The Inhabited Universe

Sometime around the year 1500, a Spanish mariner named Juan de la Cosa, who had sailed on the second and third westward voyages of Christopher Columbus, created a chart of the Atlantic basin, including much of the Atlantic coast of the Western Hemisphere. The details are incorrect, at least in comparison to later maps of the area. But La Cosa understood, in a way that modern satellites cannot, that one can use a map to do more than present certain geographical forms. Near the western edge, he inserted a small picture of St. Christopher carrying the baby Jesus Christ on his shoulders over a portion of the mainland beyond the Caribbean. The device served three possible functions. First, he used the image to illustrate Columbus’ central role in introducing Christianity to the presumptively heathenish natives of the Americas. Second, he obscured geographical information that he might have known, perhaps to keep some information secret so that his patrons could take advantage of it before others. (Other cartographers of the sixteenth century did the same thing, presumably to keep their rivals at bay.¹) And third, the image hid his imperfect knowledge of part of the hemisphere. La Cosa’s map, then, revealed not only his geographic knowledge but also perhaps his politics, an observation that will come as no surprise to historians who have benefited from the insights of the late cartographic historian J. B. Harley.²

Toby Lester’s wonderful Fourth Part of the World is less obviously concerned with the politics of cartography than with telling the story of a great map: Martin Waldesmüller’s world map of 1507, the earliest known to use the name “America” in a depiction of the Western Hemisphere. In Lester’s hands, the rediscovery of the map—which had disappeared from sight for almost four centuries—becomes the centerpiece of an often-riveting narrative, punctuated with tales about the efforts of medieval and early modern European scholars to understand the shape of the Earth and to plot its parts, as can be seen in the many maps (including La Cosa’s) dispersed through the text. He interweaves moderns into the narrative too, including the scholars who found the map and came to realize what it meant. Their moment of discovery, which took place at the dawn of the twentieth century, helps to confirm the astonishing achievement of the map’s creators, who had pieced together disparate information to carve twelve wood blocks, which could be used by printers to create a large map of the world. Indeed, since the map’s creators soon moved on to other projects, perhaps the modern finders had greater enthusiasm than the original creators. They certainly thought they had something valuable: on the occasion of its 400^th anniversary in 1907, a London map dealer put it up for sale for $300,000, the equivalent of about $8,000,000 today. (It found no immediate buyers.) The map, for those who are interested, is now on permanent display in the Library of Congress, which has owned it since its ceremonial transfer by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany on April 30, 2007.

But while Lester tells the tale of the map’s creation and rediscovery in great detail, this former editor of the Atlantic Monthly has really written a history of the centuries-long European fascination with depicting the world in two dimensions. He brings the reader into a bubbling intellectual ferment populated by inquisitive popes and tireless scholars. He explains the dominating power of the so-called T-O maps, which organized the pre-1492 world known to Europeans into three parts—Asia, Europe, and Africa—and placed Jerusalem at the center. This conception of the world hinged on religion and politics as much as anything else: the center had to fit the Christian view of reality; the terrestrial regions...