fuck yeah cartography!

unwrittenallusions:

The Waldseemüller map, or Universalis Cosmographia, is a map from 1507 created by German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller.  It is the first map to ever name the continents of the Americas “America.”  It was also the first to depict the Americas as not connected to Asia, and separated by the Pacific Ocean.

At first Martin Waldseemuller decided to name the ‘new world’ “America” baased on a letter by Amerigo Vespucci  (possibly forged) claiming to be the one who discovered and named America.

 Six years after the map was published Waldseemuller had second doubts about naming the land after Vuspucci.  In reprints of his famous atlas, he decided to relabel the continents “Terra Incognita.”  By that point, it was too late.  The name America had stuck.   As Wilson Taylor notes, “a story becomes encoded in an image, and the image changes the face of the world.”