Posts Tagged ‘Mercator’
“It’s a matter of perspective”*…
A map’s most basic assumption is a question of orientation (or persective, if you will). For most of us, “up” on a map is north… but it needn’t be– and in Australia, it often isn’t…
Perhaps more impactfully, there’s another matter of perspective: the question of a map’s projection (of areas on a sphere onto a plane). A couple of years ago, (R)D featured The True Size (source of the image at the top), which noted that…
It is hard to represent our spherical world on flat piece of paper. Cartographers use something called a “projection” to morph the globe into 2D map. The most popular of these is the Mercator projection.
Every map projection introduces distortion, and each has its own set of problems. One of the most common criticisms of the Mercator map is that it exaggerates the size of countries nearer the poles (US, Russia, Europe), while downplaying the size of those near the equator (the African Continent). On the Mercator projection Greenland appears to be roughly the same size as Africa. In reality, Greenland is 0.8 million sq. miles and Africa is 11.6 million sq. miles, nearly 14 and a half times larger…
Maps are in the news again, and for exactly that reason. As the estimable Frank Jacobs reports in Big Think, The African Union is arguing that the Mercator projection distorts the continent, both in size and global attention…
On a world map in the Mercator projection, Russia appears larger than Africa. In fact, Africa (11.7 million sq mi, 30.4 million km2) is nearly twice as large as Russia (6.6 million sq mi, 17.1 million km2). Africa has finally had enough.
“(Mercator) is the world’s longest misinformation and disinformation campaign, and it just simply has to stop,” Moky Makura, executive director of advocacy group Africa No Filter, told Reuters. The group champions the introduction of the Equal Earth projection, which aims to give Africa its magnitudinal due.
The African Union (AU) — the association bringing together all of Africa’s 55 countries — has joined Correct the Map, a campaign that urges national governments and international organizations such as the UN or the World Bank to replace Mercator with Equal Earth [here]…
… “Maps are not neutral,” Fara Ndiaye, the co-founder of Speak Up Africa, told The Washington Post. “They were never meant to be. They shape how we learn, how we imagine power, how we see ourselves.”
But, as Jacobs notes, the switch could be tricky…
In 1569, Flemish mapmaker Geert De Cremer — known by his Latinized name as Gerardus Mercator — introduced a map projection that revolutionized navigation. Simply put: a straight line on a Mercator map is a straight line at sea.
That’s not as obvious as it might seem. If you flatten a three-dimensional object, such as the Earth, onto a two-dimensional surface, like a map, you’ll inevitably create some distortion.
Mercator’s radical solution was to reduce directional distortion to zero: His projection maintains accurate angles and directions. That so-called conformal map projection made life (a little bit) easier for the ships swarming out all over the world in the Age of Sail.
But that decision came with a trade-off: It grossly inflated the size of land masses closer to the poles…
… traditions are hard to break. Case in point: The AU itself is still using Mercator for some of the maps on its websites. But secondly, and most importantly, maps aren’t about fairness; they’re about function. Despite its advanced age, the Mercator projection has an in-built advantage over most others.
Mercator’s rectangular grid wasn’t just instrumental for 19th-century whaling vessels tracking their prey; it’s just as useful for 21st-century digital cartography. All those straight angles make Mercator the projection of choice for zoomable maps…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Africa wants its true size on the world map,” from @bigthink.com.
See also: “The True Size of Africa” (an inspiration for The True Size)
* popular idiom
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As we scrutinize scale, we might spare a thought for Joseph Nicollet; he died on this date in 1843. A geographer, cartographer, astronomer, and mathematician, he is best known for mapping the Upper Mississippi River basin during the 1830s.
Nicollet’s maps were among the most accurate of the time, correcting errors made by Zebulon Pike, and they provided the basis for all subsequent maps of the American interior. They were also among the first to depict elevation by hachuring and the only maps to use regional Native American placenames.
Nicollet is memorialized in the names of several places in the region he explored, including Nicollet Island, Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis, Nicollet County, and the city of Nicollet, all located in Minnesota.
“If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.”*…
René Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy, was furiously condemned by his contemporaries. Why did they fear him? Sandrine Parageau explains…
The French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) is generally presented as one of the founders of modern Western philosophy and science, the man who made reason the principle of the search for truth, and who formulated the cogito, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ His assertion of mind-body dualism has given rise to a great number of objections over time, from those of 17th-century theologians to those of 20th-century feminists. In France, even though the decision of the 1792-95 National Convention to transfer Descartes’s remains to the Pantheon in Paris was not followed through, the philosopher is nonetheless regarded as ‘un grand homme’, a national hero, and being labelled ‘Cartesian’ is still today a compliment that emphasises one’s common sense, good judgment and methodical use of reason.
Yet Descartes was not always the undisputed champion of reason that he is today. In 17th-century England and the Netherlands, he was publicly and repeatedly accused of being a fraud and of lying to his readers so as to manipulate them into becoming his disciples. Of course, as one would expect, many intellectual and scientific objections were raised by his contemporaries against Descartes’s philosophy. But those ad hominem allegations were of a different nature altogether: they implied that the French philosopher resorted to well-crafted and dishonest strategies to make his readers ignorant, and therefore gullible, with the aim of making them submit to his control. Thus, according to those critics, the founder of modern science was, in truth, a purveyor of ignorance.
Such an accusation was made for example by the Protestant scholar and theologian Meric Casaubon (1599-1671 [a classicist and the first translators of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius into English]), a Geneva-born clergyman of the Church of England, in a long manuscript letter on ‘general learning’ written in 1668, in which he deplores what he perceives as the growing ignorance of his contemporaries. In this text, Casaubon accuses Descartes of deliberately encouraging his readers to make themselves ignorant by urging them to renounce their beliefs and forget all the knowledge that they have previously acquired: ‘a man must first strip himself of all that he has ever known, or believed.’
This accusation against the champion of rationalism may seem paradoxical at first, but it should not come as a complete surprise: if Descartes did not praise ignorance as such, and certainly not as an end in itself, he did encourage his readers to get rid of all their previous opinions, prejudices and false knowledge, as he himself had done after realising the uncertainty of the knowledge he had been taught as a child. Indeed, in the Discourse on Method (1637), Descartes relates how he initially loved philosophy, theology, poetry and mathematics, which he had been taught at the prestigious Collège Royal de La Flèche, before he became aware of the variety of opinions and the pervasiveness of error, which made him doubt all his knowledge and beliefs. In the Meditations (1641), a few years after the Discourse, Descartes further explains that, in the face of such doubt and uncertainty, he decided to get rid of all the opinions he had formed or acquired in order to rebuild science and knowledge on a firm basis. This experience of ‘radical’ or ‘hyperbolical’ doubt, as it has later been called, which results in the rejection of all knowledge, implying a form of self-induced ignorance, was unsurprisingly construed as an extreme stance by 17th-century commentators, and we may understand how it could be interpreted as a promotion of complete ignorance…
[Parageau unpacks Casaubon’s critique…]
… The 17th-century manipulation techniques here described by Casaubon are strikingly similar to what we now call ‘gaslighting’, a form of emotional and psychological abuse that leads the victim to question their own cognitive faculties and sometimes even their very sanity. As a matter of fact, the Dutch scholar and theologian Martin Schoock (1614-1669), Descartes’s contemporary, had, even more clearly than Casaubon and 25 years earlier, accused Descartes’s ‘new philosophy’ of leading to mental disorder, because choosing ignorance, according to Schoock in his Admirable Method (1643), amounts to deliberately putting off the light of reason in one’s mind: ‘A grown man who forgets everything is ignorant of everything, and where there is ignorance of everything, there is mental disorder.’ (My translation.)
As this passage makes clear, Schoock also thought that Descartes’s radical doubt could not but result in complete ignorance – Descartes’s philosophy was therefore a mere tool devised to spread ignorance. This call for radical doubt, as Schoock understood it, was based on the Cartesian idea that certain and evident truth can come only from within oneself. The French philosopher had allegedly ‘waged a war on books and reading’ and encouraged laziness, especially among young people, who were invited to spend all day lying down and ‘meditating’, in other words doing nothing. Descartes’s victims, Schoock adds, were primarily less-educated or naive people, who fell more readily for his deceptive arguments as they were dazzled by his reputation and influence. Indeed, the example of Descartes’s alleged use of ignorance also reveals the insidious domination of the intellectual elite over less-educated people. Thus, for Schoock as for Casaubon, the aim of Descartes’s so-called philosophy was to turn ignorant people into disciples and ensure their obedience.
If we are to believe Casaubon and Schoock, Descartes’s alleged manipulation was fairly successful, and a great number of people joined ‘the Cartesian sect’. So how come Descartes could so easily dupe his contemporaries? One answer might be that his deception did not rely on lying, but on the more strategic use and abuse of doubt. Doubt is indeed more subtle than crude lies, and therefore more efficient, provided the audience who is being manipulated is not entirely ignorant at first (otherwise, lies would work just as well), yet not educated or sagacious enough to be able to detect and expose the deception straight away. The efficiency of doubt as a strategy may also reside in its versatility. Doubt is indeed both an epistemic virtue, or the first step on the path to truth (the philosopher is always initially a doubter, someone who questions what they have been taught or what seems self-evident), and an epistemic vice, as it can lead to destabilisation and even dissolution of truth and knowledge altogether when it is excessive or misplaced…
… The condemnation of Descartes by Casaubon and Schoock should also be seen as the manifestation of a desperate effort to resist change in the intellectual context that led to the emergence of modern science. The conservative Casaubon feared and lamented the coming destruction of traditional knowledge, which he believed was brought forth by an undue insistence on method to the detriment of learning itself. One must admit that Cartesianism is indeed obsessed with method – Descartes’s famous Discourse is evidence enough. Moreover, Descartes’s call for the rejection by each individual of all their knowledge and opinions was not only interpreted as a means to get power over those who would make themselves ignorant, but also as the programmed extinction of established knowledge, which would give way to something new and therefore suspicious. Schoock shared those preoccupations but was probably even more worried about the psychological consequences of Descartes’s philosophy on his followers and the larger public if ever it managed to spread, which he seriously feared because the mere ‘novelty’ of this philosophy made it attractive to the ignorant multitude. Surprising as it may seem, Schoock’s fears about the sanity of Cartesians were not entirely unjustified. Indeed, if the allegation that Descartes deliberately produced ignorance to control people can be easily dismissed, the claim that his philosophy was likely to lead to madness is more convincing.
Most specialists of Descartes’s philosophy have ignored the affective experience described in the Discourse and the Meditations to focus instead on the order of reason in those texts. Radical doubt and the cogito have thus been interpreted as literary and rhetorical devices, or mere fables (the word is used by Descartes himself in the Discourse). They are generally seen as fictions or thought experiments, rather than as a cognitive process that Descartes actually experienced. If the autobiographical and emotional dimension of self-induced ignorance has been neglected so far, it might be because this aspect does not match the overarching interpretation of Cartesianism as the rule of reason. Descartes urged people to reject all their opinions and knowledge only as a temporary precondition to accessing truth, not as a permanent state. But still, he did encourage self-induced ignorance.
The epistemic anxiety that followed was described by Casaubon and Schoock, as mentioned above. But the origin of the search for truth is emotionally charged as well, as it is grounded in disillusionment and existential despair following the discovery that one was taught erroneous opinions as a child and was therefore deceived. This painful discovery gives rise to the need for purification through the rejection of one’s opinions and withdrawal from the world. The emotional impact of the search for truth is attested in Adrien Baillet’s late 17th-century biography of Descartes, which precisely describes Descartes’s physical and psychological distress.
As Tristan Dagron argues in his book Pensée et cliniques de l’identité (2019), or ‘Thoughts and Treatments of Identity’, the experience that Descartes relates in the First Meditation, where he describes the need for the purification of his mind, can be interpreted as a reappropriation of three dreams that he had in November 1619, which left him confused and mentally disturbed as he was confronted with radical doubt about the distinction between dreaming and waking. When he narrates those dreams, Baillet talks of Descartes’s violent agitations, exhaustion, despair and ‘enthusiasm’, some form of divine inspiration and madness (hence also Descartes’s association with religious sects by his opponents). Dagron shows that those dreams were a traumatic experience for Descartes, which is echoed in the First Meditation and its presentation of radical doubt.
The emotionally unsettling confrontation with radical doubt and madness should be acknowledged as the starting point of the search for truth in what is commonly hailed today as a radically rationalist, emotion-free system of thought – perhaps a consequence of Michel Foucault’s influential reading of the Meditations as a violent and successful attempt at muzzling madness, or a ‘coup de force’, in his book Madness and Civilization (1961). Thus, Casaubon and Schoock were right in arguing that radical doubt implied epistemic anxiety and madness, but madness is not rejected by Descartes – on the contrary, it is embraced and then healed, so to speak, by his philosophy. This might actually be the true reason why Descartes is indeed the founder of modern Western science and philosophy…
“The French Liar,” from @sparageau.bsky.social in @aeon.co.
* René Descartes
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As marshall our marbles, we might send magical birthday greetings to John Dee, the mathematician, astronomer, and geographer who was a consultant to Elizabeth I– and who was born on this date in 1527. Dee was a translator of Euclid, and a friend of both Gerardus Mercator and Tycho Brahe; he revolutionized navigation by applying geometry; and he coined the word “Brittannia” and the phrase “British Empire.” He had a tremendous impact on architecture and theater– and was the model for Shakespeare’s Prospero.
“So how come such a significant philosopher– one of very few in a country then considered an intellectual backwater– barely features in British history books? Because of his notorious links with magic” (observed BBC’s Discover). Dee was indeed involved (most heavily, toward the end of his life) in the Hermetic Arts: alchemy, astrology, divination, Hermetic philosophy and Rosicrucianism (the Protestant answer to the Jesuits, which Dee founded). Perhaps most (in)famously, Dee put a hex on the Spanish Armada, a spell widely credited at the time for the misfortunes that befell the Iberian fleet (which readers may recall).
In a way that presaged Isaac Newton, Dee’s work spanned the world’s of science and magic at just the point that those world’s began to separate.
“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance”*…
In 1945, in The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper described “the paradox of tolerance“…
The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato.
Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal…
Mark Manson offers a critique…
… Popper proposed the Paradox of Tolerance to explain why a German public full of otherwise good people allowed Hitler to come to power and commit so many atrocities. Since then, the Paradox of Tolerance has survived and has occasionally become a talking point in discussions about social justice. The idea is that it’s okay to be a piece of shit to someone because they, too, are a piece of shit.
But the problem is that, most of the time, it’s not crystal clear what defines “tolerance” and “intolerance.”… Like most thought experiments inspired by Hitler, it doesn’t really work when you don’t have someone who is so obviously evil to unite against. As a result, the definition of an intolerant person has become so muddied and loose to the point where it might as well mean, “someone who believes things that make me feel bad.”…
The problem with Popper’s reasoning is that it quickly devolves into a cascade of dickish, self-righteous behavior.
Let’s say Person B decides that Person A’s behavior is intolerant and a threat to society. Person B then decides that it is morally correct to be intolerant of Person A and treat her like crap.
But then, Person C strolls by and notices Person B being a totally intolerant assface to Person A. Person C then decides that it’s morally correct to be actively intolerant of Person B. But then Person D strolls by, and notices Person C being horribly intolerant towards Person B…
You can see where this is going. And if you ever doubt the realism of this scenario, I invite you to spend a few hours on Twitter some time.
The irony is that in order to practice tolerance, you must be willing to sit with things that upset you or make you uncomfortable.
Yet, if your adopted ethic is that no one should ever be upset or uncomfortable, then you make any sort of tolerance impossible…
– source
I imagine that Popper might respond first that, of course, Manson is right that the definition of intolerance is slippery and that most varieties of unshared disapproval are best tolerated– indeed, that’s the essence of an open society.
But I suspect that he’d further argue that it is possible, well shy of Hitlerian extremes, to identify the intent (beyond disapproving) to debar– to abridge the fundamental rights of others. Even then, of course, it’s tricky– especially in social/cultural periods in which xenophobia and othering are in the ascendant, when difference isn’t perceived to be simply difference or disagreement, but a threat.
Still (presuming again to channel Popper), if one values an open society, one must practice the art (which is to say that it’s not a science) of protecting against this extreme, imperious intolerance– lest it squelch all alternatives to itself. This was the challenge taken up by the Founding Fathers in crafting the U.S. Constitution. And as they observed (but we tend to forget) it’s an on-going challenge. They imagined that the Constitution would be continually revised, both to reflect “learning” (what worked and what didn’t– practical learning) and to reflect changing circumstances and culture (the social and cultural learning/development on which, as Humanists, they were counting).
It’s hard… but then, as my old man used to say, that’s why they call it a paradox…
* Karl Popper
With apologies, another “hiatus notice”: I’m headed into three days of very intense meetings, so (R)D will be off until Friday…
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As we deal with dichotomies, we might spare a cartographically-constructive thought for one of history’s most impactful scientific artists: Gerardus Mercator; he died on this date in 1594. The most renown cartographer of his time, he created a world map based on a new projection– the Mercator Projection— on which parallels and meridians are rendered as straight lines spaced so as to produce at any point an accurate ratio of latitude to longitude and sailing courses of constant bearing are represented as straight lines, an approach still employed in nautical charts used for navigation. He also introduced the term “atlas” for a collection of maps.
While he is most esteemed as the foremost geographer of his day, Mercator was also an accomplished engraver, calligrapher and maker of globes and scientific instruments. And he studied theology, philosophy, history, mathematics, and magnetism.
“Nature is the source of all true knowledge”*…
Jonathan Keats on why– and how– clocks that use nature to measure time can reintegrate people into the environment and counteract the calamities of the Anthropocene…
In his studio on the east coast of Vancouver Island, the master clockmaker Phil Abernethy is crafting a timepiece that will be calibrated in a manner that no horologist has ever attempted. It won’t show the minutes and hours of an ordinary human day. Instead, his clock will display time as experienced by some of the oldest trees on the planet.
Using techniques he’s honed over a lifetime, Abernethy will machine the gears by hand in traditional materials such as steel and brass. But the pendulum will respond to the forest: When trees grow quickly, the hours will advance more rapidly; more lethargic growth will result in a slower tempo. Over centuries, the long-term fate of the canopy will be registered on a calendar that may deviate from the Gregorian date by decades or more.
Abernethy has been commissioned to fabricate the arboreal clock by the Nevada Museum of Art. Standing 12 feet tall, the clock will be the first physical manifestation of an environmental timekeeping project I have been developing over the past decade. Some of the clocks in the project respond to rivers; Abernethy’s enlists a stand of bristlecone pine trees in Nevada’s Great Basin as living timekeepers.
Fluctuations in the bristlecones’ growth rate, affected by environmental conditions ranging from local rainfall to planetary climate change, will be measured by analyzing the thickness of tree rings in microcores retrieved from the mountain each year. These data will be used to determine the center of gravity for the pendulum, which will swing slower or faster depending on the tree ring thickness. Though the clock face will display time in the usual way, it won’t serve as a mechanism for human planning — a technology to impose order on the environment for our convenience — but rather to pace our lives to match the lived reality of other organisms.
Abernethy’s arboreal clock, in other words, upsets more than just the standards of horology. The environmental calamity known as the Anthropocene is a consequence of a worldview in which all that is not human is construed as a resource — even time itself. Other life forms are going extinct at an unprecedented rate, laid waste at a pace set by the world economy. Factory farming and logging, fossil fuel and plastics production, mining, human construction and infrastructure — all disregard the timing with which nonhuman systems emerge, ebb and flow. The globalized logic of industry, with its planetary supply chain, must keep up with human demand, turning civilization itself into a manifestation of logistics.
Our mastery of the world is a mastery of time. And as every industrialist knows, mastery of time requires the precision of a master clock to provide a temporal standard against which everything can be measured and controlled. Whether regulated by the swing of a pendulum or the oscillations of a strontium atom — as the most advanced atomic clocks are today — the master clock operates without an external feedback mechanism. The clock has become the ultimate authority. To question it would be tantamount to questioning modernity.
The design of Abernethy’s arboreal clock may be novel, but the underlying ideas are ancient. They predate pendulums and gearwork, originating in an era when people observed time in relation to other beings in order for all to flourish together. Ancient but mostly forgotten, these ideas are urgently needed today. Whatever practical use it might have, the arboreal clock is intended primarily to serve as a philosophical instrument…
…
… Humankind appears to be the only species to have contrived clocks that count without reference to something outside of themselves. We also appear to be the only species to have use for these contraptions, to use time in this peculiar way. (Mumford astutely described clocks as “power machinery whose ‘product’ is seconds and minutes.”)
All life depends on timekeeping. But nonhuman life treats time as a mixed medium: entangled with the environment, dependent on other organisms…
…
… Near the peak of Mt. Washington in Nevada’s Great Basin, which rises more than 11,600 feet above sea level, the bristlecone pines are as scraggly as the tree in “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” Until very recently, bristlecones didn’t grow at this elevation. To walk down the slope is to stroll through time, eventually reaching trees that are several thousand years old and as solid as sculpted stone.
Over the past decade, I have gotten to know these trees, visiting with members of the Long Now Foundation, the organization that stewards part of the mountaintop and has partnered with me on the clock at the Nevada Museum of Art. By observing the trees and their embodied experience of time, I have been able to see the inadequacy of my wristwatch.
The trees sensitized me to the time reckoning of other life forms, both plants and animals. They attuned me to the time kept collectively in living systems such as rivers, where the flow rate is affected by the melting of glaciers and the eagerness of beavers, not to mention the unquenchable thirst of industrial agriculture. By gearing the flow of time to match the flow of the Susitna or Matanuska — as I have done in partnership with the Anchorage Museum — fluvial clocks can integrate people into local watersheds.
An arboreal clock can likewise integrate people into the forest. Or to be more accurate, it can reintegrate people into their ecosystems, counteracting the human denaturing of the Anthropocene…
Eminently worth reading in full: “A Clock In The Forest,” from @jonathonkeats in @NoemaMag @longnow.
* Leonardo da Vinci
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As we think about time, we might also contemplate natural space, and spare a thought for Abraham Ortelius; he died on this date in 1598. A cartographer, geographer, and cosmographer, he created the first modern atlas, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World)– “the book that invented the world.”
Ortelius is generally considered one of the founders (with Gemma Frisius and Gerardus Mercator) of the Netherlandish school of cartography and geography. He was an important geographer of Spain during the age of discovery– and the first person proposing that the continents were joined before drifting to their present positions.
“If the map doesn’t agree with the ground the map is wrong”*…
Maps from hundreds of years ago can be surprisingly accurate… or they can just be really, really wrong. Weird maps from history invent lands wholesale, distort entire continents, or attempt to explain magnetism planet-wide. Sometimes the mistakes had a surprising amount of staying power, too, getting passed from map to map over the course of years while there was little chance to independently verify…
Gerardus Mercator, creator of everyone’s favorite map projection, didn’t know what the north pole looked like. No one in his time really did. But they knew that magnetic compasses always pointed north, and so a theory developed: the north pole was marked by a giant magnetic black-rock island.
He quotes a description of the pole in a letter: “In the midst of the four countries is a Whirl-pool, into which there empty these four indrawing Seas which divide the North. And the water rushes round and descends into the Earth just as if one were pouring it through a filter funnel. It is four degrees wide on every side of the Pole, that is to say eight degrees altogether. Except that right under the Pole there lies a bare Rock in the midst of the Sea. Its circumference is almost 33 French miles, and it is all of magnetic Stone (…) This is word for word everything that I copied out of this author [Jacobus Cnoyen] years ago.”
Mercator was not the first or only mapmaker to show the pole as Rupes Nigra, and the concept also tied into fiction and mythology for a while. The idea eventually died out, but people explored the Arctic in hopes of finding a passage through the pole’s seas for years before the pole was actually explored in the 1900s…
See five more confounding charts at “The Weird History of Extremely Wrong Maps.”
And for fascinating explanations of maps with intentional “mistakes,” see: “MapLab: The Legacy of Copyright Traps” and “A map is the greatest of all epic poems.”
* Gordon Livingston
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As we find our way, we might spare a thought for Thomas Doughty; he was beheaded on this date in 1578. A nobleman, soldier, scholar, and personal secretary of Christopher Hatton, Doughty befriended explorer and state-sponsored pirate Francis Drake, then sailed with him on a 1577 voyage to raid Spanish treasure fleets– a journey that ended for Doughty in a shipboard trial for treason and witchcraft, and his execution.
Although some scholars doubt the validity of the charges of treason, and question Drake’s authority to try and execute Doughty, the incident set an important precedent: according to a history of the English Navy, To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World by Arthur L. Herman, Doughty’s execution established the idea that a ship’s captain was its absolute ruler, regardless of the rank or social class of its passengers.
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