Waldseemuller

Waldseemuller’s world map of 1507. The Wikipedia has a more detailed 20 Mb version.

Martin Waldseemuller (c. 1470-1520), a German mapmaker, made the first map to use the name “America”. It was also the first to show the Pacific Ocean (six years before Balboa) and was the first printed wall map. The map was in “Universalis Cosmographica” (1507), an update to Ptolemy’s “Geography” (c. 150) that he did with humanist scholar Matthias Ringmann.

The name “America” makes its debut in 1507. The map above shows part of Soutrh America.

Why the name “America”, from the “Cosmographica” itself:

“Because it is well known that Europe and Asia were named after women, I can see no reason why anyone would have good reason to object to calling this fourth part Amerige, the land of Amerigo, or America, after the man of great ability who discovered it.”

“America” was the female form of Amerigo Vespucci’s first name in Latin, Americus. Vespucci’s books outsold Columbus three to one. A year later Waldseemuller found out that Columbus had in fact been to “America” first. Oops.

In later maps, Waldseemuller called the new lands Terra Incognita (land unknown), Prisilia (Brazil?), and Terra Papagalli (land of parrots), but never again America. It is possible that “America” was Ringmann’s idea and that Waldseemuller simply dropped it after his death in 1511. But in any case:

It was too late: the name had caught on, especially among German and Dutch matchmakers, who preferred it to political names like “New Spain” and religious ones like “Land of the Holy Cross”. By century’s end it is was the main name Westerners used – except in Spain, where it did not catch on till the 1700s.

The east coast of Parias (North America). In the middle is Florida, with the Gulf of Mexico just to the left.

North America was not called North till Mercator made his world map in 1538. On Waldseemuller’s map, South America is called America, but North America is called Parias, which is what Vespucci said the people there (in Honduras?) called it.

Not yet a continent: Although the “Cosmographica” calls Africa, Asia and Europe “continents”, America is called an “island”. The line between continent and island, then as now, was not clear-cut.

Antarctica is Walseemuller’s name for the opposite of the Arctic, but its continent was unknown in the West till the 1800s.

Why America looks strange on his map: It is mainly because Waldseemuller is using a Ptolemaic map projection – which was not so bad if you only have to map less than a fourth of the globe, as Ptolemy did in the year 150. At the top of Waldseemuller’s map is a picture of the Western Hemisphere where America is much less distorted:

Mercator and others would later come up with map projections of their own. But Ptolemy’s system of mapping the whole world on a grid of latitudes and longitudes remains. And so does his practice of putting north at the top of the map (also favoured by compass users).

The “Cosmographica” extended Ptolemy’s system to the findings not just of Vespucci, but also Marco Polo, Columbus, and the Portuguese navigators who sailed round Africa in the 1400s.

Globe: The “Cosmographica” also had a map that you could cut out and make into a globe:

South Africans, the only people pictured on the 1507 world map.

– Abagond, 2021.

Sources: mainly “A History of the World in Twelve Maps” (2012) by Jerry Brotton; “Amerigo” (2007) by Felipe Fernández-Armesto; University of Minnesota.

See also:

• The term “America”
• Amerigo Vespucci
• Christopher Columbus
• Ptolemy – Geography
• latitude and longitude
• Africa in the 1400s: the Portuguese
• Marco Polo
• Ibn Batuta (ابن بطوطة)
• al-Idrisi – a Moor who made a map of the world in 1154
• Mercator
• “Europe is a continent”

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