PRE-EUROPEAN CARTOGRAPHY OF THE NE AND NW PASSAGES
by Robin Lind
A presentation at the “International Symposium on the Significance of Admiral Zheng He’s Voyages ((1405-1433), in Commemoration of the 600th Anniversary of Zheng He’s First Voyage;” The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., May 16, 2005
SLIDE 1- Arab Sea Junk
If the Chinese Admiral Zheng He and his fleets did not discover the “new” world, visit east and west coasts of America, circumnavigate the globe, transit both the North West and North East passages, and survey, with considerable accuracy, all the territories they passed 600 years ago, I have to ask: Who did?
Because, in my opinion, someone very obviously was out there long before the Europeans began their “discoveries,” and at least a handful of these Europeans had a least some knowledge of their predecessors.
The image you see here is — to European eyes — a very recognizable Chinese Junk. It’s a five-masted junk. A very big ship. The kind sailed by Zheng He’s fleets. But this is not from a Chinese artist. It is drawn by Abraham Cresques in 1375 on a Catalan map.
SLIDE 2 – Catalan East Map
— a very large map created at Palma, Majorca, an island off the suth coast of the country we now call Spain. The country whose king is reported to have received an embassy from the great Kublai Khan in 1269.
Cresques very evidently took great pains to make his map both visually accurate and graphically attractive. He meant to impart reliable information. But what are we to make of the Chinese Junk? He shows this one in the Arabian Sea. Had he actually seen one?
Being an amateur historian and independent researcher, my curiosity is more often piqued by the anomalies than by the official histories.
SLIDE 3 – Waldseemuller Map
When the Library of Congress acquired the Waldseemüller map several years ago I was immediately intrigued by the unusual presentation of the coast of South America and determined I must see the map for myself. When I finally broke free from my schedules and came to see it, I was stunned. Who had the knowledge to place the Andes just so? This was more than a decade before any known European voyages to South America’s west coast and yet mountains that were not visible from the east coast were already mapped?
When I described my wonder to a neighbor he immediately mentioned a recent television broadcast and book called “1421: The Year the Chinese Discovered America.” I rushed to buy it.
The book exploded my horizons. Much that had puzzled me for ages suddenly was re-framed. Anomalies that had confronted me stubbornly suddenly began to shift and new images began to form in the mist.
I am indebted to Gavin Menzies for releasing the shackles of “received” history and setting me once more on the course of discovery.
***
SLIDE 4 – John Dee
When Elizabethan England entered into the “Age of Discovery” it was led almost singly by the far-reaching vision, intellectual commitment, and unflagging conviction of one man: astronomer-mathematician John Dee, England’s premier authority on navigation.
John Dee was a phenomenon — England’s one-man brain trust in mathematics, astronomy, cosmography, geography, and optics, not to mention astrology. His house at Mortlake, with its library of more than 4,000 manuscripts and books (and constant stream of inquisitive scholars) was the equivalent of a national think tank for the later half of the 16th century.
Dee scoured the continent of Europe for all current (and ancient) sources of information. His agents sent him manuscripts in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic and Coptic — all of which he read, studied and digested.
Very few of Dee’s maps survive but one, a 16th century map for discovery, represents in graphic terms the absolute conviction of Dee and his colleagues that sea routes to China existed by the Northeast and Northwest passages.
The English explorers and their investors who pursued these routes risked considerable capital and the lives of many friends and colleagues — sometimes their own. In the face of repeated setback, failure and calamity, they persisted. These people were not irrational. They were not incompetent. Where does such absolute conviction come from? Surely not simply from greed.
My belief was that they persisted because they knew such a passage existed. And they knew because they had information that was both credible and verifiable.
SLIDE 5 – Gylbert Map
The map I refer to is the polar projection map which John Dee prepared for English explorer/adventurer Sir Humfrey Gilbert in 1583. While it does not contain the detail of North America that is shown on Dee’s earlier map of 1580, presented to Queen Elizabeth and the Privy Council , it does give a broad brush portrait of North East and North West passages that summarizes the intellectual foundations for 16th century English maritime explorations.
Dee had been an adviser on navigation to the Muscovy Company since its founding and had taught navigation to their pilots and captains of the North East voyages.
Sir Humfrey Gilbert was a distinguished English explorer who sought the North West passage to Cathay — China — and the riches that might accrue from trade. Gilbert unfortunately did not survive his second voyage of discovery in 1583. He drowned on his way home from Canada after taking possession of North America for his Queen by right of “discovery.”
The map however, did survive, remaining in England with potential or active investors in the venture. It is a curiosity: an invitation to forensic archaeo-cartography.
The Gilbert map very clearly presents data not previously accounted for. Indeed, some features on this map are not “discovered” by Europeans for another 30 years, some must wait for a century or more. The challenge to modern researchers is to explain how Dee got his geographic information and from where.
Let us examine the map, (setting aside for the moment the well-known difficulty that existed in determining longitudes,) starting at the west coast of North America where Marco Polo famously put the Strait of Anian:
SLIDE 6 – Gylbert NW Passage
• The Tropic of Cancer passes through the tip of Baja California at 40˚ N which is exact
• what appears to be the Strait of Juan de Fuca is placed at 40˚ when it is actually at 47˚
• on the north the Peel and Arctic Red rivers are recognizable joining the MacKenzie River south of the Beaufort Sea; Dee places the river mouth at 55˚ N latitude: a sag of 13˚ below the correct 68˚
• the M’Clure Strait to M’Clintock Channel heading into Larsen Sound is placed at 59˚ when it is actually 74˚ N — a 16˚ sag
• Hudson’s Bay, previously depicted (but wildly distorted) as early as 1547 by Johann Ruysch, is placed between 51˚ and 56˚ when it is actually between 55˚ and 66˚
• what may be seen as Ungava Bay is correctly placed between 50 and 60 degrees latitude
• the St. Lawrence River is readily recognizable stretching westwards from 50 degrees latitude trending southwards to 40 degrees at Hochelaga (an Indian village, now the site of Montreal) and goes on past “la Chine” rapids to a great lake in the center of the country
• Greenland is correctly portrayed as an island before any “known” European circumnavigation, although its orientation is east-west rather than north-south
• Iceland is dead on, stretching from the edge of the Arctic Circle south to 63˚30’
Now examine the North East Passage:
SLIDE 7 – Gylbert NE Passage
• the north coast of the Scandinavian peninsula (Norway-Sweden-Finland) is almost exact at 70 degrees
• the White Sea is at the Arctic Circle with Vaigatz straddling 71˚
• The River Ob, flowing into the Kara Sea, is accurately drawn although its almost 13˚ south of actual
• two islands in the Kara Sea are likely Novaya Semlya and xxxx
• the Yenisey River channel is correctly shown but likewise erroneously south of the Arctic Circle
• the Tabin Peninsula he extends to 68˚ when it actually extends (including the North Land islands) to 81˚ — another sag of 13˚
• in the Laptev Sea he shows what are apparently the New Siberian Islands and perhaps the mouth of the Lena River
• almost all of Siberia is omitted in the eastern-most but …to my eye the Sea of Okhotsk is recognizable between 50 and 60˚ if we change the orientation from east-west to north-south
• Japan, again shown east-west rather than north-south …
… is accurately shown between 40 and 30˚ latitude.
[One has to wonder: is there a pattern of mis-orientation which is meaningful here?]
The question that I have pondered is: how did John Dee know how to place all these data points with this accuracy in 1580?
SLIDE 8 – Gylbert NW Passage
• of the Mackenzie River basin below the Beaufort Sea I know of no source to indicate prior explorations
• of “Hudson’s” Bay, and what appears to be the Kapuskasing/Mattagami/ Abitibi River Basin, I know of no prior source of “discovery”
• of the St. Lawrence River flowing out of the Great Lakes we may guess at unknown data from Jacques Cartier’s explorations in 1534-1542 but if so, it was data that was suppressed even from successive French explorers such as Samuel de Champlain who ventured further inland only in 1603
• of Ungava Bay we may guess that Martin Frobisher’s unfortunate expeditions of 1576-78 produced data that was later suppressed; it is also possible that the Basques, who had a whaling settlement at Red Bay Labrador provided the data; perhaps it was a lost Viking map; all is speculation
• northern Greenland was certainly icebound in 1583 and so again there is no source to justify its depiction as separate from the frozen north; it appears just so on Mercator’s map but what led Mercator and Dee to their conclusions?
SLIDE 9 – Gylbert NE Passage
• the 1550s explorations of Sir Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor can take us to Russia’s White Sea
• the explorations of Stephen Borough and the map of Anthony Jenkinson , who accompanied Chancellor on his first voyage, can give us the River Ob, but what of the territory beyond? What were the sources of information that allowed Dee to put these outlines on a grid of latitude and longitude that is recognizable to us who now have the advantage of extra-terrestrial satellite photography?
I do not know whether Zheng He’s fleets succeeded in their mission to go out to the ends of the earth six hundred years ago. My own research over the past year compelled me to believe that someone preceded the Europeans in the “Age of Discovery” and some of the explorers had at least some of that data.
This past fortnight has been an exciting time of discovery for me personally because I have now found at least part of the information I have been seeking to justify my hypothesis
First, on the Library of Congress’s own website I found, by chance, only 10 days ago, a reference to John Dee “who had collected maps of China” and to map-maker Abraham Ortelius who “had been collecting reports of China for years.” Examination of the cited authorities didn’t help me but I felt was getting closer. I continued my research.
On Wednesday of last week, reading a copy of Dee’s descriptive text for a map (now lost) presented to Queen Elizabeth in 1577 , I found the proof I had been sure must exist:
SLIDE 10 Gylbert China Text
“…we have depicted here Cambalu [present day Beijing], the royal seat, in accordance with the cosmographical records of Prince Abilfedea Ismael, and Quinsay [present day Hangzhou] in accordance with the printed Chinese chorography, from which it is clear that they both lie under almost the same parallel as Venice…”
This is the smoking gun. This is proof in Dee’s own words that he has based his work at least in part, on Chinese sources. At this point I don’t know which Chinese chorography he refers to, but I intend to keep looking. With the help of visionaries like Gavin Menzies who can help us re-frame our thinking and of researchers and scholars like those assembled for this Symposium, I believe new discoveries will continue to be made.
Eager amateurs and brilliant scholars will continue turning up new evidence or “discovering” old evidence in new lights. Astonishing images will emerge that fundamentally challenge the way we understand our shared past.
I can only hope — if I may quote Thomas Jefferson — that we may agree:
“ … here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate error so long as reason is free to combat it.”
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GEOGRAPHY AND PTOLEMY’S GEOGRAPHIA
John Dee was a colleague of many of the leading European cartographers. Famed cartographer Abraham Ortelius and Pedro Nuñez, who was to become Portugal’s Cosmographer Royal, had been Dee’s classmates at the Collegium Trilingue at Louvain, Belgium, 1548-1550. Together they studied under mathematician-cartographer Gemma Frisius and his brilliant assistant Gerhard Mercator.
They all became intimate friends and exchanged information freely but there is nothing to indicate they copied each other’s work slavishly: by which I mean they did not simply trace each other’s maps and put their own names onto them with a few added details.
Under Frisius, they learned how to construct maps in a scientific manner, most likely using the fundamental principles put forward by the 2nd Century Alexandrian cosmographer Claudius Ptolemy, in his well-known Geographia, augmented by Frisius’s teaching of triangulation, and Mercator’s fashioning of globes and improved astronomical survey instruments.
The Geographia was comprised of eight books — we would call them chapters — the first two of which are devoted to an explanation of how to draw a map on a grid, simple or complex, how to project a meaningful image onto a plane surface from data that has been recorded on a sphere. The next five books are essentially a list of data points, given in degrees of latitude and longitude from a prime meridian at the Fortunate Islands, and the eighth book gives principal towns with their distance from Alexandria calculated in hours and minutes from a meridian at Alexandria.
It was — in current terminology — a database preceded by open source software. Anyone who could master the software could then enter the data and produce a map that would resemble the map of others manipulating the same data with the same level of care.
Equally important: there is no record of any maps accompanying the first Geographia — a Greek text which reappeared in Europe (after an absence of perhaps a thousand years) as the expanding Turks drove Byzantine Christians, with their most precious manuscripts, into the west.
(Curiously, it was translated into Latin almost simultaneously with Zheng He’s preparations for his first voyage of discovery.) It quickly circulated in manuscript copies among European cosmographers.
More importantly, many of these new manuscripts now included maps. Seventy years after its first “re-appearance,” Ptolemy’s Geographia was on the printing press. Twenty-five years later, after the discovery of the “new world,” a new generation of cartographers was at work and Ptolemy’s projection of a habitable world within 180˚ of the sphere was expanded to a full 360˚ — with more and more added, as more and more was “discovered.”
Although this may appear not particularly noteworthy to a room full of scholarly geographers — I found the implications to be profound.
Early cartographers did not operate in a vacuum. They did not draw maps simply by looking at other maps. If they were true to their training — if they had been instructed in the classic Ptolemaic school — they were creating their graphic images from a data base.
If you collect enough data points (latitude and longitude) and arrange them in sequence on a grid then the map-making becomes merely a matter of connecting the dots.
Unlike Ptolemy’s Geographia, which came out of hiding as a database without maps, most of our familiar presentations of geographical information that have survived from the European “Age of Discovery” seem to be maps without databases. We are the poorer for it.
My hunch is that the databases were considered more valuable than the maps and their security was rated more highly. Perhaps they were worn out from use or progressively discarded as they were updated. Conceivably they were systematically destroyed by successive cosmographers or pilots-general who did not want erroneous information to be retained once it had been superseded.
In any event, the most valuable source of English cartographic information seems to have disappeared, was suppressed by the government, or remains hidden from us.
But to return to the Gilbert Map. The question has to be reframed: where was the database? Did Dee have his own exclusive database? Did he have one he shared with a favored few such as Mercator, Ortelius and Nuñez ? Was Frisius, their mutual teacher and mentor, an earlier source? If yes, then whence came the Frisius data? Did he inherit it from his teacher, Peter Apian? And if Apian was the source, where did he get his data?
Little specific has come down to us about Dee’s working method but we do know he was meticulous and exacting. A January 16, 1577 letter survives from Dee to Ortelius asking him specifically to supply his authorities for two new names that appear on his latest map of the North American coastline. Another letter, three months later, April 20 ,1577 from Mercator to Dee, apparently in reply to a similar specific enquiry, explains that Mercator copied this data from notes written by a native of his own village relating a report of a Minorite Friar who traveled prior to 1360 to the northern most parts with an astrolabe taking observations everywhere he went. (Dee was convinced enough of the veracity to include the same information in a report he made to Queen Elizabeth regarding her sovereign rights to northern discoveries.)
MAP DATABASE EVOLUTION:
An example of ongoing map database “evolution” would be a comparison of the Battista Agnese maps of the world between 1520 and 1550. Although similar, the earliest map has neither western features nor coastline for North and South America but it does show sinuous lines for travel routes from Seville to the Caribbean, over the isthmus and onward to Peru, from Seville through the Straits of Magellan westward to the Pacific and around Cape of Good Hope eastward to the Molluccas. As knowledge accumulates, the west coasts of America fill in and the new world takes shape and .. after 1540 … a curious dotted line appears showing a sea route from France to Canada (“el viagio do Francis”.) A year later, another Agnese map shows the dotted line extended across an (impossibly narrow) isthmus between the St. Lawrence River and Hudson’s Bay, which extends north and west to the far borders of the new world across the straits from Cathay. Four new named cities appear on the west coast. One is “Totonteach” — a toponym I have seen nowhere else.
Except it is almost identical to a name that appears on John Dee’s map for Sir Humfrey Gilbert 30 years later as “Tontontiake.” Where did this information come from? In this one instance we have identified a likely precursor for Dee. But where did Agnese get the data? Who could possibly have been to that far reach of the globe and returned with credible information? What led Dee to accept it?
We have the map. If only we had the database…
(For a full version of this document including footnotes please click here. and click on Library of Congress Presentations).
