Map of Juan de la Cosa, 1500 AD. Drawn on two joined sheets of parchment, this is the earliest known representation of the Americas and the first depiction of the equator and the Tropic of Cancer on a nautical chart. The strategical relevance of cartography in the Age of Discoveries… [1920×1080]

Map of Juan de la Cosa, 1500 AD. Drawn on two joined sheets of parchment, this is the earliest known representation of America and the first depiction of the equator and the Tropic of Cancer on a nautical chart. The strategical relevance of cartography in the Age of Discoveries…  [1920×1080]

…(15th to 17th centuries) was critical as it enabled accurate navigation, the expansion of trade routes, and the mapping of newly discovered lands, which were essential to navigation, exploration, and the expansion of empires, particularly for maritime powers like Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands.

The map is an assemblage of two different charts, one covering the Old World and the Atlantic as far west as the Azores and the other representing the New World. The New World is colored in green while the Old World has been left uncolored. The Old World map includes discoveries made up to 1488 but the New World is current up to 1500. The two maps are also drawn at different scales, the New World chart larger than its Old World counterpart.

The portrayal of Europe, Africa, and Asia is unremarkable. The outlines of Europe and the Mediterranean Sea were certainly copied from portolan charts widely available at the time. The western and southern coasts of Africa show up-to-date knowledge of Portuguese explorations, but the eastern coast of the continent is badly distorted. Asia and the Indian Ocean reflect the Ptolemaic mapping tradition.

While the mapping of the Old World is routine, the inclusion of the New World is an important milestone in cartography. Cosa’s map is the earliest surviving representation of the Americas. It is also the only known cartographic work made by an eyewitness of the first voyages of Christopher Columbus. Cosa also participated in the 1496 voyage of Alonso de Ojeda along the coast of South America. In addition, he takes into account the explorations of John Cabot, Vicente Pinzon, and Pedro Álvares Cabral. The appropriate national flags were drawn on the map to attribute the “discovery” of each region.

North America is depicted as a landmass extending far into the North Atlantic, and South America appears to be a continent but both are drawn in such a way that they could represent an extension of Asia and not entirely new continents. The Caribbean islands of Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico are rendered with some accuracy. In particular, Cuba is drawn correctly as an island, which contradicts Columbus, who stated that it was a peninsula of Asia. The first recorded circumnavigation of Cuba did not occur until 1508.

Columbus may have presented the chart to Ferdinand and Isabella in 1503 and then later it was passed on to Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca, the councilor to the king. Nothing else is known of the map until it was purchased from a junk shop dealer in Paris by Baron Charles Athanase Walckenaer early in the nineteenth century. In 1832 the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt first identified it as an important historical document.[12] It was purchased by the Spanish government in 1853 and is part of the collection of the Naval Museum in Madrid.[13]

All captains who sailed to unknown lands had to chart these new lands beyond the information on the maps they used to get there and expand and verify what was already there. Ships that navigated later towards new unknown lands would use these maps and add to them, constantly increasing the size of a world that, to the Europeans had meant Eurasia and Africa. The production and dissemination of maps helped spread geographical knowledge rapidly, doubling the European conception of the world’s size by 1600 but, at the beginning, these updated maps turned into Secrets of State, jealously protected by the powers who owned them and unceasingly seek by those who did not. All means were valid, purchase, theft, copy, bribe… A deadly and constant spy game surrounded those maps constantly…