1561 Ruscelli/ Gastaldi Mariner's Map of the World

This is an attractive example of Girolamo Ruscelli's 1561 map of the world,Carta Marina Nuova Tavola. It was one of three maps in Ruscelli's edition of Ptolemy. One of these was Ptolemy's map while two - this, and a double-hemisphere map - were modern works. This striking work, with its array of rhumb lines, was an enlarged and improved version of Giacomo Gastaldi's 1548 Carta Marina Nova Tabula. As such, it reflects the puzzling features of that earlier map: not merely those which differ from modern understanding of the globe, but sharp differences between Gastaldi's own maps of the same period, and indeed differences between this and Ruscelli's other modern map appearing in the same work.

Asia and America

One feature held in common with most of Gastaldi's world maps (until 1561) is his emphatic connection of North America and the Asian mainland. On the present work this is unmistakable: the same continent sporting Florida, Mexico and a peninsular California continues onward to reveal the Ganges River at its westward limits; the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra tell the same tale. Gastaldi's conviction on this point ran counter to that of his contemporary Münster, and to many of the mapmakers to follow in the 16th century. (It must be said that European geographers had no concrete evidence of the separation of Asia and America by the Bering Strait until Cook's voyage there in the 18th century.)

The geography here, preserved from the 1548 map, is distinct from any Gastaldi's other maps thanks to the presence of two great bays appearing in North America: a bay intruding into the Pacific coast north of the unnamed California, and the appearance of the Sea of Verrazano in the northeast. Neither of these appear on any of Gastaldi's other maps. The appearance of the Sea of Verrazano - the wedge-shaped bay bisecting America from the north - may represent an effort by Gastaldi to reconcile his geography with that of his colleague, Sebastian Münster, on whose maps of America and the world that bay had appeared. Münster and Gastaldi were familiar enough with each other's work for the former to write the preface to Gastaldi's 1548 Ptolemy, so it is likely that the idea was one they had discussed. Gastaldi's interpretation of the sea is very different from Münster's however. The German-Swiss scholar's sea appeared to hold out hope for a convenient passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific, whereas Gastaldi's Verrazanean Sea connects not with the Pacific but with a great northern ocean with no connection whatever to either the Atlantic or the Pacific.

Despite Ruscelli's version having been engraved thirteen years after the Gastaldi original, it remains among the earliest maps to show a peninsular California (first appeared on Cabot's 1544 map; Gastaldi had adopted the form as early as 1546.) It shows the Strait of Magellan, and a massive insular Tierra del Fuego - although it does not command the size of the Terra Australis that would appear on Mercator's maps.

'Carta Marina?'

Despite the title of this little map, and its elaborate latticework of navigator's rhumb lines, this is a work that would plainly be of very little use at sea. That said, its focus is on the seas: very few cities are named, and only the most dramatic land features appear at all. The map's purpose, then, may be to show Gastaldi's ideas about which of the world's seas were navigable, and where one might be able to travel; so the map's 'chartiness' and its nautical title may have been intended to invoke the idea of the sailability of the post-Magellanic world. For even the most housebound armchair traveler, the idea that 'one might be able to get there from here' would have been a compelling message for such a map to deliver.

Publication History and Census

This map was engraved for the 1561 edition of Ruscelli'sLa Geografia di Claudio Tolomeo. The maps of that edition were engraved two-to-a-plate, and consequently the platemark runs off the edge of the sheet at top. Afterwards the plates were divided, and examples from 1574 onwards exhibit a platemark all around the map. This example conforms typographically to the 1574 edition of Ruscelli's work. We see eleven examples of this separate map cataloged in OCLC, in various editions.