The fourth part in the “Mapping North America” series describes how the 1524 voyage of Giovanni da Verrazzano added to the international body of cartographic knowledge by establishing the fact that an entire continent connected Florida with Canada. It’s also explained how a certain error on the part of Verrazzano led to the introduction of a spurious “Sea of Verrazzano” into world maps that were drawn following his [...]

The map published by Martin Waldseemüller in 1507 was the first to show the discoveries in the New World as belonging to a complete, almost entirely unexplored continent, separated from China by thousands of miles of ocean, and was the first map to label the New World with the name [...]

Juan de la Cosa sailed on the first three voyages of Christopher Columbus and was the owner and captain of the Santa María. de la Cosa made several maps, of which only one has survived. It is the oldest known European cartographic representation of the New World and is the only historic map to unambiguously illustrate the voyages of John [...]

Ptolemy’s “Geography” was a treatise on cartography and a compilation of what was known of world geography in the Roman Empire of the 2nd century. The rediscovery of Ptolemy’s methodology in the early 14th century coincided with the onset of the Age of Discovery and was an essential ingredient in the success of the voyages of early [...]