Why Early Europeans Should Never Have Drawn Maps

HELLO WONDERFUL HUMANS and welcome to the very first Hysterical Histories!

This week we learned about prehistory and the Age of Encounters, or sort of the time when the Europeans and Native Americans were first interacting with each other. One of the books I’m reading is called “Encounters in the New World” by Jill Lepore, and it’s basically a bunch of primary sources from the Age of Encounters.

One of the best types of primary sources we have is maps. And maps that were created during the Age of Encounters with the so-called “new world” were VERY interesting, and sometimes quite funny. So today I thought I’d talk about how euro-centric and intolerant Europeans were and why we really shouldn’t have trusted them to make maps. Let’s go!

Okay, so maps at the time, to begin with, were… interesting. A lot of the maps made in the time before the New World was discovered were centered around Christianity because a lot of the people in the known world were Christian of some sort. Introducing the T-O map! T-O maps were not really maps that had any sort of geographic information and more ones that held religious symbolism: the T representing the cross, for example. Let’s take a look at a T-O map.

This divides the world into three parts. Asia, in the upper part; Africa, in the lower right; and Europe, in the lower left. At the top of the map is written "Paradisus", farthest from the most-known world, representing the Garden of Eden. Around the edges of the world, of course, are oceans, and seas dividing the continents.

Now, how were maps once people started sailing to the New World? There were lots of interpretations, none of which were particularly correct, so here are a couple of my favorites:

1. This map of the New World from 1687, mapped by Giovanni de Rossi. This map is pretty great, except for the fact that California’s an ISLAND. It says this was a COMMON misconception. Aside from that, this map is pretty good. But I can’t get over that California’s an ISLAND. 
   
   
2. This map from 1507 by Martin Waldseemuller. This one’s older, and not even CLOSE to what the coastline looks like. It’s not much better than the 1515 consideration that it’s an infinite mass of land. Also, most of the map is taken up by the symbolism of Ptolemy, the main map guy for a really long time, being like “hey look at my world” and Waldseemuller being like “um nah, my world is better, look.

Anyway, that’s all I have for today! What do you think? Have any questions for me about US History that I might tackle in another post? Leave them in the comments below. Thanks for reading, see you next time!