Slide Sets

This slide set of six maps traces the changing European perception of the New World in the first hundred years after Columbus. The maps illustrate the rapid assimilation of knowledge about the New World and the evolving European image of it—from nothing to something like the modern conception of the Americas. The integration of the Americas into a new image of the world was made possible by important developments in cartography in the sixteenth century, which these maps illustrate as well. The cartographic significance of these maps, and the radically new images of the Americas and the world they introduce, is best understood against the background of two of the medieval map-making traditions. (For a fuller treatment of medieval maps, see Gerald Danzer's pamphlet, Cartographic Images of the World on the Eve of the Discoveries, in this series).

Western Europeans knew at least two kinds of maps during the Middle Ages: the contemplative’s map (the T-O or Jerusalem map) and the sailor’s map (the portolan or sea chart).

The contemplative’s map may derive ultimately from classical sources. It is commonly called a T-O map because it represents the world, with east at the top, as a disk (the “O”), divided into three parts (by the “T”). The Mediterranean, the stem of the T, provides a vertical division between Europe and Africa, and a series of bodies of water (the River Don, the Sea of Azov, the Black Sea, the Aegean and the Nile); the cross of the capital T divides Asia from the other two continents. These T-O maps, which usually show Jerusalem at the center and Paradise in the east at the top, were schematically very simple. But a number of considerably embellished versions, often called mappaemundi, survive: one at Hereford Cathedral (c. 1275), for example, another at Venice, attributed to Fra Mauro (1459).

The sailor’s map may also have developed in classical times in the Mediterranean, though the earliest surviving sea chart is the “carte pisane” (c.1290). Medieval sailors could navigate by sight, from memory or oral reports, on shorter voyages in the Mediterranean. But on longer voyages, especially out of sight of land, they required more explicit and repeatable directions to get from one harbor to another. A sailing guide which sometimes included a map with compass bearings between harbors was called a portolano.

By the end of the fifteenth century, portolan charts were a highly developed aid to navigation. Their common features include numerous compass roses connected by a network of rhumb lines which enable the navigator to lay a course from one place to another. These portable navigational tools were usually made on one skin, with north at the top and with the neck of the Mediterranean to the left. Names of places appear in black, perpendicular to detailed coasts, with important features noted in vivid reds, often with stylized decorations in gold and silver in the interior. (The fourth slide in this set illustrates many of these characteristics). In the later Middle Ages, several world maps appeared—like the one in the Catalan Atlas (1375)—which recall the T-O maps but which were based on data supplied by the portolan tradition.

As mapmaking progressed in the sixteenth century, the contemplative’s T-O map became less important, and the sailor’s map merged with the scholar’s map to form a new, single image of the world. This development is evident in the maps in this slide set. Ptolemy’s world map, the scholar’s map represented in slide one, shows the enlightened view of the world on the eve of the discoveries. The second slide, also a world map, shows the first inclusion of data about the New World within the traditional scholarly view. The third and fourth slides illustrate the increased knowledge about the Americas in the mid-sixteenth century as treated in two regional maps in the scholarly and portolan traditions, respectively. The new single image of the world, which integrates the scholarly and portolan traditions, emerges in the last two maps, both based on the work of Gerhard Mercator. The fifth slide shows the world in Ortelius’ first modern atlas; the sixth slide depicts the known world at the very end of the sixteenth century.

Ptolemy’s Geography, consisting of eight books of introductory material and 27 maps, irreversibly influenced the way Europeans conceptualized the world when it became available in Western Europe in the fifteenth century. Ptolemy, who lived in the second century A.D., in Alexandria, Egypt, sought to summarize all that was known of the cosmos and the earth in his two books, his Astronomy (sometimes called the Almagest) and his Geography (often called the Cosmography). Ptolemy’s Geography was known to Arab scholars throughout the Middle Ages, but Western Europeans learned of it only in 1406 when it was translated into Latin from a Greek copy brought from Constantinople.

The Geography provided an image of the world and its parts as no one had conceived them in the previous 1000 years in the West. After studying Ptolemy, few could think of the world in the old way again, especially since this radical newness had the authority of the whole classical past behind it—this was the world as the Roman empire knew it. Hundreds of manuscript copies of Ptolemy’s Geography circulated in widely varying forms in the 70 years before its first printed editions at Bologna in 1477 and at Rome in 1478.

The rare and unusual map reproduced in the first slide is the earliest separately printed Ptolemaic world map. Like all surviving copies, the Newberry’s (the only fully intact copy) was probably produced c.1590 from plates that date from the late fifteenth century. This map is an interesting hybrid related to the world maps in both of the two early editions of Ptolemy’s Geography: in content, it is very close to the world map in the 1478 Rome edition, a fine copper-engraved map that was widely circulated in four editions; in style, some of the decoration is reminiscent of the 1477 Bologna edition, which though earlier was less expertly executed and survives in only the original edition. The engraver of this map is thought to be either Arnold Buckinck, who completed the engraving of the Rome edition, or Taddeo Crivelli, who may have drawn and perhaps engraved the world map in the Bologna edition. The map is also notable for its border decorations of frame, small stars, and ten windheads. Such decorations, and some much more elaborate, are common on many sixteenth-century maps.

Ptolemy assumed the world was spherical, and his authority helped put to rest any alternative belief on this score. Many features of Ptolemy’s world map became a fixed part of the way the world is cartographically represented—oriented toward the north, as a globe projected on a plane surface, with a system of latitude and longitude. He drew his maps on two projections: his world map on a conical projection based on a technique of adjusting longitude for changes in latitude; his regional maps on an equidistant rectangular projection. Both were frequently imitated in the sixteenth century.

Although Ptolemy’s maps themselves advance cartography significantly, they also impeded further developments because of the strong conservative effect of their authority. (Many subsequent printed maps had the same retarding effect). Several inaccurate features of this map misled his successors. For example,

• Ptolemy significantly underestimated the size of the earth and the length of a degree of longitude. (This helped Columbus believe, for example, that he would reach the East Indies by sailing west much sooner than is actually possible).
• He portrays a blockish Africa, growing rather than thinning in size as it goes south, connected to “Terra Incognita.”
• He represented an enclosed Indian Ocean with a shrunken India and an enlarged Ceylon.
• He had no idea, of course, of the vast New World as yet undiscovered.

Along with Henricus Martellus’ manuscript world map (c.1490), Francesco Rosselli’s printed map (c.1492), and the globe of Martin Behaim (1492), Ptolemy’s atlas of maps illustrated the widely-held picture of the world on the eve of the discoveries. His authority continued to be important: virtually all printed atlases before 1570 and several after this date were editions of Ptolemy, and many of the notable cartographers of the sixteenth century (Waldseemüller, Münster, and Mercator, for example) were associated with editions of Ptolemy. Although we tend to emphasize the new contributions of these men, they were themselves almost equally interested in retaining the tradition of Ptolemy. For example, Ptolemy’s original 27 maps were reproduced in the more than 50 sixteenth-century printed editions of his atlas; new knowledge was illustrated in tabulae novae which supplemented but did not replace the Ptolemaic maps themselves.

The exciting discoveries of the late fifteenth century—Dias’ rounding of Africa (1487), the discovery of Newfoundland by John Cabot (1497), Vasco de Gama’s travel to India (1499), as well as the transatlantic encounters in the Caribbean and South America of Columbus (1492-93, 1493-94, 1498, 1502-04), and Vespucci (1499, 1501-02)—were not widely known in Europe outside of the professional circles of mariners and government officials for up to fifteen years. Some of the discoveries were recorded in vellum portolan charts (Juan de la Cosa’s map of the world, 1500, based on the second voyage of Columbus, for example, and the Cantino world map, c. 1502), but only a few of these survive not simply because they were manuscript rather than printed maps, but also because they were often regarded as state secrets.

But this changed significantly in 1506-07 with the appearance of three independently printed world maps which for the first time gave the recent discoveries widespread pictorial representation. The first two, the Contarini-Rosselli copper-engraved map (Venice or Florence 1506) and the Waldseemüller woodcut map (Strassburg 1507), had considerable influence in the sixteenth century but exist in unique copies rediscovered only in the twentieth century. The third, Johannes Ruysch’s world map, illustrated here, appeared for the first time among the tabulae novae in some copies of the 1507 Rome edition of Ptolemy’s Geography: it survives in many copies of the 1507 and 1508 Rome editions. Ruysch’s world map, using Ptolemy’s conical projection, was the first modern world map (as opposed to numerous regional maps) specifically prepared to supplement Ptolemy’s originals.

Little is known about Ruysch: a seaman apparently born in Antwerp, it is said that he sailed from England to America, either with Cabot or on a Portuguese ship out of Bristol, and therefore may have drawn parts of his map from first-hand observation. His other sources include: Ptolemy; travel accounts, like those of Marco Polo; recent world maps and globes (perhaps including the Contarini-Rosselli map mentioned above); and a variety of early Spanish and Portuguese manuscript sources (including, probably, both reports and charts).

Along with the two other printed world maps of 1506-07, Ruysch’s map illustrates a number of significant geographic features more correctly than before, especially along the easterly sea route to the Orient which was of prime importance to early sixteenth-century Europeans. These three maps begin the radical transformation of the image of the world beyond both the medieval and Ptolemaic understandings. These and the maps to follow were increasingly based on actual reconnaissance, which became the accepted standard by the end of the century.

• Ruysch’s map shows the fruits of the discoveries of the Portuguese along the coast of Africa; it represents Africa as a peninsula surrounded by water, with the tip of Africa on approximately the correct latitude.
• It delineates India as a triangular peninsula with Ceylon in proper proportion and position in relation to India.
• It includes details about the interior of Asia and its eastern expanse based on data gathered by travelers like Marco Polo in addition to the ancient authorities.

For our purposes, the most notable innovation in Ruysch’s map is the representation of the western discoveries. Concerning the New World, however, his map is a mixture of tradition, new information, and misleading conjecture. Ruysch’s treatment of Greenland exemplifies the composite nature of his representation. Ruysch correctly draws Greenland as separate from Europe, not connected with Europe by a vast polar continent as some earlier maps indicate. Instead of connected with Europe, he links Greenland with Asia through Newfoundland (“Terra Nova”). In addition, he shows the northern polar regions as a basin with a number of islands, thus prompting the long-held hope for a Northwest passage from Europe to Asia.

In the south, Ruysch shows the Caribbean basin as separate from Asia, but assumes (as indicted in an inscription in the western Pacific) that “Sipganus” (Marco Polo’s Japan) is identical with “Spagnola” (Hispaniola, modern Haiti and the Dominican Republic), thus reinforcing Columbus’ belief that the West Indies were very close to Asia. Ruysch makes Cuba too large and without a western coast and follows the report of Columbus’ second voyage for the most part in naming the West Indian islands. In the long inscription in the interior of South America, called “Mundus Novus” here for the first time, Ruysch describes the inhabitants and natural products of the country following the letters of Vespucci and other sources.

Many of the printed maps produced in the middle years of the sixteenth century continued the scholarly tradition of Ptolemy. Numerous new editions of Ptolemy’s Geography appeared, usually with tabulae novae added to the traditional maps of classical authority. Even these new maps, produced to account for new discoveries or to provide more detailed information about various parts of the world, were often drawn in conical or various rectilinear projections derived from Ptolemy.

Sebastian Münster was one of the most influential of the scholarly cartographers. In addition to a number of regional maps, Münster produced two influential works which continued to be used throughout the sixteenth century. He edited Ptolemy’s Geography in several continually expanding editions: his 1540 edition had the 27 traditional Ptolemaic maps, plus 21 new maps; his 1542 edition had 24 new maps. Münster’s Cosmographia, a more encyclopedic work that also went through many editions, appeared in 1544 with the new maps from the Geography as well as an ever-increasing number of regional maps—the 1550 edition, for example, had 52 new or modern maps.

First included in his edition of Solinus (1538), Münster’s map of the New World, shown in the third slide, was repeated in his 1540 edition of Ptolemy’s Geography. In a number of ways, Münster’s woodcut maps are cruder than the copper-engraved maps of the earlier editions of Ptolemy. Not only does the different method of printing provide a less detailed appearance, but Münster, despite being a skilled mathematician as well as Hebraist and geographer, was not as advanced in applying mathematical principles to his maps as were a number of his contemporaries.

Nonetheless, in this map and in all his work, Münster strove to get all the latest information he could about the country he describes. His rendering of the western hemisphere is the first to show the New World as a discrete land mass, separate from Asia and consisting of two connected parts. Münster also gives more information (mistaken though some of it would ultimately prove to be) about the internal configuration of the occidental continents. For example, he shows a large body of water nearly dividing the continent of North America, separating “Terra florida” from “Francisca.” This erroneous notion derives from Varrazzano’s explorations of 1522-24 when the Chesapeake Bay was mistaken for the Indian Ocean. It is also related to Cartier’s search for a Northwest passage via the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes in 1534-35. A similar distortion appears in the depiction of the northwest coast of South America.

In other ways, though crude, the map corrects Ruysch’s notion of the New World. The islands of the Caribbean are more fully articulated, though Yucatan is shown as an island. Gross coastal configurations are more up-to-date, with the prominent rivers shown. Notably, too, Magellan’s 1522 circumnavigation is reflected in the labeling of the straits with his name (“Fretum Magaliani”) and in the treatment of the Central Pacific where Magellan’s ship, the Victoria, is portrayed.

This map illustrates another feature of many sixteenth-century maps which make them a source of ethnological as well as geographic information—the practice of depicting (in continental interiors, in the sea, or in border decorations) the flora, fauna, and human inhabitants of the New World. In comparison with the 1532 Grynaeus world map, for example, which was based on Münster’s earlier rendering of the world with illustrations attributed to Hans Holbein, this map is quite restrained. But the depiction of native inhabitants of South America as “canabali” shows that the tradition of projecting negative characteristics of the people of the New World is already well established by 1540.

During the middle of the sixteenth century, numerous cartographic centers emerged to meet the demand for new maps, not only to reflect new discoveries but also to illustrate the already-known world in light of refined knowledge and new methods of projection. Many skilled cartographers, some more clearly in touch with the portolan tradition than Münster, who was very little influenced by it, produced a variety of maps during this period.

A spectacular and rare map in the late portolan tradition is illustrated in the fourth slide. This double chart of the Caribbean is part of a unique mid-century atlas consisting of 24 folio leaves at the Newberry Library. The 22 other charts illustrate the coasts of Northern Europe, parts of the Mediterranean, the sea route around Africa to the Orient, as well as sections of the New World, including Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Brazil, Panama, and the Pacific coast of South America.

Little is known of Lopes, who is described in official documents as “master of nautical charts, resident of the city of Lisbon”; he apparently was a principal figure in the Armazem da India, the official center of Portuguese cartography. In addition to the atlas, five of his works survive: a signed and dated chart of North America, the Atlantic, and North Europe (1558); an unsigned and undated chart of the same region (1570); and three other anonymous works—a chart of the Mediterranean (c.1555), a planisphere world chart (c.1583), and a fragmentary sea chart (c.1581).

The atlas, which is attributed to Lopes because of its stylistic similarity to the signed and dated chart, is not simply a collection of miscellaneous charts bound together. It was designed as a uniform work since maps were drawn on both sides of a sheet of vellum. The charts come in groups, with each succeeding chart overlapping the material of the previous one, suggesting how they would be used in navigation. In the double chart of the Caribbean, for example, reproduced in the slide, the island of Hispaniola is reproduced twice, once in the left chart and once in the right, as is the river going north and south on the South American continent.

It is unlikely that this particular atlas, however, was actually used aboard ship; instead, its elaborate decoration suggests that it is a carefully crafted presentation copy. The decorations here illustrate, at a remarkable level of craftsmanship, the characteristics of the portolan tradition. The shields and emblems of Portugal, the compass roses with rhumb lines, the ship under full sail, the town of “Beuda” on the northwest coast of South America are all rendered in striking color and in remarkable detail.

The geographic feature of the map (from about Cape Hatteras in the north to below the Amazon River in the south), based as they are on actual reconnaissance, present a detailed picture of the known New World about 75 years after Columbus, in the portolan style. The carefully drawn harbors and small peninsulas down the Atlantic coast, around Florida and lining the Gulf of Mexico are clearly labeled. The islands of the Caribbean are fully articulated. The development of New Spain by the mid-century is indicated by the delineation of harbors on both sides of Central America, with the Yucatan and Lake Nicaragua rendered with considerable accuracy. The whole upper third or more of South America is similarly depicted, from Beuda in Peru on the Pacific side, across the north coast, and down the Atlantic seaboard past the Amazon river delta.

This atlas is both an accurate chart of the New World and one of the most beautiful specimens of sixteenth-century Portuguese cartography.

The publication of Abraham Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum in 1570 marks a new era in mapmaking and an important new stage in the European understanding of the configuration of the world, including the Americas. As the first truly modern printed atlas, it essentially superseded Ptolemy as the authority for the cartographical image of the world and its parts. A native of Antwerp, Ortelius had produced an excellent world map of his own in 1564, as well as several regional maps. But his fame rests on his skills as a collector and publisher of maps.

Ortelius had several predecessors in the atlas-making enterprise. The numerous sixteenth-century editions of Ptolemy—including as they usually did both his original maps plus the modern ones—provided a comprehensive view of the world. Münster’s emphasis on regional maps in his Cosmographia also had the effect of collecting and then circulating increasingly accurate depictions of the Old and New World. In addition, printers (notably Lafreri in Rome) produced made-to-order collections of printed maps, picking and choosing from the many maps available during the middle years of the sixteenth century; individual manuscript atlases, like that of Lopes, can also be found.

But Ortelius was the first systematically to collect the best available maps of the world by the most renowned and up-to-date geographers and to have each map engraved specifically for his atlas according to a uniform format. The first edition of the Theatrum Orbis Terraum consists of 70 maps of 53 sheets; subsequent editions continually expanded the number of maps over the course of 40 editions in the next 40 years. Most editions were in Latin, but other editions appeared in all the major European languages—Dutch, German, French, Spanish, English, and Italian.

The world map illustrated here, a re-engraving of the world map of the first edition, is from the 1588 Spanish edition of Ortelius’ atlas, Theatro de la Tierra Universal. For his atlas, Ortelius adapted the 1569 large world map of his fellow Dutchman, Gerhard Mercator, redrawing it on a smaller oval projection, without the textual panels and decorative features. Virtually every world map for several decades was based directly on Mercator or on Mercator via Ortelius.

In his world map, Mercator combined his conceptual skills as a learned geographer and his practical abilities as a draftsman, bringing together the theoretical ideas of representing the world derived from Ptolemy and the practicality of marine charts actually used by sailors. His means of effecting this combination was the use of the projection which bears his name to construct his map. In this revolutionary cartographic projection, parallel straight lines of latitude are drawn at right angles to straight meridians of longitude, but the length of a degree of longitude and of latitude increases progressively toward the Poles in a set proportion of latitude to longitude. This preserves the correct relationship of angles, which in turn has two effects: compass directions can be plotted accurately as straight lines, and the shape of small areas are truly shown so that local charts can be constructed from the larger map.

In its depiction of Europe, Africa, and most parts of Asia, in areas reconnoitered by explorers, this map is remarkably accurate. In the middle latitudes of the New World, roughly between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn (in the area covered by the Lopes chart in the previous slide), it comports with the modern standard. Outside this large equatorial band, it also corrects renderings of the St. Lawrence River, for example, and depicts California as a peninsula and New Guinea as an island. But in the more distant reaches of the north and south, this map retains a number of misleading suggestions which persist in the European imagination. The rendering of the northern hemisphere of the New World continues to support the possibility of some kind of Northwest passage, for example. The shape of South America, with the bulge to the south and west, is significantly distorted. Terra del Fuego, at the tip of South America, is linked to a vast southern continent, which suggests a non-existent land mass that covers Australia, Antarctica, and a significant amount of ocean as well. The Strait of Anian, to the west of Alaska, is wholly conjectural.

Although Ortelius produced his atlas first, the impetus for such an undertaking may have come from Mercator, whose own atlas was completed in 1594, a year after his death. Both atlases were regularly reproduced for over 40 years. Together, Mercator and Ortelius established the ascendancy of the Dutch school of cartography which would continue to predominate into the seventeenth century in the work of Mercator’s family, his successors like Jodocus Hondius, and their fellow countryman Willem Blaeu.

To mark the end of the first hundred years of cartographic representation of the New World, any number of maps might have been chosen, most of which would illustrate both the remarkable advances in knowledge about the New World in the hundred years after Columbus and the improvement in cartography in that time as well. Imitating both Ptolemy and the Dutch atlas-making practice, for example, Cornelis Wytfliet produced a Ptolemy-like atlas devoted entirely to the New World. His Descriptionis Ptolemaicae Augmentum (Louvain 1597) consists of extended prefatory discussions of the discoveries, the geography, natural history, and ethnology of the New World, along with a world map and 18 regional maps.

But the map often regarded as the supreme cartographic artifact of the sixteenth century is the Molineux-Wright world map, often called “A Chart of the World on Mercator’s Projection,” illustrated in the sixth slide. This map first appeared in volume two of the second, enlarged edition of Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (London 1599). In the first edition of his collection of accounts of voyages and discoveries in 1589, Hakluyt somewhat apologetically included a modified version of Ortelius’ oval world map only slightly different from the version seen in the fifth slide. By replacing the outdated Ortelius map with the remarkable new map, Hakluyt achieved his goal of accompanying his compendium of prose narratives with a suitably advanced cartographic image.

This new map is probably the work of Edward Wright, an English mathematician. In his Certaine Errors in Navigation (London 1599), Wright explained in detail the theoretical basis for Mercator’s projection, published tables for the construction of maps using this projection, and explained how such maps could be easily used in navigation. The geographic information in the map is based in part on Emery Molineaux’s globe of 1592. But in explaining Mercator and drawing a map using his projection, Wright made useable the “true chart” invented by Mercator which combined the scholar’s theoretical representation of the world with the sailor’s practical needs—a significant navigational and cartographic advance.

Visually, the map is notable for its no-nonsense image of the world. There are no fanciful illustrations; instead, the map includes rhumb lines and compass roses as a practical aid to navigation. In terms of its content, this map is one of the best general maps of the world in the sixteenth century because it included details derived from voyages made up to that point by English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French explorers and limits itself to land actually discovered, eliminating all features based on conjecture. Thus there is no large “Terra Australis” of the Ortelius world map and of many earlier and contemporary maps. It is especially notable for its detailed rendering of South America, correcting Ortelius’ bulge to the West (as Ortelius himself had done by this time). Wright attributes this advance to the findings of Sir Francis Drake in the lower left, third cartouche, which first appears in the revised second state of the map as shown here. Of the other two cartouches, one emphasizes that the Pacific Ocean is larger than a strait as depicted on many other maps (such as Ortelius’), and the second gives a general rule for determining distances on this map. The map also shows advanced knowledge of Canada and Labrador and depicts “Lake of Tadouac,” an apparent allusion to one of the Great Lakes.

The seventeenth and subsequent centuries would see further exploration: of the interiors of North and South America, of the contents of the vast Pacific including another continent—Australia—and of North and South Poles. And the arts of engraving and decorating maps would continue to develop in these years as well. But the cartographic basis of representing the world remains essentially unchanged from that developed by the end of the sixteenth century. No longer could the world be envisioned or represented as it had been before the achievements of Mercator and the use of his work by Ortelius and Wright. Together they established the practice of combining the authority of actual reconnaissance, based on the practical needs of navigation associated with the portolan tradition of the Middle Ages, with the scholarly tradition of representing the world as a sphere projected on a plane surface introduced by Ptolemy’s Geography in the fifteenth century. As occurred in the sixteenth-century mapping of the Americas, the depiction of all subsequent discoveries would be accommodated to this modern method of representing the world.

1. The Ptolemy-Crivelli World Map, Rome? c. 1480 (c. 1590).
2. The World Map of Johannes Ruysch, Rome 1507, from the Rome edition of Ptolemy’s Geography, 1507.
3. The Map of the New World of Sebastian Münster, Basel 1538, from the Basel edition of Ptolemy’s Geography, 1540.
4. A Chart of the Caribbean, with parts of North and South America, from the manuscript atlas of Sebastiao Lopes, c. 1565.
5. The World Map of Abraham Ortelius, Antwerp 1570, from the Spanish edition of his Theatrum Orbis Terraum, Theatro de la Tierra Universal, Antwerp 1588.
6. The Molineaux-Wright World Map, London 1599, from Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, 1599.

Bagrow, Leo. History of Cartography. Revised and enlarged by R.A. Skelton. Second edition. Chicago: Precedent, 1985.
—A very useful general study.

Cortesao, Armando, and Avelino Texeira da Mota. Portugaliae Monumenta Cartographica. Vol. 4. Lisbon: 1960.
—Provides a full description of Lopes and his atlas.

Cummings, W.P., R.A. Skelton, and D.B. Quinn. The Discovery of North America. New York: American Heritage Press, 1972.
—Includes many maps among the illustrated discussions of early exploration of the New World.

Nordenskiold, A.E. Facsimile-Atlas to the Early History of Cartography. Translated by Johan Adolf Ekelof and Clements R. Markham. Introduction by J.B. Post. New York: Dover, 1973.
—Detailed discussions of early maps and charts, from Ptolemy to Ortelius.

Parry, J. H. The Age of Reconnaissance: Discovery, Exploration and Settlement 1450-1650. Second edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.
—Very good narrative survey; fine chapter on maps and charts; very useful for discussions of Ptolemy and Mercator.

Quinn, David B., with the assistance of Alison M. Quinn and Susan Hiller. New American World: A Documentary History of North America to 1612. 5 vols. New York: Arno, 1979.
—Each volume contains an appendix reproducing pertinent maps, with expert succinct notes.

Schwartz, Seymour I., and Ralph E. Ehrenberg. The Mapping of America. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1980.
—A very good reliable treatment of the early maps.

Shirley, Rodney W. The Mapping of the World: Early Printed World Maps 1472-1700. London: Holland, 1983.
—The definitive treatment of printed world maps.

Wallis, Helen. “Edward Wright and the 1599 World Map.” The Hakluyt Handbook. Edited by D. B. Quinn. 2 vols. London, 1974. 1:69-73.
—Persuasively argues for Wright’s authorship of the 1599 World Map.