Marco Polo's GeographyMuch of the more notable speculative geography here relates to interpretations of Marco Polo's Travels. Many explorers in the 16th and 17th centuries sought the Great Southern Continent, including Quiros, Drake, and Cook, but Antarctica itself was not truly discovered until Edward Bransfield and William Smith sighted the Antarctic Peninsula in 1820. It was thought, based upon the writings of Aristotle, that the globe was a place of balances and thus geographers presumed the bulk of Eurasia must be counterbalanced by a similar landmass in the Southern Hemisphere, just as, they argued, the Americas counterbalanced Africa and Europe. Long before the discovery of Antarctica, the southern continent, supposedly capping the South Pole, was speculated upon by European geographers of the 16th and 17th centuries. Terra Australis Nondum Cognita or the Speculative Southern ContinentThe map exhibits a host of striking features, but perhaps none stand out more than the enormous continent massing at the base of the map identified as Terra Australis Nondum Cognita (Southern Land Not Known). In compiling this map Ortelius drew on the best cartography available, including Gerard Mercator's map of 1569, Giacomo Gastaldi's 1561 World Map, Diego Gutierrez's portolan of the Atlantic, as well as other works by Sebastian Cabot, Jodocus Hondius, Orontius Finaeus, Petrus Plancius, Gemma Frisius, Laurent Fries, and more. The map embraces the entirety of the known world and represented the most widely-disseminated and eagerly-copied image of the world available to the European reader at the end of the 16th century. This map was published in Ortelius' Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the first modern published atlas. One of the most iconic maps of all time, this is Abraham Ortelius's 1589 map of the world, Typus Orbis Terrarum, here in the first state of the 3rd plate.
Minnesota - North Dakota - South Dakota.Massachusetts - Connecticut - Rhode Island.
0 kommentar(er)
