Of Maps, Ancestors, and Genes
Of Maps, Ancestors, and Genes Duana Fullwiely
O .
On a former occasion I wrote to you at some length concerning my return from those new regions which we found and explored with the fleet, at the cost, and by the command of this Most Serene King of Portugal. And these we may rightly call a new world. Because our ancestors had no knowledge of them, and it will be a matter wholly new to all those who hear about them.
—Amerigo Vespucci, Mundus Novus, letter to Lorenzo Pietro Francesco de Medici, 1503 In the “Age of Discovery” many explorers and ship pilots were commissioned by the Spanish and Portuguese Crowns to set sail in search of goods, opportunities for trade, plunder, and expansion of powers. Amerigo Vespucci made his way into the circles of these men and eventually onto their ships. Born in the city state of Florence, he became a mercantilist who worked for the Medici family’s business interests in Spain. There he met prominent explorers, including Christopher Columbus, Alonzo de Hojeda, and Juan de la Cosa. It was during a voyage in 1501 that Vespucci realized that they had not reached “the Indies,” or Asia, but were in fact limning the shores of what is now Brazil. The diverse people, languages, plants, and animals that Vespucci saw convinced him that they had breached a new continent. Printers in Florence seized on the story and published his 1503 letter to Medici under the title Mundus Novus, which became a best seller. A few years later, a group working in Saint-Dié, France, under the name Gymnasium Vosagense set out to produce a cartography of the world based on the most recent accounts of explorers. This was the first time the “new” continental landmass would be included on a global map. The cartographer Martin Waldseemüller was the primary mapmaker among a small group of printers and humanists, including the Alsatian scholar and poet Matthias Ringmann who produced Cosmographiae Introductio (a book to accompany the map). In The Fourth Part of the World, historian Toby Lester makes a compelling case that it was Ringmann who called the landmass “America” in recognition of Vespucci, coupled with his own poetic fascination with
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