BENCHMARKS - Maphead - page 57

ulating with Christians, urged by excessive lust, they defiled and prostituted themselves.”
Check it out, Europe: Caribbean women are all hawt ! And, like, total sluts!
Vespucci's letters went on to be printed in no fewer than sixty editions; Columbus's
journals, only twenty-two. So Waldseemüller could be forgiven for thinking that Amerigo
was the one who deserved the naming honors. After all, Vespucci wrote that the land he'd
visited (the “New World,” he called it) “is found to be surrounded on all sides by the
ocean.” Readers like Waldseemüller got the distinct impression—which turned out to be
right—that there was a new continent out there, over the horizon. The new map may never
havereachedSpain,whereVespucciliveduntilhis1512death,soheprobablydiedwithout
knowing what his legacy would be. But what a legacy! This Renaissance rock star had
managed to get 28 percent of the earth's land area named after him— in his own lifetime .
When he drew his map, Waldseemüller extended conic projection used in the first cen-
tury by Ptolemy to the new ends of the Earth, so Europe, Africa, and the Near East look
pretty good but eastern Asia and the Americas are distorted, as if seen through a fish-eye
lens. The effect is oddly immersive as I walk toward the map; it rises out of its case to en-
gulf me on all sides like a Hunter S. Thompson hallucination. The library has spared no
expense in preservation—the case, modeled on the ones that house the Constitution and
Declaration ofIndependence over in the National Archives, cost $320,000.The map sits in
dim light behind an inch and a half of glass, the air inside having been replaced with inert
argon gas. Gold letters on the case read, “America's Birth Certificate.”
That tagline isn't just a politically canny way to raise $10 million for a single map—it's
also a very perceptive statement about maps in general. The history of the world is just as
much a history of places as it is of people—cities and nations that were born in obscurity if
not bastardy but later grew into greatness. The English comic poet E. C. Bentley once ob-
served that “ The science of geography / Is different from biography: / Geography is about
Maps, / But Biography is about Chaps.” The Waldseemüller map—in fact, the whole of
John Hébert's vault of wonders, its portolans and panoramas and powder horns—reminds
us that history is about both. It makes us wonder: if one map can change the world, what
can five and a half million do?
They have power only if we use them, of course. I wonder how many dusty drawers of
the Geography and Map Division might hold unseen treasures like the one that Father Fis-
cher found in a German castle garret. We'll never know if nobody looks. As we walk out
of the Waldseemüller exhibit, our footsteps echo on the marble floor. Today, the vast, dim
gallery that houses the world's most valuable map is, except for us, completely empty.