Posts Tagged ‘Francis Drake’
“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.
The Fab(ricated) Four…
On the heels of the release of Beatles remasters as box sets, a special kind of tribute: “The Beatles Never Broke Up“– where readers can find a hitherto-unheard Beatles album from another (parallel) reality.
The work of “James Richards” (amusingly, the inversion of Richard James– aka The Aphex Twin, one of the most influential electronic musicians of the last century), the site tells the story of Richard’s acquisition of the “grail cassette,” and allows visitors to stream each newly-discovered track and to download the album in it’s entirety.
… though readers might be well-advised to do their downloading sooner than later. As earlier missives have noted, mash-ups have a nasty habit of incurring their honorees’ wrath…
As we ponder “piracy,” we might tip our bandanas to Privateer Francis Drake, who set out from Plymouth on this date in 1577, and returned almost three years later (September, 1580), the first captain to have completed a circumnavigation of the globe– an accomplishment for which Drake was knighted by Queen Elizabeth to become Sir Francis Drake.
(Readers will recall that Magellan, who sailed earlier, made it three-quarters of the way, but was killed in the Phillipines; his boats made it back to Portugal, but under the command of his navigator.)
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