Cantino planisphere

• 1. Introduction

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  The Cantino planisphere is a hand-drawn Portuguese world map measuring 220 by 105 centimetres. In 1502, an agent for the Duke of Ferrara smuggled it out of Portugal and into Italy. The map still carries the name of that agent, Alberto Cantino. Why would a duke's man go to such lengths for a sheet of parchment? What did it show that Italy did not yet know? And how did an object this valuable end up, centuries later, in a place no mapmaker would have chosen for it?

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• 2. A Duke's Agent in Lisbon

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  At the start of the 16th century, Lisbon buzzed with people chasing work, glory or fortune. Undercover agents mingled among them, hunting for the secrets that Portuguese voyages carried home from remote lands. One of them was Alberto Cantino. Ercole I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, had sent him to Portugal with the stated purpose of horse trading. His quieter assignment was to collect information on the Portuguese discoveries.

  The Padrão Real stands at the center of a popular theory from the earliest studies of the map. This was the royal cartographic pattern, kept in the Armazéns da Índia. According to the theory, an official Portuguese mapmaker was ordered to copy it for Cantino. No historical evidence shows that any such order was made. The map's many mistakes count against the idea too, since a careful copy of an official standard should be accurate. A likelier explanation is that someone acquired the map in secret, soon after it was made for some nobleman or official client.

  On the 19th of November 1502, Cantino wrote to his patron, the Duke of Ferrara, and that letter survives. It tells us he paid 12 golden ducats, a considerable sum at the time. An Italian inscription on the back of the map reads: Carta de navigar per le Isole nouam trovate in le parte de India: dono Alberto Cantino al S. Duca Hercole. It translates as "Navigational chart of the islands recently discovered... in part of the Indies: from Alberto Cantino to Duke Hercole."

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• 3. Charting by Latitude

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  Astronomical navigation arrived in the second half of the fifteenth century, and it produced a new kind of chart. The Cantino planisphere is the earliest example of that type, the latitude chart. Mediterranean portolan charts were built from magnetic courses and estimated distances between places. A latitude chart instead placed each location by its latitude. Cantino's map did this only for the coasts of Africa, Brazil and India. Europe and the Caribbean Sea still followed the portolan model.

  Two circles organise the rhumb line system on the sheet. The western circle is centered on the Cape Vert islands, and the eastern circle is centered on India. Some charts use only one circle, and others use as many as three, depending on their size. Sixteen equally spaced points mark each circumference, and from them radiate the 32 classic rhumbs. The two outer circles touch at a large wind-rose in central Africa, where a fleur-de-lis marks north. Navigators used this dense mesh of lines to read and mark courses between places.

  Six scale bars graduated in Iberian leagues are scattered across the chart. Each has a variable number of sections, called logs, and together they let a navigator measure distances. Near the spot where the two circles meet, in central Africa, the sheet also carries some of its stranger images.

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• 4. Pictures and Legends

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  Venice and Jerusalem are the two cities that the mapmaker chose to portray in grand style. Illustrations on the chart are few, but each one is elaborate. The Portuguese castle of São Jorge da Mina, also known as Elmina Castle, stands on the Gold Coast of West Africa, flanked by two African towns. A lion-shaped mountain stands for the Sierra Leone range. The Tower of Babel lies on its side. In central Africa sit the mythical Mountains of the Moon, the legendary source of the Nile River. Farther south, the Table Mountain or Drakensberg range appears in South Africa.

  Along the central African coast, small crosses mark the stone pillars called padrões. Diogo Cão and Bartolomeu Dias set them up in the 1480s.

  In North Africa, the Montes Claros occupies the usual place of the Atlas Mountains. Two legends are written in this region. The one on the left reads "this is the land of King Organo, whose king is very noble and very rich". The one on the right names the "land of the King of Nubia, the king of which is continuously making war on Prester John and is a moor and a great enemy of Christians".

  Across the Atlantic, the same sheet recorded coasts that European ships had reached only a few years before.

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• 5. Cabral's Vera Cruz

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  Beside Porto Seguro, an inscription announces the finding of Vera Cruz, the first name given to Brazil. It says Pedro Alvares Cabral, "a gentleman of the household of the King of Portugal", came upon the land while commanding fourteen ships. The King had sent that fleet to Calicut. Cabral took the new coast for mainland, or terra firma. The text notes many people there, men and women, walking about unclothed. It dates the discovery to 1500.

  The Brazilian coast was the last part of the map to be drawn, and it took its final shape in three phases. The first phase set down a coastline running southeast from Golfo fremosso to Cabo Sam Jorge, then continuing south to the tip of the landmass. Cabral's fleet in 1500 would have surveyed only a small stretch of it, between the flag near the Vera Cruz inscription and the northern side of the baia de todos os santos.

  The second phase was a strip of parchment pasted in between Rio de sã franc° and Golfo fremosso. Its details would have come from the fleet of João da Nova, which reached Lisbon in September 1502. In the third phase, an island named quaresma and some names in cursive script were added to the coast.

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• 6. Greenland and Newfoundland

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  João Fernandes Lavrador and Pedro de Barcelos are thought to have made the European rediscovery of Greenland, between 1495 and 1498. Europeans knew of the island but understood little about it. While sailing toward Greenland, Lavrador made landfall on a nearby coast. Giovanni Caboto, known in English as John Cabot, also visited during the English expedition of 1498. Yet the way Greenland appears on the Cantino map suggests that its source was the Portuguese mission of Lavrador and Barcelos.

  Gaspar Corte-Real and his brother Miguel were members of the Portuguese royal household. King Manuel I sent them west to look for a Northwest Passage to Asia. The brothers visited Newfoundland in 1500 and 1501, and the map labels it Terra del Rey de Portuguall. The map credits Gaspar Corte-Real with discovering and charting the land for King Manuel I. An English expedition probably reached Newfoundland first, in 1497-98.

  South of these northern lands, the sheet shows a landmass that later maps would label in several different ways.

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• 7. The Unnamed Western Land

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  Roughly where North America lies, the map shows a peculiar landmass that ends in a peninsula labeled "C. do fim do abrill", or "Cape of the end of April". The peninsula points toward the Caribbean. Several theories try to explain it. The land has been linked to Asia, the Yucatan, Florida and Cuba. Its few defined details and names seem tied to the voyages of Columbus, Cabot and Corte-Real.

  By then, Christopher Columbus had finished three voyages to a land that he called both Cuba and Asia. John Cabot had made three voyages from Bristol under Henry VII of England. Very little was known about the third, including whether Cabot ever returned to England.

  Other maps show the same land, among them the Caverio map, the maps of Martin Waldseemüller and the Johannes Schöner globes. They label it in different ways. Terra ultra incognita means "Land beyond unknown", and Vlterius incognita terra means "Land further beyond unknown". Terra de Cvba is "Land of Cuba". Parias is a native place name taken from the Four Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci. The label Asie partis, meaning "Part of Asia", shows that some mapmakers still read the land as a piece of Asia.

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• 8. Copied Across Europe

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  Soon after the Cantino map arrived in Italy, its geography was copied into an Italian-made chart called the Canerio, or Caveri, map. In 1507, the Canerio became the main source for the newly discovered western lands on Martin Waldseemüller's highly influential wall map of the world. Rene, Duke of Lorraine, sponsored that map.

  Cantino's own map did not stay current for long. Later Portuguese mapping voyages made it obsolete within months. Even so, it mattered for relations between Portuguese and Italian traders. It gave Italians the coastline of Brazil and much of the Atlantic coast of South America, long before other nations knew that South America reached so far south. It also supplied great detail on the Indian Ocean.

  Six parchment sheets, glued together, form the old map that sat in the Ducal Library in Ferrara for about 90 years. Pope Clement VIII then transferred it to another palace, in Modena, Italy. More than two centuries later, in 1859, that palace was ransacked, and the map disappeared. The same year, Giuseppe Boni, Director of the Biblioteca Estense, found it in a butcher's store in Modena.

  The Cantino world map now rests at the Biblioteca Estense, where it remains the earliest surviving map to show Portuguese discoveries in both the east and the west.

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