Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
1534
French explorer Jacques Cartier (1491-1557) makes the first of three voyages to America in
search of the Northwest Passage linking the Atlantic to the Pacific. On the second trip a year later,
he sailed up the Saint Lawrence River, hoping it was the passage to China, and landed at the Huron
city of Hochelaga, the present site of Montreal.
Geographic Voices
Jacques Cartier on the Hurons
The tribe has no belief in God that amounts to anything; for they believe in a god they call
Cud-
ouagny
, and maintain that he often holds intercourse with them and tells them what the weather will
be like. They also say that when he gets angry with them, he throws dust in their eyes. They believe
furthermore that when they die they go to the stars and descend on the horizon like the stars. Next,
they go off to a beautiful green field covered with fine trees, flowers and luscious fruits. After they
had explained these things to us, we showed them their error and informed them that their
Cud-
ouagny
was a wicked spirit who deceived them, and that there is but one God, Who is in Heaven,
Who gives us everything we need and is the Creator of all things and that in Him alone we should
believe. Also that one must receive baptism or perish in hell.
While Cartier and the later French explorers were positively enlightened when placed against
the Spanish in terms of dealing with Indians, Cartier's views are typical of the sense of cultural and
moral superiority that all Europeans carried in their dealings with the Indians. It was that sense of
superiority that made it that much simpler for successive waves of Europeans to rout the Indians
from their ancestral lands, kill most of them, and destroy the Indian way of life.
1538
First world map by Flemish geographer Gerardus Mercator (born Gerhard Kremer;
1512-1594), a student of Frisius's. This map is the first to use the names North and South America.
In 1544 during the Counter-Reformation he was declared a heretic, but influential friends spared
him death during the Inquisition. In 1569, he published a world map featuring a new type of pro-
jection of the round earth on a flat map. The Mercator Projection, featuring straight, parallel lines
of latitude, was designed to assist sailors in sailing along a fixed line and became the most widely
accepted solution to the projection problem, but it greatly exaggerates some distances and areas of
land near the poles.
1543
Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (born Mikolaj Koppernigk, 1473-1543) publishes
Of
the Revolution of Celestial Bodies
, in which he proposes a sun-centered solar system in which the
earth rotates daily on its axis. Although written much earlier, the topic was withheld by Copernicus
for fear of reprisals from the Roman Catholic Church.
1566
Philip II commissions the first detailed map of Spain.
1570
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum
(Theater of the World) by Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598), first up-
dated collection of world maps since Ptolemy's
Geography.
In the collection's introduction, Orteli-
us's friend Gerhardus Mercator for the first time uses the word
atlas
, after the Greek mythic hero
who supported the world on his shoulders, to describe a collection of maps.
1577-80
English explorer, slaver, and pirate Sir Francis Drake (circa 1540-1596) circumnavigates
the globe, the first Englishman to do so. The round-the-world voyage of the ruthless
Drake—nicknamed the Dragon by his enemies—came primarily at the expense of the Spanish and
