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From Sea-Serpents to Science

The Editor Visits the Historical Map Collection

.N JULY 12, 1493, there was published in Nuremberg
a mappa immdi, or world map, illustrating the Liber
Crovicariuvi. It is one of those maps in the Ptolemaic
tradition, with all the fabulous medieval apparatus of sea-ser¬
pents, "wind-boys," six-armed men, twelve-fingered men, her¬
maphrodites and Cyclops. The known world of Europe, Africa
and Asia is shown, lapped by a billowly ocean.

No sooner was this map published than it was out of date. A
few months before, Columbus had returned from his first voyage,
bringing to Europe news of exotic lands across the Western Sea.
The Asia he thought he had reached was in fact a brave new
world, thus bestowing on the Nuremberg map the doubtful
honor of being the last that could ever be printed out of ancient
ignorance. The six Indians who returned with him and cast them¬
selves at the feet of the Catholic Sovereigns, Indians with neither
too many nor too few arms, fingers and eyes, relegated to the
books of tall stories Othello's "men whose heads do grow beneath
their shoulders," and all their fabulous kin.

There seems to have been a pause in the printing of world maps,
while the cartographers absorbed the reports of the explorers. At
least no known printed map, prior to that of M. G. Contarini
engraved by Roselli in 1506, gives any representation of the newly