This is the much sought-after Northwest Passage (to the north of America) and Northeast Passage (over Asia). Years later, the gold and glory-seeking conquistador Hernando Coronado ploughed through the region with a massive army sacking several Zuni Pueblos (generally associated with Cibola) and a city on the Great Plains known as Quivira, but failed to find the gold he sought.įar to the north an open Arctic Sea passage winds its way around the globe. When navigators failed to discover Antilla in the Atlantic, legends pushed the Seven Cities further west into unexplored lands north of Mexico. They prayed to god and were granted a refuge in the form of a magical paradise in the Atlantic where each bishop established a mighty city. The legend describes how when the Moors invaded Porto in the early 8th century, the city's seven bishops took all of their wealth and fled to the sea. The origin of the Seven Cities may connect to legends of Antilla, a mythic island that appears on some early portolan charts of the Atlantic and even appears here on Ortelius's map at the center of the Atlantic as Sept Cites (Seven Cities). The identification of this region as Anian persisted until the late 18th century when more comprehensive exploration of the Pacific Northwest spearheaded by Captain James Cook shed more light on the region.Ĭities of Gold and other Wonderous PlacesĪlso in the North America, several wonderous cities appear, among them Quivara (Quivira), Cibola (Ceuola), Tiguex (Teguayo), Totonte, Axa, and Granata – these are known in aggregate as the Seven Cities of Gold. This error was followed by numerous subsequent cartographers including Zaltieri, Mercator, and of course, Ortelius. Polo's description was vague enough that the cartographer Giacomo Gastaldi transposed in to the northwest coast of American on his world map of 1562. This was in fact the Gulf of Tonquin, near modern day Vietnam, which then was referred to as Anian. Polo described a Chinese province named Ania located on a large gulf. At this time no European navigator had explored these extreme Arctic seas but again, cartographers turned to Marco Polo. Similarly, the land of Anian is identified in the far northwestern part of American in what might today be considered a proto-Alaska. Attempting to reconcile the 1532 Polo geography with actual discoveries in the East Indies, cartographers relocated 'Beach', 'Lucach', and 'Maletur' were further south and attached them to the Southern Continent. This is probably related to a printing error in the 1532 edition of Polo's Travels wherein Java Minor appeared disproportionally gigantic. All three locations appear in Polo's Travels, but where Polo was describing places in Java, later cartographers ascribed them to the speculative southern continent. Among these are a number of identified lands in Terra Australis, including 'Beach', 'Lucach', and 'Maletur'. Much of the more notable speculative geography here relates to interpretations of Marco Polo's Travels. Many explorers in the 16th and 17th centuries sought the Great Southern Continent, including Quiros, Drake, and Cook, but Antarctica itself was not truly discovered until Edward Bransfield and William Smith sighted the Antarctic Peninsula in 1820. It was thought, based upon the writings of Aristotle, that the globe was a place of balances and thus geographers presumed the bulk of Eurasia must be counterbalanced by a similar landmass in the Southern Hemisphere, just as, they argued, the Americas counterbalanced Africa and Europe. Long before the discovery of Antarctica, the southern continent, supposedly capping the South Pole, was speculated upon by European geographers of the 16th and 17th centuries. The map exhibits a host of striking features, but perhaps none stand out more than the enormous continent massing at the base of the map identified as Terra Australis Nondum Cognita (Southern Land Not Known). Terra Australis Nondum Cognita or the Speculative Southern Continent In compiling this map Ortelius drew on the best cartography available, including Gerard Mercator's map of 1569, Giocomo Gastaldi's 1561 World Map, Diego Gutierrez's portolan of the Atlantic, as well as other works by Sebastian Cabot, Jodocus Hondius, Orontius Finaeus, Petrus Plancius, Gemma Frisius, Laurentz Fries, and more. The map embraces the entirety of the known world and, although it may seem wildly erroneous by most modern standards, it was incredibly sophisticated at the time of its publication. The map was published in Ortelius', Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, considered to be the first modern published atlas. One of the most iconic maps of all time, this is Abraham Ortelius's 1592 map of the world, Typus Orbis Terrarum, here in the premier state of the 3rd edition.
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