Portugal May Have Put America on the Map

A fresh look at the ancient Waldseemueller Map, commonly called the baptismal certificate of America, is offering tantalizing clues that it was Portuguese navigators, and not the Spanish, who first explored the west coast of South America--a finding that could recast the early history of New World exploration.

The 1507 Waldseemueller Map--the first document that gave the name America to the New World--has such an accurate depiction of the coasts of South America that it could only have been based on firsthand knowledge of the continent, according to amateur historian Peter W. Dickson, a retired CIA analyst who will present his conclusions Thursday in a lecture at the Library of Congress.

A close reading of the map suggests that some as-yet-unknown explorer sailed through the South American straits later named after Magellan and traveled north as far as Acapulco no later than 1506, and perhaps several years earlier, Dickson said. In either case, the date is well before Magellan’s discovery of the Pacific Ocean and circumnavigation of the world in a voyage sponsored by Spain that began in 1519.

The Portuguese kept the discovery secret because of their intense trade rivalry with the Spanish, who had claimed the New World as their own sphere of influence, he added.

Dickson’s proposal, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the cartography journal Exploring Mercator’s World, has not yet been widely circulated, and those who are familiar with it have mixed feelings.

“I think there is merit here,” said cartographer John Hebert of the Library of Congress, which is in the process of purchasing the Waldseemueller Map for $10 million. “Until proven otherwise, his observations are correct. There is some exciting stuff on that map that really needs additional study. It shows what happens when a scholar looks at something with fresh eyes and begins asking the right questions.”

Independent cartographer and map dealer Kenneth Nebenzahl embraced the idea less quickly. “My first reaction to something like this always is, here comes another quack,” he said. “Then I stared at that map again, and I said ‘This guy is not completely crazy.’ Later, I said to myself, ‘Why didn’t I notice that?’ ”

Geographer David Woodward of the University of Wisconsin’s Madison campus is still skeptical. “I would take issue with” Dickson’s conclusions, he said. “I think it [the map’s resemblance to the known coastline] is simply a coincidence ... I would like to see some more solid, archival evidence to back that up.”

On that point, at least, everyone is in agreement, including Dickson. The Spanish and Portuguese archives have already been mined pretty thoroughly, all agreed, but now that scholars have something specific to look for, they might find some previously overlooked nugget of information that will shed more light on the map.

“This is the ultimate human artifact,” Dickson said. Not only is the map the first to bear the name of America, but it is also the first to show the New World as separate continents distinct from Asia and the first to show the presence of a major ocean separating the New World from Asia.

“I don’t know of another artifact that has that much information packed into it,” he said.

The Waldseemueller Map is a massive work, a woodcut print on paper in 12 sections that together measure 8 feet by 4.5 feet. Before it was produced at a Catholic monastery in Saint Die in the Lorraine province of France, maps showed a world composed only of Europe, Africa and Asia, with the New World drawn only as vague appendages to Asia.

In addition to the map, cartographer Martin Waldseemueller produced a 103-page book, “Cosmographiae Introductio,” which noted that the Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci had recently discovered “a fourth part” of the world. “Since Europa and Asia have received names of women, I see no reason why we should not call this other part ‘Amerige,’ that is to say, the land of Americus, or America, after the sagacious discoverer [Amerigo].”

The name was applied only to the southern continent, with the north left unlabeled.

Hidden away for centuries in the family castle of Prince Johannes Waldburg-Wolfegg in southern Germany, the map resurfaced in 1901. Five hundred copies were made at the time, with one going to the Library of Congress. The library has been trying on and off to purchase the original, and last year struck a deal with the prince’s heirs to buy the map for $10 million.

The library is still $3.5 million short of its fund-raising goal for the map, Hebert said. The authenticity of the Waldseemueller Map has never been seriously questioned.

Dickson spent 20 years as a political and military analyst for the CIA and the State Department and frequently lectures on foreign affairs topics at the Foreign Service Institute in Washington. For the last 10 years, he has devoted his free time to studying Christopher Columbus and the political impact of the voyages to the New World.

Last January, he began preparing a bibliography of everything that has been written about the map for the Library of Congress, researching materials that included a small globe produced at Saint Die at the same time as the Waldseemueller Map.

That globe, he said, indicated a passage to the Pacific through what is now the Straits of Magellan. When he measured the latitudinal distance of the passage from the equator, “it was virtually spot on,” he said.

Reexamining the map itself, he noted an abrupt northwestern shift in the South American coastline at about 15 degrees south in the small map inset in the Waldseemueller Map and at about 18 to 19 degrees south in the larger map, roughly where Chile and Peru meet.

“There is no way somebody could draw something like that without firsthand knowledge,” he said.

He then measured the longitudinal width of South America at various latitudes on the map and confirmed that this, too, correlated well with modern knowledge.

“I concluded that, on this clandestine expedition, they must have reached Acapulco,” he said. “Clearly they stopped there, because mapmakers drew a straight line from there to the North Pole”--meaning that they didn’t know what the rest of the coastline looked like.

Why did the explorers keep it a secret? Because Spain and Portugal were the two main maritime powers of the period, with each trying to find a profitable route to Asia to ship back spices and other goods. “A pound of pepper at the time was worth a pound of gold,” Hebert said.

Portugal had already established a route to Asia around the tip of Africa, while Spain had attempted to reach it by sailing west, only to be blocked by the unbroken coastline of the New World. By conducting an expedition to the western coast of the Americas, Portugal would have been encroaching on a region it had tacitly ceded to Spain.

New geographical knowledge, furthermore, was closely guarded. The Spanish, for example, had a large map called the Padron Royale or Royal Map, in Seville that was updated as soon as each expedition returned. “It was a capital offense to disseminate information from that map,” cartographer Nebenzahl said. The Portuguese had a similar map.

When Waldseemueller drew his map, he clearly wanted to depict all that was known about the world at the time, but he had to be careful to avoid spilling trade secrets. “The mapmakers had sensitive information that had to be kept from the Spanish, and they were devilishly clever in how they handled it,” Dickson concluded. Only 500 years later has the true extent of their knowledge become apparent.