Another describes “monsters similar to humans whose ears are so large that they can cover their whole body.” Many of these fantastical creatures can be traced to texts written by the ancient Greeks. “Here are found the Hippopodes: they have a human form but the feet of horses,” reads one previously illegible text over Central Asia. Many of the map legends describe the regions of the world and their inhabitants. The method involved taking many hundreds of photographs of the map with different wavelengths of light and processing the images to find the combination of wavelengths that best improves legibility on each part of the map (you can play around with an interactive map created by one of Van Duzer’s colleagues here). But in 2014 Van Duzer won a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities that allowed him and a team of collaborators to use a technique called multispectral imaging to try to uncover the hidden text.
Over time, much of the text had faded to almost perfectly match the background, making it impossible to read. It was donated anonymously to Yale University in 1962 and remains in the university’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Such a large map would have been a luxury object, likely commissioned by a member of the nobility, but there’s no shield or dedication to indicate who that might have been. Van Duzer says it’s reasonable to speculate that as Columbus sailed down the coast of Central and South America on later voyages, he pictured himself sailing down the coast of Asia as depicted on Martellus’s map. He was likely convinced Japan must be near because he’d travelled roughly the same distance that Martellus’s map suggests lay between Europe and Japan, Van Duzer argues in a new book detailing his findings. When Columbus made landfall in the West Indies on October 12, 1492, he began looking for Japan, still believing that he’d achieved his goal of finding a route to Asia. Columbus’s son Ferdinand later wrote that his father believed Japan to be oriented north-south, indicating that he very likely used Martellus’s map as a reference. Correct, but almost certainly another lucky guess says Van Duzer, as no other known map of the time shows Japan unambiguously oriented this way. Martellus’s map shows it running north-south. Marco Polo’s journals, the best available source of information about East Asia at the time, had nothing to say about the island’s orientation. At the time the map was created, Europeans knew Japan existed, but knew very little about its geography. Martellus filled the southern Pacific Ocean with imaginary islands, apparently sharing the common mapmakers’ aversion to empty spaces.Īnother quirk of Martellus’s geography helps tie his map to Columbus’s journey: the orientation of Japan. The large island in the South Pacific roughly where Australia can actually be found must have been a lucky guess, Van Duzer says, as Europeans wouldn’t discover that continent for another century.
But southern Africa is oddly shaped like a boot with its toe pointing to the east, and Asia is also twisted out of shape. Its depiction of Europe and the Mediterranean Sea is more or less accurate, or at least recognizable. But their understanding of the world was quite different from ours, and Martellus’s map reflects that. In the process, they’ve discovered new clues about the sources Martellus used to make his map and confirmed the huge influence it had on later maps, including a famous 1507 map by Martin Waldseemuller that was the first to use the name “America.” MARTELLUS AND COLUMBUSĬontrary to popular myth, 15th-century Europeans did not believe that Columbus would sail off the edge of a flat Earth, says Chet Van Duzer, the map scholar who led the study. Most of it has faded over the centuries.īut now researchers have used modern technology to uncover much of this previously illegible text. The map, created by the German cartographer Henricus Martellus, was originally covered with dozens of legends and bits of descriptive text, all in Latin. In fact, Columbus likely used a copy of it in planning his journey. This 1491 map is the best surviving map of the world as Christopher Columbus knew it as he made his first voyage across the Atlantic.