In 1569 Gerardus Mercator published a world map that introduced his innovative cartographic projection. Although he wanted his projection to aid navigation, this particular map was not practical for this purpose. It was too large (1.24 x 2 m), many parts of the oceans were covered with Latin text, and instructions for using his method were only a small part of the text. With beautiful ornamentation, colorful illustrations, interesting stories, and close attention to the latest discoveries of new lands, the map was better suited as a wall decoration or a teaching aid than a tool for sailors.
The Mercator projection was not the only innovation on the map. Mercator has accepted major restrictions on his map. Since the disadvantage of this projection was that the closer to the poles, the more distortion was. Therefore, in the lower left corner of the map, Mercator placed an insert depicting the region of the North Pole north of 70 degrees latitude.
This provided enough overlap with the main map that viewers could easily imagine how the two maps fit together. The previous map of the world, compiled by him together with Oronce Fine in 1530, consisted of images of two hemispheres, showing the poles, but this was not their main purpose.
Mercator map of 1538, consisting of images of two polar regions.
A 1569 Mercator map showing the northern polar regions.
Mercator died in 1594, leaving his last major project - six volumes of an atlas and history of the world - unfinished. His only surviving son Rumhold and the people of his workshop, which included his three grandchildren, collected his final materials and published them as a third volume to complement the two already published. These materials include 28 maps and the first chapter of his story. One of those maps contained a projection of the north pole. Like the 1569 map, it showed four large islands in the place where the Arctic Ocean was supposed to be. They are located in a circle around the Pole. Four large rivers flowing inward connected the world ocean with the inland sea, in which, exactly at the point of the pole, a large black rock jutted out, having a circumference of 33 nautical miles and a height to the sky. The magnetic island lies north of the Bering Strait. On one of the larger islands the inscription: "Pygmae hic habitant 4 ad summum pedes longi, quaemadmodum illi quos in Gronlandia Screlingers vocant"
Mercator. Map of the Arctic 1595.
As strange as these islands looked, they were not a product of Mercator's imagination. He had a source. It's pretty amazing that we know something about this source. Mercator read about this in a book written in the 14th century, now lost - in the travel diary of the Dutch traveler Jacob van Knooy. Knooy had two sources. He learned most of the story from an unnamed traveler who heard it from another unnamed traveler. The previously unnamed traveler is believed to have written the history now lost - Inventio Fortunatae (Happy discovery). Knooy's other source was another, now lost book - Gestae Arthuri (Arthur's Success). Mercator gave a brief explanation of these sources on the 1569 world map.
Promotional video:
Meanwhile, in England, Dr. John Dee was looking for ways to expand the British Empire (his name) across the Arctic. It was not easy to accomplish. In 1553, the charmingly named Mystery, a company and a commonwealth of merchant entrepreneurs for the discovery of new regions, possessions, islands, and unknown places (Company of Merchant Adventurers to New Lands) sent three ships in order to open the Northeast passage around Russia and Siberia to India. The captains and crews of two ships died in the cold and dark, and the third ship reached the Russian port and entered into a trade agreement with the court of Ivan the Terrible. Russian trade was lucrative enough that very few were willing to fund additional expeditions in order to die in the cold and darkness, seeking greater gain. But this fact was not enoughto stop Dee, who argued that English merchants should turn their attention to the Northwest. Dee argued that not only the Northwest Passage was pending to be discovered, but that the British had the right to own the passage and the lands around it by right of discoverers and occupation of expeditions during the time of King Arthur.
In 1577, Dee wrote to Mercator asking for more information on Knooy's descriptions. Mercator copied a large portion of Knooy's book and sent it to Dee. Unfortunately, this letter was later lost. Fortunately, Dee copied the letter into one of his secret notebooks. But this book was damaged when an angry mob, believing that Dee was an evil sorcerer, set fire to his house. I'm not making this up. Most of what we know about Knooy's travel notes and the anonymous Happy Discovery comes from Dee's damaged notebook. Mercator explained that before losing access to Knooy's book, he copied most of the recordings and translated them from Belgian into Dutch. He assured Dee that Knooy was a reliable source.
John Dee.
Koi explained that there is a mountain range in the far North that completely surrounds the North Pole at a latitude of about 78 °. The mountains are riddled with nineteen ocean channels with such strong currents that any ship entering the channel will be pulled northward with no hope of escape. Nineteen channels combine into four suction seas. One of the islands between these seas is pretty cute, two are completely uninhabited, and one is inhabited by pygmies. The province of Dark Norway (Greenland) is attached to one of the Arctic islands by a narrow isthmus. West of Dark Norway is the easternmost tip of Asia, charmingly named the Province of Darkness. Above these two provinces is a large island called Grocland, which protects them from the Retracting Seas. Some giants live in Grockland.
Grocland.
The weather is foggy and dull in the Far North, there are no trees, and the wind is too weak to grind grain, let alone save the ships that are drawn by the current to their destruction. Of course, King Arthur thought it was a bleak, barren land where rivers simply suck in just what he needed to add to his domain. In 530 he sent out armies and colonists and conquered it all. This information may have come from the lost book Arthur's Success.
In 1364, eight people came to the court of the King of Norway from the islands. They were the descendants of some of the settlers who were drawn into the Sucking Seas. Or maybe their fathers were from Belgium. This was not entirely clear in Knooy's notes, much to Dee's dismay. One of the eight was a priest carrying an astrolabe. He said he received it from an English Franciscan monk whom he met on the islands. This monk spent many years traveling to those islands and made geographic observations there with his astrolabe. The monk's description of the North confirmed what was written in the Gestae Arthuri and added more detail about the location of the canals and islands. He approached the pole as close as possible. At the top of the world, the four Retracting Seas joined together and swirled around a black magnetic island located in the center before disappearing beneath the Earth. The only people the monk met on his travels were a group of pygmies, mostly women. Later, the monk presented his observations in the form of a report to King Edward III of England. It was a book he called Inventio Fortunatae.
The priest from whom Knooy supposedly heard the monk's story had never seen "Happy Discovery" in the eye. Mercator did not clarify whether he heard the story from the priest himself or from additional intermediaries. However, Knooy had another source of information, independent of the priest. If the priest had met an English monk on his way back from the North, he would not have written about it in his report yet. And Knooy mentions that the monk made five more voyages for Edward III after writing Happy Discovery. We also have independent confirmation that the record exists. Martin Beheim's globe from 1492 and Johannes Ruysch's world map of 1507 have notes containing information from it.
Fragment of the world map 1507 by Johann Ruysch.
The whole map is in high definition.
Ruisch interpreted the nineteen canals and four parcels of land differently from Mercator. He also ignored the pygmies and filled the two islands with legendary tribes according to Herodotus.
It is believed that the cartographers of that time were simply embellishing things to fill in the empty space on their maps, but this is not the case. The best cartographers have checked all sources to find buried nuggets of information. Even the sea monsters were based on sailors' reports. The worst cartographers copied the best. Mercator drew the outlines of the Far North on his 1595 map based on the book of Jacob van Knooy. He based the outlines of the northern coast of European Russia on the reports of English merchants, authorized in accordance with an agreement with Ivan the Terrible. To depict Asia, he used descriptions made by Marco Polo and Pliny the Elder. To depict Greenland and the surrounding area, he used information from three flights of Martin Frobisher, one of the projects Dee lobbied when he wrote to Mercator. The large non-existent island of Friesland, located below Iceland and in the upper left inset, was based on a well-known book about the voyages of a Venetian family in 1380. The real crime of Renaissance cartographers was that they were so eager for information that they became trusting and uncritical. In the next century, additional information allowed cartographers to have the luxury of choosing between competing sources.additional information allowed cartographers to have the luxury of choosing between competing sources.additional information allowed cartographers to have the luxury of choosing between competing sources.
Postscript: What about Arctic pygmies? Pygmies in ancient and medieval lore were not just small people; it is said that they were one of the monstrous races that inhabit the far parts of the world. In the case of the pygmies, monstrous is not a moral judgment. The pygmies were said to be brave and organized in their age-old war with the cranes.
On his map, Mercator indicated that the pygmies of the High North were similar to the Scraelings living in Greenland. The word "Scraeling" was used to refer to Scandinavia for various immigrants from the New World - mainland Indians, people of the English county of Dorset and the Eskimos, who replaced them at the beginning of the second millennium. Kristin Seaver writes that while the exact etymology is not clear, the word Scraeling almost certainly means the translation of the word "pygmy." The Scandinavians believed that Greenland and the more western lands were either part of Asia or islands next to Asia. The geography of the time placed the pygmies deep in Asia. When the Scandinavians met the small people where they thought Asia should be, they believed they had discovered the homeland of the legendary pygmies.
Pygmies of Greenland.
Olaf Magnus describes the Greenland pygmies as short but with a big heart.
There is also modern evidence of the existence of the Arctic whirlpool. Writes about this, for example, Sibved. In his article "The Polar Whirlpool", he mentions the book by Kirill Fatyanov, THE LEGEND OF HYPERBORE.
Here are excerpts from this book that are relevant to the topic:
Tradition says: two and a half darkness (25,000) years ago, the northern polar continent was not, as it is now, buried under water and ice. It consisted, as it were, of four Islands. Tradition calls their names: White, Gold, Secret, Veliy (Great). In general, this whole land was called Orth (Wort, Art), later - Arctida, and the ancient Greeks called it Hyperborea.
The Four Islands were divided by straits leading to the inland sea. The center of this sea was exactly on the Pole. (And to this time, the legends of different peoples tell about the islands of the blessed and the four rivers of paradise.)
Although Tradition speaks of the "Islands", it was a continent, not an archipelago, that was located at the Pole. It was a single array, bounding by the shape of the land like a cross, enclosed in a circle. (And to this time, the Northern Tradition, leading its existence on Earth from the arcs, is also called the Teaching of the Closed Cross.)
This is exactly what Gerhard Mercator's maps captured Arctida.
Today's geographers are amazed at the accuracy of mercator maps, because it is simply incredible for that time. More precisely, such accuracy was not possible at all in those days.
This refers to the detail of the coastline of known continents. Thus, the Kola Peninsula, which had not yet been studied, was written out in all details. And - the most amazing thing - the 1595 map clearly shows the strait between Eurasia and America. Meanwhile, Semyon Dezhnev, a Russian Cossack, discovered it only in 1648!
It is believed that Mercator copied his maps from some very ancient images, which he kept secret from competitors. And when he died, he passed these priceless originals to his son, Rudolf Mercator. And he, continuing the work, also issued cards, and steadily signed them with the name of his father.
Mercator Map 1595.
Where did the relics of ancient eras, the knowledge of which were lost by his time, fall into the hands of Gerhard Mercator? The 16th century still found the innermost temples of the Ancient Faith, hidden in the wilderness along the coasts and islands of the northern seas. Has the fate of Mercator or his friends brought together one of the legendary white priests (white elders) - keepers of ancient secrets? Nothing is known about this. However, Mercator's Cosmography provides a detailed description of the sanctuary on the island of Rügen.
Further you can read in the primary source. Everything is very interesting there. And I want to add something else here:
Something like Mount Meru, in my opinion, tried to portray the authors of the movie "Star Wars Rogue One":
Still from the film.
Only Meru was possibly even higher (Mercator writes-to the sky).
Still from the film.
This shot was shown in general in passing: it is shown that the tower stands in the middle of a reservoir surrounded by a dam, from which water flows under the tower.
Still from the film.
Very similar to the description of Mercator.
The history of the creation of the Mercator map, translated by me from an English source
Author: i_mar_a