Mapping America

The Incredible Story and Stunning Hand-Colored Maps and Engravings that Created the United States

Jean-Pierre Isbouts, Neal Asbury

• Publisher: Apollo Publishers
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781948062770
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Kolonialismus & Postkolonialismus

The story of the exploration and birth of America is told afresh through the unique prism of hand-colored maps and engravings of the period.

Before photography and television, it was printed and hand-colored maps that brought home the thrill ofundiscovered lands and the possibilities of exploration, while guiding armies on all sides through the Indian Wars and the clashes of the American Revolution. Only by looking through the prism of these maps, can we truly understand how and why America developed the way it did.

Mapping America illuminates with scene-setting text and more than 150 color images—from the exotic and fanciful maps of Renaissance explorers tothe magnificent maps of the Golden Age and the thrilling battle-maps and chartsof the AmericanRevolutionary War, in addition to paintings from the masters ofeighteenth century art, scores of photographs, and detailed diagrams.

Intotal, this informative and lushly illustrated volume developed by rare maps collector Neal Asbury, host of "Neal Asbury's Made in America, " and National Geographichistorian Jean-Pierre Isbouts offers a new andimmersive look at the ambition, the struggle, and the glorythat attended and defined the exploration and making of America.

The Discovery of the Americas

At 6:30 a.m. on August 3, 1492, just half an hour before sunrise, the newly minted admiral of the Spanish Navy stood on the aftcastle of the Santa María and surveyed his small flotilla. It was Friday, and the dock was filled with people who had come to gawk at the three small ships that were about to sail into the unknown. Above him, the first breath of wind brushed the sails, as if probing their fitness for the long journey. Even at this early hour, the air already carried the heady smell of polished wood, fish offal, and salt—the unmistakable scent of a ship about to sail. Around him, his crew scurried to their assigned tasks, tending to the buntlines, the clew garnets, and the topsails, while stevedores strained under the weight of the last barrels being carried on board. He wondered whether they would be enough, these provisions, but that was the least of his problems.

Foremost on his mind was the reliability of his ships and the crew that had been tasked to sail them. He was well aware that the owners of the Pinta and the Niña, Christoval Quintero and Juan Niño de Moguer, deeply resented being forced to relinquish their vessels against their will and had tried to delay the journey in any way possible. It was not a good omen, and sailors were very superstitious about such things. That was also why he wasn’t sure about the loyalty of the captains who were in command of these ships: Captain Martín Alonso Pinzón on the Pinta and his brother Vicente Yáñez Pinzón on the Niña, each supervising a crew of about twenty-six men.

Above all, he worried about the many unknowns that awaited him on the journey ahead. It all depended on how one read Ptolemy’s—or, better, Marinus’s—calculations about the actual distance between Spain and the eastern coast of Asia. Ptolemy had written that the landmass comprising both Eurasia and Africa occupied 180 degrees of the terrestrial sphere. Marinus, however, believed that the oceans were much smaller and that the ratio of landmass to sea mass was 225:135. According to Marinus’s calculations, the distance between Spain and Japan was just 2,000 nautical miles—a huge error, since as we know today, the actual distance is 10,600 nautical miles. Fatefully, Columbus had based the route of his voyage on Marinus’s measurements. There was not a single vessel in fifteenth-century Europe that could carry sufficient water and provisions for a journey of over ten thousand miles. It was not until the development of the behemoths of the seventeenth century, the British galleons and the Dutch fluyts, that men would succeed in covering such huge distances.

Another mistake Columbus made was equally catastrophic: he was using charts prepared by the ninth-century geographer and astronomer Al-Farghani, known in the West as Alfraganus, and had mistaken an Arabic mile (1.18 modern international miles) for Italian—Roman—miles (roughly 0.8 miles today). This prompted him to underestimate the actual distance even more. On top of that, Columbus lacked the navigational instruments that the eighteenth century would take for granted, such as the Davis quadrant and the sextant. The only instruments that Columbus had at his disposal were a cross-staff, a rudimentary device to measure the altitude of the sun and the stars; a plain quadrant with a plumb line, used for calculating longitudes and latitudes; an astrolabe, another device for calculating latitude at sea depending on the altitude of celestial bodies; and a compass, used for dead reckoning.

But Columbus rarely used cross-staffs and astrolabes. Instead, he put all his faith in his compass, the bearings of which he scrupulously plotted as straight lines on his charts. And last but not least, Columbus worried about the wind—the trade winds, to be precise. By the end of the fifteenth century, it was well known that the prevailing wind in the southern Atlantic was a strong easterly that blew westward. It would probably carry them to the Indies, but it was doubtful that his caravels, designed for coastal traffic, would be able to turn around and return to Spain, fighting this headwind all the way.

By rights, then, this whole venture should have ended in failure—with the inevitable deaths of all hands in the middle of the ocean, deprived of food and potable water. But, as if by a miracle, that is not what happened.

Fig. 13. An astrolabe attributed to the German goldsmith Hans Dorn from 1483

A Journey Against All Odds

At 8:00 a.m., at high tide, Columbus ordered the lines cast and the Santa María, the Pinta, and the Niña slowly edged away from the quay, while the crowd along the shore waved and the sails snapped taut in the breeze. Once out of the mouth of Palos de la Frontera, he led his convoy past the confluence of the Odiel and Tinto rivers, hoping that the tide would carry their seven-foot draft vessels over a treacherous sandbar known as Saltes. “The wind is strong and variable,” Columbus wrote in his logbook that night, “and we had gone 45 miles to the south by sunset.” Then, after a careful study of the compass, “I altered course for the Canary Islands, to the SW and south by west.”

He had barely traveled three days when disaster struck. The rudder of the Pinta slipped from its socket and broke. Columbus immediately suspected sabotage by the ship’s owners. Fortunately, Captain Martín Pinzón reacted quickly and ordered the rudder secured with strong ropes, with which they were able to limp into the Grand Canary. Despite Columbus’s earlier misgivings, he was impressed with Martín’s rapid response and praised him for his presence of mind. Perhaps, he mused, he could trust the Pinzón brothers after all. He decided he could leave both captains in charge of supervising the repairs of their vessels—a new rudder for the Pinta, and square sails for the Niña—while he sailed his caracca to the island of La Gomera for victualing.

Unfortunately, all of this took a lot longer than he had hoped. So it was nearly a month before Columbus could finally lead his small flotilla into the open Atlantic. Already it was September 6, the storm season was due to begin soon, and the anxiety of the crew was palpable. None of them had ever sailed so deep into blue waters, so far from home. Columbus sensed it, and to assuage their feelings he decided to keep two books: one that recorded their progress in much shorter distances, to create the impression that they were close to home, and one that accurately tracked the lengthening miles of their journey.15

There were other things to worry about, too. Just before he sailed from the harbor of Gomera, heading due west, he was told that some people on the island had spotted a Portuguese naval squadron of three caravels. He immediately surmised that the purpose of this flotilla was to try to stop him from leaving the Canary Islands. He knew that King John II of Portugal was incensed that Columbus had “gone over” to the Spanish side. Apparently, the king was under the impression that Columbus was going to chart a new route to West Africa, ...