BENCHMARKS - Maphead - page 54

who love maps in here. It's how to get the other people in here, the ones who don't even
know what a map is.”
Pam van Ee, one of John Hébert's map history specialists, tells me that one of the lib-
rary's biggest influxes of congressional staffers comes at four every Friday afternoon, as
weekend hikers wander into the collection looking for a trail map. This shocks me even
more than the idea of a congressman visiting the map division only to check on public
school locations in his district. Here we have the most monumental map collection in the
history of the world, one that makes the library at Alexandria look like a bookmobile, and
we're using it to appease PTA moms and help Capitol Hill staffers see the Blue Ridge
Mountains? It seems like a waste of an almost sacred resource, like gargling with Commu-
nion wine. But I reconsider after a moment. Maybe that's the power of this collection, the
factthatsomanypeoplecanfindexactlywhattheyneedhere,nomatterwhattheirinterest.
It shows, above all, the versatility of maps, and how we all rely on them in different ways.
The greatest cartographic treasure in the Library of Congress actually sits a block north
of John Hébert's vault, in the grand exhibition gallery of the library's opulent Thomas Jef-
ferson Building. In 2001, the library paid a German prince a whopping $10 million (half
allocated by Congress and half from private donors) for the only surviving copy of a 1507
world map by a cartographer named Martin Waldseemüller.
Why did the so-called Waldseemüller map command a price of almost ten times what
any other map had ever fetched at auction? For one thing, the map was believed lost for
centuries; ofanoriginalprintrunofonethousand,itseemedthatnotasinglecopyhadsur-
vived. Some geographers even claimed that the much-ballyhooed map had never existed.
“ No lost maps have been sought for so diligently as these,” proclaimed the Royal Geo-
graphical Society. “The honor of being their lucky discoverer has long been considered as
the highest possible prize . . . in the field of ancient cartography.”
That prize was finally claimed in 1901 by Joseph Fischer. Father Fischer was a Jesuit
scholar researching early Viking navigation when he happened to come across a map folio
in the south tower garret of Wolfegg Castle, near the German-Swiss border. As he paged
through the pristine map sheets, Fischer realized he had unearthed a lost treasure. The map
depicts a Western Hemisphere divided into two continents, north and south, separated by
a narrow strait and the Caribbean Sea. Westward, there's a vast ocean separating this new
continentfrom(arathersketchilydefinedversionof)easternAsia.Andinthenorthernpart
of modern-day Argentina was inscribed one fateful word: “America.”
These are familiar sights on a world map today, but in 1507, they weren't just unexpec-
ted—they were revolutionary. Christopher Columbus had gone to his grave the year be-
fore still convinced he had visited the East Indies on his four voyages, but here was a vast
new continent stretching almost from pole to pole between Europe and Asia. Europeans
wouldn'tglimpsethePacific acrosstheIsthmusofPanamaforanotherfiveyears,yetthere
it is on the map. The western coast of South America hadn't been explored at all yet, but