A closer look
Sebastian Munster’s Universal Geography
How did Europeans view the western hemisphere in 1540?
by Susan Schulten, University of Denver
This map, initially printed in 1540, captures the state of European knowledge of the western hemisphere just a few decades after the voyages of Christopher Columbus. Beginning at the southern edge, we find the “Frenum Magaliana,” straits named for Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan after his recent circumnavigation of the globe in 1522. The oversized ship at left represents the sole surviving ship of that expedition, sailing on the newly named “Mare Pacificum” (Pacific Ocean). Immediately north lies the island of “Zipangri” (Japan), part of Marco Polo’s description of a vast archipelago of 7448 islands that lay east of China. And by representing North America as surrounded by ocean, Munster’s map implicitly rejected contemporary beliefs that this land mass was the western edge of Asia.
At the eastern edge of the map, we find a fantastical representation of cannibalism in what is now Brazil. Off the coast flies the Portuguese flag in the southern Atlantic, while the rival Spanish flag stands in the Caribbean. These flags reflect the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, which divided control of the lands in the western hemisphere between these two empires. Notice that Munster connected North and South America by a narrow isthmus, indicating the recent exploration of what is now Panama by Vasco Nunez de Balboa in 1519. Further north in what is now Mexico, “Temistitan” marks the site where Hernan Cortes invaded and destroyed the Aztec capital before establishing Mexico City.
Perhaps the most striking feature of the map—to American eyes—is the strangely shaped continent of North America. This distortion is a crucial clue to understanding contemporary European beliefs and aspirations. In the earliest decades of the sixteenth century, explorers had focused on areas further south in search of a passage to the Pacific, leaving North America largely neglected. But the discovery of an enclosed Gulf of Mexico and a continuous neck of land between Mexico and South America shifted attention north. In response, the French king sent Giovanni de Verrazzano to chart the coast of North America. Verrazzano found no such passage, but while sailing around Pimlico Sound in North Carolina he believed that he had discovered a body of water to the far west, beyond which was the sea that led to “Cathay” (China). Munster mapped this description by representing North America as having an isthmus at its midsection, where the yellow and red shaded lands meet.
Munster’s map circulated widely, effectively publicizing the French explorations of North America and the speculation that an easy route across land to the Pacific existed somewhere along the Atlantic Coast. That hope of a “Northwest Passage” lasted for centuries, finally disproven by the travels of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in the expedition of 1803-1806 across the American Northwest. That wild error on Munster’s map, then, indicates that Europeans of the sixteenth centuries were largely interested in what lay beyond North America. This preoccupation would influence early settlements along the Atlantic Coast, which were designed as footholds for the ongoing search for a route to Asia.