The Universal Cosmography according to the Tradition of Ptolemy and the Discoveries of Amerigo Vespucci and others). One of the others was Christopher Columbus. The title signalled his intention to combine or harmonize in a unified cosmographic depiction the traditional Ptolemaic geography of Europe, Asia and Africa with the new geographical information provided by Amerigo Vespucci and his fellow discoverers of lands in the western hemisphere. He explained: "In designing the sheets of our world-map we have not followed Ptolemy in every respect, particularly as regards the new lands ... We have therefore followed, on the flat map, Ptolemy, except for the new lands and some other things, but on the solid globe, which accompanies the flat map, the description of Amerigo that is appended hereto.""" Martin Waldseemüller, Cosmographiæ Introductio, cap.ix, f.19 ; transcribed and translated in Marie Armand Pascal d'Avezac, Martin Hylacomylus Waltzemüller, ses ouvrages et ses collaborateurs, Paris, Challamel, 1867, p.39.
Several earlier maps are believed to be sources, chiefly those based on the Geography (Ptolemy) and the Caveri planisphere and others similar to those of Henricus Martellus or Martin Behaim. The Caribbean and what appears to be Florida were depicted on two earlier charts, the Cantino map, smuggled from Portugal to Italy in 1502 showing details known in 1500, and the Caverio map, drawn –1506 and showing the Gulf of Mexico.
While some maps after 1500 show, with ambiguity, an eastern coastline for Asia distinct from the Americas, the Waldseemüller map apparently indicates the existence of a new ocean between the trans-Atlantic regions of the Spanish discoveries and the Asia of Ptolemy and Marco Polo as exhibited on the 1492 Behaim globe. The first historical records of Europeans to set eyes on this ocean, the Pacific, are recorded as Vasco Núñez de Balboa in 1513. That is five to six years after Waldseemüller made his map. In addition, the map apparently predicts the width of South America at certain latitudes to within 70 miles. However, as pointed out by E.G. Ravenstein, this is an illusory effect of the cordiform projection used by Waldseemüller, for when the map is laid out on a more familiar equirectangular projection and compared with others of the period also set out on that same projection there is little difference between them: this is particularly evident when the comparison is made with Johannes Schöner's 1515 globe.E.G. Ravenstein, Martin Behaim: His Life and His Globe, London, George Philip, 1908, p. 36.
Apparently most map-makers at the time still erroneously believed that the lands discovered by Christopher Columbus, Vespucci, and others formed part of the Indies of Asia. Amerigo Vespucci said: "After we sailed ca. 400 leagues along the coast without interruption, we concluded that this is mainland, by which I mean that it forms the easternmost point of Asia and the first tip of Asia reached when sailing westbound".""; "Lettera di Amerigo Vespucci indirizzata a Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de Medici", in A.M. Bandini, (ed.), Vita e lettere di Amerigo Vespucci, Florence, 1745, pp.68, 76–77; quoted in Martin Lehmann, "The depiction of America on Martin Waldseemüller's world map from 1507—Humanistic geography in the service of political propaganda", Cogent Arts & Humanities, 3 (1), 2016, p.5. On his 1506 world map, Giovanni Contarini called the land later called America by Waldseemüller the Antipodes.“The world and all its seas on a plane map, Europe, Lybia [Africa], Asia, and the Antipodes" (); Robert J. King, “The Antipodes on Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 World Map”, The Globe, no.91, 2022, pp. 43-60.
Waldseemüller drew upon the 1506 world map of Nicolay de Caveri, where an inscription off the coast of vera cruz (America/Brazil) says: "The land called Vera Cruz was found by Pedro Álvares Cabral, a gentleman of the household of the King of Portugal. He discovered it as commander of a fleet of 14 ships that that King sent to Calicut, and on the way to India, he came across this land here, which he took to be terra firma [mainland] in which there are many people, described as going about, men and women, as naked as their mothers bore them; they are lighter-skinned.""". Opus Nicolay de Caverio ianuensis, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b550070757/f3.item.zoom This came from the account of the discovery by Pedro Álvares Cabral of the (new land of Parrots) during his voyage to India of 1500–1501, as reported by Giovanni Matteo da Camerino, "il Cretico", secretary of the Venetian Ambassador to Spain and Portugal, published in the Paesi Novamente Retrovati of Fracanzano da Montalboddo, where the relevant passage read: "They were borne by a west wind beyond the Cape of Good Hope, and discovered a new land, which they called that of Parrots, for there they found birds of this kind of incredible size... They judged that this was mainland because they ran along the coast more than two thousand miles but did not find the end of it".""; Fracanzano da Montalboddo, Paesi Novamente Retrovati, Vicenza, 1507, cap. cxxv; in Guglielmo Berchet (ed.), Fonti italiane per la storia della scoperta del Nuovo mondo, Reale Commissione Colombiana pel Quarto Centenario dalla Scoperta del l'America, Raccolta di Documenti e Studi, Parte III, Volume I, Roma, Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione, 1892, p.43-44. Caverio's inscription was copied by Waldseemüller and placed in the same location on his map, with the significant difference that, although Cabral and his companions believed that they had reached "the mainland", i.e. part of Asia, Waldseemüller, for unexplained reasons, asserted in the inscription on his map concerning America that it was "an enormous sea-girt island of yet unknown size", i.e. not part of Asia.Martin Lehmann, "The depiction of America on Martin Waldseemüller's world map from 1507—Humanistic geography in the service of political propaganda", Cogent Arts & Humanities, 3 (1), 2016, p.9.
Some believe that it was impossible for Waldseemüller to know about the Pacific, which is depicted on his map. The historian Peter Whitfield has theorized that Waldseemüller incorporated the ocean into his map because Vespucci's accounts of the Americas, with their savage peoples, could not be reconciled with contemporary knowledge of India, China, and the islands of the Indies. Thus, in the view of Whitfield, Waldseemüller reasoned that the newly discovered lands could not be part of Asia, but must be separate from it, a leap of intuition that was later proven uncannily accurate. An alternative explanation is that of George E. Nunn (see below). Chet Van Duzer has said that the explanation for the depiction of the Ocean to the west of America is that Marco Polo had stated that Zipangu (Japan) was an island, so that there had to be sea between it and America, which Waldseemüller had concluded was also an island.John W. Hessler and Chet Van Duzer, Seeing the World Anew: the Radical Vision of Martin Waldseemüller's 1507 & 1516 World Maps, Levenger Press & Library of Congress, Washington, 2012, p.56.
Mundus Novus, a book attributed to Vespucci (who had himself explored the extensive eastern coast of South America), was widely published throughout Europe after 1504, including a version by Waldseemüller's group in 1507 under the title, Quatuor Americi Vespucii Navigationes.Mundus Novus, Paris, 1504 It expressed the belief of Vespucci and his companions that: "We knew that land to be not an island but continent, both from its long extending coasts which do not enclose it and from the infinite number of inhabitants which it contains".""; Mundus nouus (novus), Albericus Vespucius Laurentio Petri Francisci de Medicis salutem plurimam dicit, [p.2] at: http://digital.onb.ac.at/OnbViewer/viewer.faces?doc=ABO_%2BZ180311301 "Continent" meant, at that time, one of the three known continents, Europe, Africa and Asia, that adjoined each other (from Latin "continens"="touching") surrounded by the Ocean, which was divided by Africa into the Western, or Atlantic and Eastern, or Indian Oceans which contained the Earth's large and small islands.Harald Kleinschmidt, Ruling the Waves: Emperor Maximilian I, the Search for Islands and the Transformation of the European World Picture C. 1500, Utrecht, Hes & De Graaf, 2008, p.4; Martin Lehmann, "The depiction of America on Martin Waldseemüller's world map from 1507—Humanistic geography in the service of political propaganda", Cogent Arts & Humanities, 3 (1), 2016, p.5. Vespucci's belief, therefore, was that the land was part of the continent of Asia.Martin Lehmann, "Amerigo Vespucci and His Alleged Awareness of America as a Separate Land Mass", Imago Mundi, vol.65, no.1, 2013, pp.15–24.
It has been theorized that "continent" in the Mundus Novus meant the same as its modern meaning, that is, one of the Earth's main continuous land-masses, and that therefore it had first introduced to Europeans the idea that this was a new continent and not Asia, and that this led to Waldseemüller's separating the Americas from Asia, depicting the Pacific Ocean, and the use of the first name of Vespucci on his map.