First Map of Full Western Hemisphere

Sebastian Munster, 1540 (1574 or 1578) :
Die Neuwen Inselin... State 13. Burden 12. 10.75 x 13.5 inches. Very good margins. An excellent example. $5500.

Coming half a century after Columbus' initial landfall in the Indies, this is the first separate printed map of the Western Hemisphere, and the finest portrayal of Japan as a hypothetical close insular neighbor of America.

Two decades after Magellan's circumnavigation, it is also the first printed map (along with Münster's world map) to refer to Magellan's great ocean by the name he had christened it - Mare Pacificum.

Münster has also set precedent in his mapping of North America, being the first printed use of Verrazanian geography. In his use of Verrazano's misinformation, Münster is preceded by the manuscript maps of Juan Vespucci (1526), Vesconte de Maggiolo (1527; destroyed in the second World War), Girolano Verrazano (1529), and the globe of Robert de Bailly (1530).

By adopting the reports from Verrazano's expedition, Münster has choked the mid-Atlantic coast of North America into a narrow isthmus, offsetting the Northeast and creating a huge sea in Canada. The origin of this error is revealed in a letter written by Verrazano during his voyage up the East Coast, dated the 8th of July, 1524:

“ . . . In XXV more days we sailed more than 400 leagues where there appeared to us a new land never before seen by anyone, ancient or modern. At first it appeared rather low; having approached to within a quarter of a league, we perceived it, by the great fires built on the shore by the sea, to be inhabited. We saw that it ran toward the south . . . We had seen many people who came to the shore of the sea and seeing us approach fled, sometimes halting, turning back, looking with great admiration . . . marveling at our clothes, figures and whiteness . . . [their] eyes [are] black and large, the glance intent and quick. They are not of much strength, in craftiness acute, agile and the greatest runners. From what we were able to learn by experience, they resemble in the last two respects the Orientals, and mostly those of the farthest Sinarian regions . . . We think that partaking of the Orient on account of the Surroundings, [local plants] are not without some medical property or aromatic liquor . . .”.

And, following this pseudo-Asian scenario, his famous blunderous link with the Orient:

“ . . . where was found an isthmus a mile in width and about 200 long, in which, from the ship, was seen the oriental sea between the west and north. Which is the one, without doubt, which goes about the extremity of India, China and Cathay. We navigated along the said isthmus with the continual hope of finding some strait or true promontory at which the land would end toward the north in order to be able to penetrate to those blessed shores of Cathay . . .”.

Thus the source of decades of confusion. Verrazano's “isthmus” was in reality nothing more than the Outer Banks between Capes Lookout and Henry; his “oriental sea,” which would lead them to “hose blessed shores of Cathay (China)” was the Pamlico and Albermarle Sounds. Ironically, the Florentine explorer, sent by Francis I of France to find a passage to the East, entirely missed the Cheasapeake and Delaware Bays and the Hudson River.

The New World had been an impediment for Europe's commercial goals in the Orient, and many explorers dreamed of locating a passage through it which was more practical than the strait discovered by Magellan. Hence Verrazano's desire to believe that the water he saw was that of China.

What remains most baffling, though, is Verrazano's failure to attempt to reach this supposed gateway to the East, despite his report of the existence of inlets through which smaller vessels might pass. While a 100 ton ship would be ill-advised to attempt such a maneuver, Verrazano relates, a longboat would encounter little difficulty in doing so. Why such a monumental opportunity was not pursued remains unanswered, although the feasibility of a smaller vessel traversing the remaining sea may have deterred such an attempt. He may have anticipated a follow-up voyage to complete the goal. (See Sauer, Sixteenth Century North America, p54).

In the Northeast, Münster has labelled Francisca (Canada), named by Verrazano for France and Francis I, shortly before his northerly return back to Europe. Just east of Canada is an island representing the early Corte Real discoveries.

Upon reaching home, he found Francis I a prisoner of the Emperor. It was probably fear of further encounter with the Emperor that prevented Francis I from sending Verrazano back to follow up his “discovery” in the New World.

In the Atlantic Ocean, Münster has correctly located a Spanish and a Portugese standard, intended to reflect the division of the unknown world in two by the Papal Treaty of Tordesillas (1494).

The Yucatan appears as an island, an error still prevalent on printed maps for another two decades. This misconception arose from the way in which the Yucatan was first encountered by Europeans. In 1517, Diego de Velasquea, first governor of Cuba, sent Francisco Fernandez de Cordoba to search for treasure in the west. A vicious storm blew him off course, and after floundering in the Gulf for three weeks he stumbled across the exotic Yucatan. Being culturally alien to what was known there, and having been first encountered from the sea rather than from the mainland, it was mistaken for an island.

Münster has emphasized the width of the mouth of the Rio de la Plata. Even before Tierra del Fuego was reached by Magellan, Europeans exploring southward along the South American coast came across what seemed to be open ocean at 35 degrees south latitude. This was the entrance to the Plata: 250 km wide, maintaining that width for approximately 100 km, then narrowing to a width of about 50 km. It does not assume a ``normal'' river width until about 300 km upriver from where the continent first begins to veer westerly into the river's mouth. The notion of cosmographic perfection was still widely held in the sixteenth century; Africa, to which South America could have been thought a balancing counterpart, was already known to reach its southern extreme at 35 degrees south latitude. This created a coindidence of earthly geography and human tradition; it was probably widely believed that the earth should be balanced, and here a river is encountered whose mouth is so exceptionally wide as to appear as open ocean. The pioneering sailor stumbles upon this pseudo-sea at precisely the latitude the continent would be supposed to end if analogous to Africa. The seafarer who had sailed into the river, logically assuming he was rounding South America towards the (in his mind) Indian Ocean (for example, Juan Diaz de Solis), might well relate to his geographers a glorified account of the peculiar geography that had deceived him.

The general outline of America on Münster's map testifies to the inability of the pre-chronometer sailor to determine longitude nearly as accurately as latitude: east-west distances are obviously more distorted that north-south distances.

The Pacific is crude. Zipangri (Japan), still known only from Marco Polo (who had heard tales of it but had never been there), appears as a very large, north-south oriented rectangular island off the ``California'' coast. In 1540, when the map was created, two or three years would still elapse before the first known European encounter with Japan; if Portuguese mariners had already stumbled across the empire, certainly no record of it has survived. The earliest known direct European contact with Japan occurred in 1542 or 1543; Matsuda Kiichi, the Japanese historian, accepts the date of September 23, 1543, as that which saw three seamen, having approached the Orient from Portugal via the Cape of Good Hope, blown off course to their chance landing on Japanese soil. Münster, in any case, knew nothing first-hand of the long sought civilization, and had only Marco Polo's romantic lore and a few earlier Renaissance maps with which to model it.

The Venetian merchant, Polo, was also the source for Münster's belief in the complex of 7,448 islands situated between Japan and the Asian mainland. As with Japan, Polo himself never ventured there; but by their number and the description of them given Polo by his hosts, it is likely that these islands were the Philippines.

By Münster's time, direct European contact with the Philippines had been made, both by Magellan (who died there) and almost certainly by eastward bound Portuguese explorers before him. (Münster, on his map of Asia, has included the “real” Philippine island of Puloan.)

It was a result of this archipelago of 7,448 islands and Europe's underestimation of the Pacific's true vastness that pushed Japan so close to North America on Münster's map.

A large illustration of Magellan's ship, and the “Unfortunate Islands” he and his desperate crew passed on their ill-fated voyage, are shown below Japan. Their luckless path across the Pacific bypassed, though barely, islands of the Polynesian groups; these islands were rich in foods that might have sustained many of them, and particularly endowed with the sorts of plants whose citrus content would have spared them scurvey. Disease, violence, and starvation took the lives of all but 18 of the 277 members of the expedition.

Münster's remarkable map of America survives as among the earliest and most interesting of printed documents relating to America and Japan. It came at a time of cultural upheaval, synthesis, annihilation, and absorption; The half of our planet which had for so long eluded Europe was now a principal force in the shaping of the modern world.


reference: Skelton, Decorative Printed Maps, p. 40 and plate 7; Schwartz & Ehrenberg, The Mapping of America, p. 43, 45, 50; Tooley, Maps and Mapmakers, p. 112, plate 80; Nordenskiold, Facsimile Atlas, p. 23, 24, 108, 110, ill. #73; Suarez, Shedding the Veil, p. 81-85..