Abstract
A WORK of great interest in the history of early European, cartography has recently been published by Messrs. Stevens and Sons, of Great Russell Street, and the manner in which it came to be compiled is not a little curious. One of the most famous of the early European cartographers was Johann Schöner, Professor of Mathematics at Nuremberg in the early part of the sixteenth century, He is best known now by a series of terrestrial globes which he prepared, one about 1515, another in 1520, and a third in 1533, all three of which are still preserved at Frankfort, Nuremberg, and Weimar respectively. Here, so far as cartography is concerned, students would have believed Schöner's work to have ceased, were it not for a small Latio pamphlet of four pages which existed amongst his numerous writings, and which was, in substance, a letter to a high ecclesiastical authority of Bamberg descriptive of a globe on which were marked the discoveries made during Magellan's famous circumnavigation of the globe. Only three copies of this pamphlet were known to exist. It was dated 1523, and it obviously did not refer to the globes of 1515 or 1520, for these did not contain any references to the discoveries in question. Hence it was assumed that another globe, between 1520 and 1533 had been prepared by Schöner, but no trace of this could be found, and, if in existed at all, it seemed to be lost for ever. But in 1885 the late well-known bibliographer, Mr. Henry Stevens (“of Vermont”) found in the catalogue of a Munich bookseller a facsimile of a globe which he at once recognized as the long lost work of Schöner. He promptly purchased it, and ultimately it found its way into the remarkable collection of works on early American geography and history made by Mr. Kalbfleisch, of New York, where it still is. But Mr. Stevens, who regarded it as “one of the keys to unlock the many mysteries of early American geography,” determined to reproduce Schöner's letter and globe in facsimile, and to append a translation and an introductory sketch of the early historical geography of America. While still labouring at this work he died, but his son took it up, and, aided by Mr. C. H. Coote, of the Map Department of the British Museum, has now succeeded in bringing it to a conclusion. Schöner himself was entirely indebted for his knowledge of the results of Magellan's voyage to a letter written by one Maximilianus Transylvanus, a natural son of the Cardinal Archbishop of Salzburg, and then employed about the Court of the Emperor Charles V., describing for his father the expedition in question. This pamphlet is styled “De Molvccis,” and from the descriptions here given, Schöner depicted the new portions of his globe, of in his own words, “being desirous to make some small addition to this wonderful survey of the earth, so that what appears very extraordinary to the reader may appear more likely when thus illustrated, I have been at the pains to construct this globe.” The differences between this and former globes are considerable, and mark a great advance in geographical knowledge. America, instead of being broken up into many islands, as in all earlier globes is shown as one large continent of tolerably correct shape; Florida is named for the first time in print; “the Moluccas have found a local habitation and their true places, as well as many of the real isles of the sea, while all the monsters and bogus elements of American geography are made to disappear.”
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Geographical Notes . Nature 38, 375–376 (1888). https://doi.org/10.1038/038375c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/038375c0