Figure 1. A flashforward suggesting the derivation and chronology of the first descriptions of Drake’s route of circumnavigation of the world shown in this paper. Time runs roughly from the top to the bottom.
DOI: 10.14714/CP103.1871
© by the author(s). This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0.
A. Terry Bahill, University of Arizona | terry@sie.arizona.edu
This paper describes the nine sixteenth-century maps, texts, and globes that showed Sir Francis Drake’s route of circumnavigation of the world. It shows the relationships between these nine artifacts and suggests the year of disclosure for each. The oldest of these is the Whitehall map, which was the direct or indirect precursor of the Drake-Mellon map, the French-Drake Van Sype map, the Dutch-Drake map, and the Hondius Broadside map. Most world maps published between 1561 and 1588 have a huge bulge on the coast of Chile. However, eight of the maps discussed in this paper shrank the bulge and moved it to the southern tip of Chile, using updated information from Drake’s voyage.
KEYWORDS: Whitehall map; Nicola van Sype; nautical charts; Sir Francis Drake; circumnavigation; bulge on the coast of Chile; Drake-Mellon map; Silver maps; Spanish Armada; sixteenth century
Sir Francis Drake (ca. 1541–1596
Drake was born in the 1540s. The Library of Congress states 1543. Wagner (1926, 457) states between 1541 and 1545. Drake (1854, vi) states 1544. A quick survey of Internet sources with Drake’s birthdate yielded x̄ = 1540.9, σ = 1.4, n = 33, and range = 1540 to 1545. We will use 1541. The reader can ignore all footnotes in this paper without a lack of continuity.
) was an English admiral, ship captain, naval navigator, world explorer, war hero, and privateer. The Spanish, however, viewed him as a ruthless pirate and called him El Draque, The Dragon. Drake commanded the second ship to circumnavigate the earth. This paper is about the first descriptions of Drake’s route of circumnavigation.
Drake sailed from England in December of 1577 with a fleet of five ships and headed southwest across the Atlantic through storms, starvation, and mutiny. His purpose may have been to recover his losses to King Phillip II of Spain, to avenge his grievances against this king, or maybe it was to seize Spanish treasures. He passed through the Strait of Magellan and reached the Pacific Ocean in September 1578 with one remaining ship, the Golden Hind. Then, as he sailed north, he plundered Spanish ships and ports along the west coast of South America.
In June of 1579, he gave up pirating and searching for the Northwest Passage and spent five weeks onshore on the northwest coast of America repairing his ship and preparing for a long voyage west across the Pacific Ocean. Then he sailed perhaps 10,000 miles non-stop in 100 days, an unprecedented feat, and arrived at his intended destination without running out of food or water. This was an unparalleled feat of navigation.
Drake sailed through the Spice Islands (the Moluccas or Maluku Islands) in November 1579 and then around the Cape of Good Hope. On the unremarkable final leg of his journey northwards up through the Atlantic Ocean, he stayed far away from Spain. He returned to England in September of 1580. His ship was bulging with stolen gold and silver from Spanish ships and ports, rare porcelains and silks from China, and spices from islands of the East Indies.
When he met with Queen Elizabeth on his return to England, Drake presented to her a map of the world with his route of circumnavigation drawn on it. She hung this map on a wall of her private quarters in her Whitehall Palace, hence its name, the Whitehall map. In honor of his circumnavigation of the world, in 1581 she knighted him.
About eight years later, world maps showing his route suddenly appeared. The purpose of these maps was presumably to honor Drake’s achievement and show his route of circumnavigation. The following contemporary maps, globe, and book describe Drake’s general route of circumnavigation.
We have found no other sixteenth-century maps or texts that show or describe the route of Drake’s circumnavigation of the world, except possibly for the following four. The John Blagrave 1596 Nova Orbis Terrarum Descripto . . . map has the routes of circumnavigation of Drake and Cavendish (Shirley 1983, entry 191; Wallis 1984, 155). However, it uses a unique projection, featuring a north polar stereographic for the northern hemisphere, with the southern hemisphere added in four corner pieces to extend the map into the shape of a square. It is mathematically elegant but practically useless for our purposes because Drake’s path cannot be readily followed into the corners. Gastaldi & De Jode’s 1600 Nova Totius Orbis Descriptio map also had Drake’s path but we did not include it in this paper because its origin is obscure and it was published too late to have affected the maps discussed in this paper (Shirley 1983, entry 174). It can be seen at https://objects.library.uu.nl/reader/img.php?obj=1874-12850&img=/11/77/86/117786291475277382385409027987969932909.jpg.
Bawlf (2015, 33) and Wallis (1984, 132) each show a copy of Ortelius’s 1579 Typus Orbis Terrarum map from the British Museum that has Drake’s route drawn on it. However, because Drake did not return to England until 1580, this route must have been added by an unknown person at an unknown later date. Furthermore, no other copies of the Typus Orbis Terrarum have Drake’s route. Crispin de Passe in his 1598 Effigies Regum ac Principum . . . has a portrait of Drake along with a simplified miniature of the Hondius 1595 Broadside map. However, it adds nothing new to our discussion. Of course, there may have been other maps with Drake’s route that have simply disappeared over the last five centuries.
No papers in the literature describe these nine artifacts as a group. In this list, we also give our final determination of their years of disclosure.
The years of disclosure mean when the creator first made the maps, etc. available for others to view. These dates are probably accurate to the year, not the month (Thrower 1984, 36). Our years of disclosure are usually the year after an enabling event. For example, Rumold Mercator first published his double-hemisphere equatorial stereographic map projection in 1587. We think that it would take a year to learn a new technique, make a new map or write a text, and then publish it. Therefore, the earliest year of disclosure we give for maps using that projection is 1588. In a similar way, the Spanish Armada was destroyed in August 1588. So, we state that maps and texts that depend on that event could have first been made public in 1589.
In this paper, these nine descriptions of Drake’s route of circumnavigation will collectively be called the C9. The C9 without the Whitehall map will be called the C8. We recommend that the readers look ahead in this paper and familiarize themselves with Figures 2–8, which show the C8. URLs for these and all other maps mentioned in this paper are given in our list/database located at sysengr.engr.arizona.edu/URLsForSixteenthCenturyMaps.xlsx.
Why was there a gap of over eight years between the completion of Drake’s voyage and the first public descriptions of his route? Probably because Queen Elizabeth wanted to keep all of Drake’s discoveries secret from the despised and feared Spanish. This included where Drake had been, the fact that he had circumnavigated the world, how much gold and silver he had brought back, and most importantly his route of circumnavigation. The Queen forbade her subjects to disclose these state secrets under pain of death (de Mendoza 1896; Colthorpe 2017, 29).
As will be shown below, four of the C9 (the Drake-Mellon, the French-Drake, the Dutch-Drake, and the Hondius Broadside maps) were certainly based on the Whitehall map, either directly or indirectly: it was their common precursor. Figure 1 shows, with black arrows, information flows between the C9; grey arrows indicate uncertain information flows. This figure summarizes the literature about sixteenth-century maps that contain the route of Drake’s circumnavigation of the world. While our general principle in this paper it to use only information contained on the maps themselves, this figure is an exception. It instead uses information from historical texts, sixteenth-century family, friendship, and religious relationships, language, geographical location of the cartographers, and chronology of the maps.
Figure 1. A flashforward suggesting the derivation and chronology of the first descriptions of Drake’s route of circumnavigation of the world shown in this paper. Time runs roughly from the top to the bottom.
When we began this research, the state of knowledge about the information sharing between these sources was as shown in Figure 1. However, no previous papers have shown all of this in an integrated form. Although the Ortelius Typus Orbis Terrarum does not contain Drake’s route of circumnavigation, it is included in Figure 1 because it is central to late sixteenth-century nautical world maps. Figure 1 foreshadows the findings of this paper, suggesting the incipient relationships between the C9 that will be revealed. Two purposes of the research presented in this paper are to find the relationships and the years of disclosure of these maps, globes, and books. We will start at the top of Figure 1 with the Whitehall map.
This paper analyzes the relationships of the sixteenth-century C9 that show Drake’s route of circumnavigation of the world, based only on information shown on the maps themselves. My colleagues and I inspected over 2,000 sixteenth-century nautical charts and maps
What is the difference between a nautical chart and a map? In general, a nautical chart is designed for navigation on the water. They emphasize oceans, seas, bays, and rivers and islands and shoals within them. Depending on the scale, they might give water depth. They show features along the coasts, like lighthouses and harbors, but do not emphasize inland features, like roads. An example would be a chart of the Pacific Ocean. In contrast, several types of land maps show mountains and their elevations, cities, political boundaries, railroad tracks, and other inland features. A map of Portugal would not be a nautical chart (Gaspar and Leitão 2019).
that were available on the Internet. We downloaded 500 of these maps and examined them in detail. Of these, we recorded the 180 most relevant to Drake’s route in our database, which is located at sysengr.engr.arizona.edu/URLsForSixteenthCenturyMaps.xlsx. Then the C9 were studied and dated in this paper
This is not a traditional history paper as is commonly found in the fields of cartography. Instead, this paper introduces a new genre of research writing about sixteenth-century nautical charts, by being based only on material contained in those charts and not modern interpretations of them. We do not make a statement about a map and then reference an earlier paper that made a similar statement. Rather we make a statement and then point to a feature on a map that supports that statement. We do not arrange the maps in chronological order. This paper does not present the religious, familial, or nationality relationships of the cartographers, or try to analyze their thinking or what their motives were. Nor does it present their ages, native languages, educations, or alma maters. In general, we do not use manuscript maps because the date can never be ascertained with certainty. We do not interpret our maps as vehicles for the exercise of power to effect social-political ends as was done by Harley (1988 and 1989) and Edney (2019). This paper is an experiment. We wanted to show that research papers like this could be written based solely on information shown on charts and maps that are freely available on the Internet. Long trips to libraries are no longer necessary.
After we wrote this paper and ushered it through four rounds of reviews, we discovered the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University (davidrumsey.com). It is the perfect solution for what we are trying to do. This online digital database contains over 125,000 maps and related images dating from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century, and can be read by anyone, anywhere. Rumsey has said that he wanted to provide “open access to all art … freely available via the Internet” (Hessler 2023). The David Rumsey Map Collection’s capabilities exceeds our needs: “It allows searching maps by toponyms and text on the maps” (Hessler 2023). This database should further enable the new genre of map research we are suggesting here.
Of course, there are limitations to using only information on digitally published maps in research on nautical world maps. These are presented in the Limitations section of this paper.
The purposes of this paper are to
We made many assumptions while researching and writing this paper, and we continually checked their validity. These are some of the initial assumptions that were, in the end, deemed important and valid.
One initial assumption that was discarded was that the Whitehall-derived maps were made in southern England.
In this section, we give general descriptions of the C9. Details will be added in later sections.
On his voyage of circumnavigation, Drake had with him maps and charts, along with paint brushes and pens for embellishing them. Furthermore, he took the maps from every Spanish ship he seized. We speculate that during the voyage, he and his cousin John drew his route of circumnavigation on one of them. Then on his return to England in 1580, he presented it to Queen Elizabeth (Colthorpe 2017, 27). This map then joined the royal map collection in her “Majesties Gallerie at Whitehall, neere the Privie Chamber” (Purchas 1625).
This map might have been put on public display in the Whitehall Palace after 1589 (MacGregor 2013).
No modern cartographer has seen the Whitehall map because everything in the royal map collection at Whitehall was presumably destroyed in fires in the seventeenth century. The only known first-hand visual description of this map was made by Samuel Purchas (1625).
The Drake-Mellon map (Figure 2) was made with pen, ink, and watercolors on vellum. This manuscript map is held in the Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art at Yale University Library, collections.britishart.yale.edu/catalog/orbis:9579023. It is not attributed to any particular cartographer or artist (Wallis 1984, 141–145). Its text is in Latin. Wallis (1984) dates it as “after 1586” (138) and “not later than 1590” (141). It includes Drake’s Caribbean voyage of 1585–86. Because it is a manuscript map, it is hard to be sure of its cartographer and date.
Figure 2. The Drake-Mellon map (Vera descriptio expeditionis nauticae Francisci Draci Angli …) shows Drake’s approximate route of circumnavigation of the world in 1577–80 with black dots on brown lines and his Caribbean voyage of 1585–86 with black lines. This manuscript map uses an equirectangular map projection.
This map has flags with the cross of St. George planted four places in the Americas. This map also contains the names Virginea [sic] and California.
This map shows the general route that Drake took during his circumnavigation. However, the route is not detailed enough to be used for navigation. Presumably, the purpose of this map was to document Drake’s unique feat, not to give directions for replicating it. It might have never been put on public display.
The Drake Silver maps are 68 mm (2.7 in) diameter sterling silver disks with maps of the known world in the sixteenth century, featuring Drake’s route of circumnavigation stamped on them (Christy 1900; Hague 1908; hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/rbdk.d058). The nine existing medallions have weights from 260 to 424 grains (0.6 to 1 oz, 17 to 27 g) (Kraus 2022a, item 58). Each of these medallions has a diameter that is about the same as that of a tennis ball. The variation in weight is due to differences in thickness: the lightest one is as thin as a thumbnail (0.46 mm) and the heaviest one is as thick as a credit card (0.76 mm) (Bahill 2022b). Christy (1900) emphatically states that they were created in 1581. MacGregor (2013) states 1589.
Figure 3. Drake Silver maps. The medallion on the left, showing the western hemisphere is from the British Museum (2024). On the right, the eastern hemisphere is from the Library of Congress (hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/rbdk.d058). These medallions are 68mm in diameter and are shown at their actual size. Each medallion uses a Mercator double-hemisphere equatorial stereographic map projection. The maps have parallels and meridians every ten degrees.
“The famous voyage of Sir Francis Drake into the South Sea, and there hence about the whole Globe of the Earth, begun in the yeere of our Lord, 1577,” is a section that comprises twelve unnumbered pages in Richard Hakluyt’s 1589 volume The Principall navigations, voiages and discoveries of the English nation, which he self-published: memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=rbdk&fileName=d027/rbdkd027.db&recNum=661.
The content of these pages is also given in The World Encompassed (Drake 1854, 92–93), The Anonymous Narrative (Wagner 1926, 277–285), and The English Hero (R. B. 1695).
This summary of Drake’s voyage was corroborated and elaborated by John Drake, Sir Francis Drake’s cousin (sometimes mistakenly called his nephew), who was on the voyage of circumnavigation, in his testimony before the Spanish Inquisition in March 1584 and January 1587 (Nuttall 1914). However, these declarations were presumably not seen by an Englishman for a long time, because they were state secrets of the Spanish Inquisition.
The French-Drake Van Sype map, La herdike enterprinse faict par le Signeur Draeck D’Avoir cirquit toute la Terre is seen in Figure 4 (Shirley 1983, entry 149). This map is attributed to Nicola van Sype (or van Sÿpe), whose name is engraved to the right of the distance scale in the lower right-center. Most assume that this was the name or pseudonym of the cartographer, the engraver, or a friend of theirs. However, nothing is known about Nicola van Sype (Wallis 1984). The La Herdike Enterprinse map, shown in Figure 4, was written in French, and is usually called the French-Drake map (Wagner 1926, 427–434). It was printed from an engraved copper plate. The Kraus Collection at the Library of Congress dates it to 1581 (hdl.loc.gov/loc.gmd/g3201s.rb000011). Wallis (1984) dates it as “1582–83 or later” (143) but “not later than 1590” (141). Aker (1970, 70) wrote a “date not later than c. 1585.”
Figure 4. French-Drake Van Sype map, La herdike enterprinse faict par le Signeur Draeck D’Avoir cirquit toute la Terre. This is on an equirectangular map projection. Note the cartouches.
The Dutch-Drake map, La heroike interprinse faict par le Signeur Draeck D’Avoir cirquit toute la Terre, was a copy of the French-Drake Van Sype map (crouchrarebooks.com/maps/one-of-the-earliest-maps-to-depict-drakes-circumnavigation). It uses French for the title, a mixture of Early Modern Dutch and French for the cartouches, and Latin and Spanish for the toponyms. See Figure 5 (Shirley 1983, entry 151). Wagner (1926, 424–426) dates it as 1641.
Wagner (1926) has two mistakes. On page 424 the heading has the word Enterprinse whereas it should be Interprinse and on page 427 the heading has Interprinse which should be Enterprinse. Aker (1970, 68; 77) caught one of these mistakes but left the other. He called both the French-Drake and the Dutch-Drake maps La Heroike Enterprinse.
Aker (1970, 77) opines that the Dutch-Drake map was published after the French-Drake map, but he estimates the Dutch-Drake’s date of publication as 1581.
Figure 5. Dutch-Drake map La heroike interprinse faict par le Signeur Draeck D’Avoir cirquit toute la Terre. This map is on an equirectangular projection.
Emery Molyneux’s Petworth House Globe was made in 1592 (Figure 6; www.gutenberg.org/files/39866/39866-h/39866-h.htm#Page_190). It has the routes of circumnavigation of both Sir Francis Drake (1577–80) in red and Sir Thomas Cavendish (1586–88) in blue (Wallis 1951; Wallis 1984; Dekker 2007; Blundeville 1613). This may be the first public display of Cavendish’s route of circumnavigation.
Figure 6. Molyneux’s 1592 Petworth House Globe. It is about two feet one inch (63.5 cm) in diameter.
The Jodocius Hondius 1590 and 1595 map Vera Totius Exbitionis Nautica (Figure 7) is commonly known as the Broadside map. Generally, a broadside was a large sheet of paper having words and graphics printed on one side only, such as a poster or handbill. This particular broadside has the routes of circumnavigation of both Drake (1577–80) and Cavendish (1586–88). See Shirley (1983, entry 188) and lccn.loc.gov/92680608.
Figure 7. Hondius 1595 Broadside map. This piece is on a Mercator double-hemisphere equatorial stereographic projection. For convenience, it uses a ten-degree graticule.
Hondius lived in London from 1584 to 1593. Wallis (1984, 145) states that of the six surviving copies of the Hondius Broadside map, three were issued in London in 1590 and the other three in the Netherlands in 1595. Wallis (1984, 145) and Aker (1970, 102) both mention the “Jodocus Hondius fecit Londini” written on the back of one of these maps. Wagner (1926 239) states that the Hondius Broadside map was engraved in 1595.
The De Bry map America Pars VIII (Figure 8) is nearly the same as the Hondius Broadside map (Shirley 1983, entry 219; van Groesen 2007), and is viewable at jcb.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/s/j4s58c.
Figure 8. The De Bry 1599, America Pars VIII map, like the Hondius Broadside map, is a Mercator double-hemisphere equatorial stereographic projection.
We have found no other sixteenth-century maps or texts that show or describe the route of Drake’s circumnavigation of the world; however, see footnote 2.
The texts in the cartouches of the Drake-Mellon, French-Drake, and Dutch-Drake maps (Figures 2, 4, and 5) are surprisingly similar and are consistent with the description of the Whitehall map given by Purchas (1625, 461–462). We will now compare Purchas’s comments about the Whitehall map to the texts in the bottom center cartouches of the other three maps.
This is the complete comment by Purchas (1625, 461–462) about the Whitehall and Silver maps.
… I adde their New Straights Southwards from those of Magelane were discovered before by Drake, as in the Map of Sir Francis Drakes Voyage presented to Queene Elizabeth, still hanging in His Majesties Gallerie at White Hall, neere the Privie Chamber, and by that Map (wherein is Cabotas [Sebastian Cabot’s] Picture, the first and great Columbus for the Northerne World) may be seene. In which Map, the South of the Magelane Straits is not a Continent, but many Is[l]ands, and the very same which they have stiled in their Straits. Barneuels Is[l]ands had long before been named by the most auspicate of Earthly Names (and let themselves be Judges, with which the other is as little worthie to be mentioned, as a kind Mother, and an unkind Traitor. The name Elizabethᶜ is expressed in golden Letters, with a golden Crowne, Garter, and Armes affixed: The words ascribed there unto are these, Cum omnes feré hanc partem Australem Continentem esse putent, pro certo sciant Insulas esse Navigantibus periuias, earumqum australissimam ELIZABETHAM à D. Francisco Draco Inventore dictam esse. The same height of 57. degrees, and South-easterly situation from the Magelan Westerne Mouth give further evidence. And my learned friend Master Brigges told me, that he hath seene this plot of Drakes Voyage cut in Silver by a Dutchman (Michael Mercator, Nephew to Gerardus) many years before Scouten or Maire [Williem Schouten and Jacques Le Maire] intended that Voyage. As for Nova Zemla by Stephen Burrough, and others, long before discovered, they also have given new names, which, I envie not: only I feare a vae soli [being alone] and hate ingratitude both ours and theirs. But too much of this. Next to this more generall Discourse shall follow the Dutch Northerne Voyages, and the English North-easterne: after which wee will take a more complementall leave of that Continent, and from thence visite the Northerly and North-westerne Discoveries; at once hunting for a New World and a New passage to This
ᶜ [footnote in original] In the [s]aid Map is Queene Elizabeths Picture, with Neptune yielding his Trident, and Triton sounding her Fame, with these Verses, Te Deus aequoreus donat Regina Tridente, Et Triton laudes esslat ubique tuas.
The following is our summary of the comments by Purchas (1625) about the Whitehall map.
Please note that Purchas, his pilgrimage … 1613, Purchas, his Pilgrim … 1619, and Purchas his Pilgrimes … 1625 are three entirely different books written by Samuel Purchas (1577–1626).
We will now use this quotation to examine maps that were clearly copied from the Whitehall map, Table 1. Purchas did not specify where on the Whitehall map the Latin inscription appeared. But a similar sentence appears in the bottom center cartouche of the Drake-Mellon, the French-Drake, and the Dutch-Drake maps shown in Figures 2, 4, and 5, respectively.
Table 1. Comparison of texts on the Whitehall, Drake-Mellon, French-Drake, and Dutch-Drake maps.
These four descriptions of the southern tip of South America are remarkably similar. From these wordings, we should assume that the Drake-Mellon, French-Drake, and Dutch-Drake maps were derived from the Whitehall map. Earlier researchers, for example, Shirley (1993, entries 149 and 151), have further concluded that the Dutch-Drake map is a copy of the French-Drake map. We agree with this conclusion.
The Drake-Mellon, French-Drake, and Dutch-Drake maps also have cartouches in their upper left, and the texts in these are also similar to each other. And in this case, a fourth map, the Hondius Broadside, contains a title box with similar text, as shown in Table 2.
Table 2. Comparison of texts in the upper-left cartouches of the Drake-Mellon, French-Drake, and Dutch-Drake maps and the title box of the Broadside map.
Using these translations for the text in the cartouches, we can easily infer the flow of information from the Whitehall map to the Hondius Broadside map indicated in Figure 1. Moreover, all four of these maps have cartouches in the bottom corners. Those in the bottom-right represent the Golden Hind being aground on a shoal off of Celebes island in January of 1580. The cartouches in the bottom-left corners show the Golden Hind being triumphantly towed into Ternate, one of the Moluccas islands. We now wish to offer evidence for the information flow arrows from the Whitehall map to the Hakluyt text, to the Silver maps, and thence to the Hondius Broadside map.
Isla Mocha, off the central Chilean coast (38° S, 74° W), was a significant stop for Drake and his men. Two of his crew were killed and Drake was shot with arrows. This island is shown as a stop and is labeled as Mucho on the Drake-Mellon map, the Silver maps, and the Hondius Broadside map and is described in detail in the text “The famous voyage of Sir Francis Drake …” (Hakluyt 1589; Drake 1628). Therefore, Isla Mocha is a link between these sources of information. The French-Drake and Dutch-Drake maps did not label the island. Therefore, they are more distant from the Whitehall map.
The Silver maps and the Hondius Broadside map show a large inland lake, the precursor of the Salton Sea in southern California. The Drake-Mellon, French-Drake, and Dutch-Drake maps do not show this lake. The Silver and Broadside maps also show and label the Pacific Ocean islands named Rocca Partida, Cazones, I. de Pasiao, and Ambon. The Drake-Mellon, French-Drake, and Dutch-Drake maps might show these islands but they do not label them. Again, this shows the affinity of the Silver maps and the Hondius Broadside map and their detachment from the Drake-Mellon, French-Drake, and Dutch-Drake maps.
The Drake-Mellon, French-Drake, and Dutch-Drake maps draw Japan as a horizontal oval centered on 155° W latitude. The Silver, Broadside, and de Bry maps orient it vertically centered on 175° E.
These paragraphs suggest that there was an information flow from the Whitehall map to the Hakluyt text to the Silver Maps and finally to the Hondius Broadside map. The French-Drake and Dutch-Drake maps were not a part of this flow.
Girolamo Ruscelli, in his Orbis Descriptio map in his 1561 atlas La Geografia di Claidio Tolomeo Alessandrino, put an enormous bulge on the coast of Chile. This bulge is more than four times the size of Spain. He was followed by Pablo Forlani in 1562, Giacomo Gastaldi circa 1561 and 1565, Diogo Homen in 1565, and many others. This bulge lies between the Tropic of Capricorn (23.4° S) and 45° S latitude as shown in the lefthand portion of Figure 9 (Bahill 2022a).
Figure 9. Parts of Typus Orbis Terrarum by Ortelius 1587 (P2S2) (left) and 1588 (P2S3) (right). Land to the west of the green line is the bulge (Bahill 2022a). The only differences between the two maps are to the left of the green line. To the right of the green line, land, rivers, mountains, and other toponyms on these maps can be superimposed. The abbreviations P2S2 and P2S3 stand for plate-2 state-2 and plate-2 state-3, respectively. It is shorthand to distinguish maps with small variations (Shirley 1983). These are in Ortelius oval map projections. Parallels of latitude and meridians of longitude are spaced ten degrees apart.
Abraham Ortelius published his atlas Theatrum Orbis Terrarum in 1570. Then he updated and reissued it just about every year. The Typus Orbis Terrarum maps in his atlases from 1570 to 1587 had this enormous bulge on the coast of Chile, as he was (along with Mercator in 1569) an early adopter of this feature. Others followed Ortelius by adding bulges to their coasts of Chile, for example, André Thevet 1575, Francisco de Belleforest 1575, Gerald de Jode 1578, Joan Martines 1582 and 1587, Rumold Mercator 1587, Urbano Monte 1587, Sebastian Munster 1580 and 1588, Cornelius De Jode 1589, Theodor de Bry 1592, Michael Mercator 1595, and Arnoldo di Arnoldi, 1600. Note that URLs for these maps (and others mentioned without a formal reference in this paper) are available in our database at sysengr.engr.arizona.edu/URLsForSixteenthCenturyMaps.xlsx.
Drake was known to have taken maps with him on his trip of circumnavagation. Furthermore, whenever he seized a Spanish ship, he took their maps and navigation charts. He may have had some of the above-mentioned maps with him. However, no known European explorer or cartographer had been to this section of the coast of Chile before Drake in 1578.
Magellan sailed through this area. Albo’s log of Magellan’s route (Albo 1874) lists him as cruising northward along the Chilean coast from 48° S latitude up to 36° S latitude where he headed west out into the Pacific Ocean. But Magellan left no maps. Ribero made an accurate map in 1529, but it only went up as far as 52° S.
Therefore, when Drake followed existing, unfounded maps, he got lost.
Several textural descriptions of Drake’s voyage describe his sailing from the southern tip of South America. Nuño da Silva’s
Nuño da Silva was a Portuguese pilot. He was captured by Drake in the Cape Verdes in January of 1578 and was released in Mexico in May 1579. He served as Drake’s pilot along both sides of South America.
deposition to the Spanish Inquisition (Wagner 1926, 342; Moreno Madrid 2022) stated that from November 1 to 5 they sailed northwest. This is four-plus days. Assume they sailed at a slow 50 miles (80 km) per day. This would give them over 200 miles (320 km). The protrusion on the Wright-Molyneux 1599 map (Gitzen, 2014) of Figure 10 is about 220 miles (350 km) at 49° S latitude. Da Silva continued, then they changed direction to the northeast for a few days and then to the north for 20 days: finally, they landed at Isla Mocha (Mucho Island). This meandering is described by the red track at the southern end of South America in Figure 10. The above synopsis is from Nuño da Silva’s deposition. However, there are several similar descriptions.
This same description is given in The World Encompassed (Drake 1854, 92–93), “The famous voyage of Sir Francis Drake” (Hakluyt 1589), The Anonymous Narrative (Wagner 1926, 277–285), The English Hero (R. B. 1695), and John Drake’s testimony before the Spanish Inquisition (Nuttall 1914).
Figure 10. A section of the Wright-Molyneux 1599 map showing South America with a part of Drake’s path shown in red. Other cartographers probably used this description (in red) to fill in the land behind it. This is a Mercator projection map. However, this does not preclude wind roses with correctly interconnected rhumb lines throughout the whole map. Parallels of latitude and meridians of longitude are spaced ten degrees apart.
This Chile bulge mistake in the maps seems to have vexed Captian Drake, who wrote
… we continued our course, November 1, [1578] still North-west, as wee had formerly done, but in going on we soone espied, that we might easily have beene deceived; and therefore casting about and steering upon another [compass] point, wee found, that the general mappes did erre from the truth in setting downe the coast of Peru,
Drake refers to the whole South American coast as Peru, not differentiating between Chile and Peru. After describing the section of the coast between 52° S and 40° S latitude, he continues:
… perceiving hereby that no man had ever by travell discovered any part of these 12. deg., and therefore the setters forth of such descriptions are not to be trusted, much less honored, in their false and fraudulent coniectures which they use, not in this alone, but in divers other points of no small importance.” (Drake 1854, 92–93)
At the end of his circumnavigation of the world, Drake returned to England in 1580. We conjecture that he expressed his displeasure to some cartographers and presumably he corrected the coast of Chile on his Whitehall map because afterwards, there was a proliferation of changes to this coastline. When the changes appeared, there were three distinct manifestations: one group of cartographers omitted the bulge entirely (Figure 9), a second group shrunk the bulge and made it a small protrusion between 52° S and 44° S latitude (Figures 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, and 10) and finally a third group fell behind the times and continued to publish maps with the big bulge on the coast of Chile.
Ortelius omitted the bulge on his Typus Orbis Terrarum map that was printed in 1588 (Figure 9, right). He did the same on his Americae Sive 1587,
This map is dated 1587. So, it seems to have an earlier date than the 1588 Ortelius Totius Orbis Terrarum. In addition, the Novus Orbis map that was published in Paris and is dated 1587 and was included in Hakluyt’s text of 1587 also seems to have a confusingly earlier date.
and his Maris Pacifici 1589. For the most part, these maps were all contained in his atlases: they were not published individually. This, therefore, makes their dating fairly certain. However, we do not know the month in 1588 when he published his map. So, we do not know if he had a head start on the other C8 cartographers.
Ortelius and his followers constituted the first group of cartographers who either removed the bulge on the southern coast of Chile after 1588 or had never put it there in the first place. These cartographers included: the Silver maps 1589, Plancius 1590 and 1594, C. de Jode 1593 (Brasilia et Peruvia), Vrients 1596, Lavanha & Teixeira 1597, Hondius 1592 and 1597, and Ricci 1602 (Bahill 2022a).
Our second and most important group of cartographers did not omit the bulge but instead shrunk it and made it a small, protrusion between 52° S and 44° S latitude with a peak at 49° S (see Figures 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, and 10). They moved it around a thousand miles (1600 km) down the coast. The average area of the bulge on these maps is 10% of that of the large bulges on pre-1588 maps (Bahill 2022a). Maps and other artifacts that have this small protrusion at the very southern end of South America include the 1580 Whitehall map (probably), the 1589 Drake-Mellon map, the 1589 Hakluyt text, the 1589 French-Drake map, the 1594 Dutch-Drake map, the 1592 Molyneux globe, the 1595 Hondius Broadside map, the 1599 Theodor de Bry map, and the 1599 Wright and Molyneaux map of Figure 10; but not the 1589 Silver maps. This group is the C9 plus the Wright and Molyneaux map but without the Silver maps.
The red path shown in Figure 10 was constructed from descriptions given in “The famous voyage of Sir Francis Drake” (Wagner 1926, 277–285; 342; Moreno Madrid 2022; Drake 1854, 92–93; Hakluyt 1589; R. B. 1695). It outlines the small protrusions that are seen on the maps of the second group of cartographers. These protrusions are almost the same among the C8-minus-Silver-maps and no other maps have this protrusion.
The 1602 LeClerc and Hondius Orbis Terrae Novissima Descriptio also has this protrusion (Shirley 1983, entry 233) but it is not included in our C9 because it does not have Drake’s route of circumnavigation and it was published in the seventeenth century.
This is strong evidence of a common ancestor for these maps, shown in Figure 12—namely the Whitehall map or “The famous voyage of Sir Francis Drake” text.
We speculate that cartographers started with this description of Drake’s path (in red in figure 10) and filled in the land behind it. In Figure 10 and the C8, toponyms are dense along the whole coast of South America, except along this fictitious peninsula. Cartographers typically invented toponyms to fill in empty space. But they did not do that here. This must mean that they had no information and, in this case, they did not want to invent any.
This description of the Chilean coast of South America was probably one of the Queen’s most prized secrets because at the time there were no good maps of this region and the undocumented maps that Drake had on board got him lost.
The third, and least important, group of cartographers did not get the word and continued to publish maps with the bulge on the southern coast of Chile; for example, Munster 1588, C. De Jode 1589, Theodor de Bry 1592, M. Mercator 1595, and Ruscelli 1599.
Because this section is so important, it merits a summary. Starting in 1561 several cartographers drew their nautical world maps with a huge bulge on the coast of Chile. Within the next dozen years, many cartographers followed suit. It is quite likely that the maps Drake had with him on his voyage of circumnavigation had this incorrect bulge, causing him difficulty navigating the southern coast of Chile. When Drake returned to England, we speculate that he had stern words with cartographers about their “false and fraudulent coniectures.” Speculating again, we suggest that this caused them to correct their mistakes in one of two ways. The maps show that one group of cartographers omitted the bulge completely and the second group shrunk the bulge and moved it to the southern tip of Chile. Most of our C9 were in the second group (all except for the Silver maps). This shows a previously unnoticed commonality of the C9 that is not described in the literature.
The main purpose of this section is to show the relationships between the C9 as shown in Figure 1. We will start with the Drake-Mellon, French-Drake, and Dutch-Drake maps. These relationships, shown in Table 3, help derive the years of disclosure of these maps and they help show who copied from whom.
Table 3. Similarities and differences between the Drake-Mellon map, the French-Drake map, and the Dutch-Drake map. Cells in a boldface font are especially important.
The comparisons in Table 3 imply that, first, the Drake-Mellon, the French-Drake, and the Dutch-Drake maps without a doubt drew information from the same common precursor, either directly (black arrows in Figure 1) or indirectly (grey arrows). Second, the Dutch-Drake map was derived from the French-Drake map (Shirley 1983). It probably did not draw information directly from the Whitehall map. It drew information from other contemporaneous maps. We can assume that the Drake-Mellon, the French-Drake, and indirectly the Dutch-Drake maps were derived from the same common precursor, the Whitehall map. Therefore, in this section, we will call these collectively the Whitehall-derived (WHD) maps. These three WHD maps look generally alike. In addition, the following specific features from Table 3 and earlier sections strongly suggest that these three maps had a common precursor.
Besides the maps mentioned in this paper, no other maps have all of the above features. Most assuredly, the three WHD maps had a common precursor, and that precursor was the Whitehall map.
The three WHD maps in Figures 2, 4, and 5 have the source of the Nile River in South Africa, as most other sixteenth-century nautical world maps. This model for the Nile River originated with Ptolemy in the Second Century AD.
The Drake-Mellon, French-Drake, and Dutch-Drake maps have simplistically drawn river systems. The French-Drake and Dutch-Drake maps, however, each have a river flowing out of the more southern of the Nile River source lakes going to the Atlantic Ocean near the Cape of Good Hope. In a similar way, the Drake-Mellon map, and some other sixteenth-century maps have a river flowing from one of these lakes to the Indian Ocean. Thus, many maps have a continuous, but non-navigable, waterway from the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic and/or the Indian Ocean in Southern Africa.
The handwriting in the cartouches is different in the three WHD maps. See in particular the handwriting in the upper-left cartouche. These differences suggest that these three maps had different illustrators/engravers.
Both the French-Drake and the Dutch-Drake maps mistakenly label the Moluccas Islands at 20° N latitude. However, these are the Mariana Islands. The Moluccas Islands are on the equator. The Drake-Mellon map correctly labels these Mariana Islands as Ini Ladrones.
Between 1545 and 1600, most maps that included South America represented the Amazon River shaped as a giant snake, as in Figures 2, 3, 9, and 10 (Bahill and Gitzen 2021). Of our three WHD maps, only the Drake-Mellon map has this feature. We do not know about the Whitehall map but it might have been influenced by the Sebastian Cabot map of 1544 and that map does represent the Amazon River shaped as a giant snake.
The Drake-Mellon manuscript map was made with pen, ink, and watercolors on vellum. As a result, only one copy was probably made, unlike the French-Drake and Dutch-Drake maps, which were printed from engraved copper plates. That one copy is now in the Yale University Library. It is an undated manuscript map. Below the label for VIRGINEA is this text (originally in Latin): “VIRGINEA Colony was led into this part of the continent by Walter Raleigh knight in 1583.” Therefore, this map was surely finished after 1583. Raleigh was knighted in 1585. If the labeling of Virginia and the route of Drake’s Caribbean voyage were added to this map at a later date (for example after 1586), then the Drake-Mellon map could be the original Whitehall map!
A grossly incorrect feature on the French-Drake map is a peninsula protruding from Marseille, France almost to Africa. The western Mediterranean Sea had been drawn accurately on many fourteenth- and fifteenth-century portolan charts. Therefore, the introduction of such a careless error is surprising. Greg McIntosh (in a personal communication) wrote that this appears “to be an area of the plate that was left unengraved by mistake, then made into a coastline. Very strange. Most likely an error of the engraver, not of the cartographer.”
Another mistake on this French-Drake map was drawing Madagascar as several small islands close to the coast of Africa. From Gemma Frisius’s 1544 Charta Cosmographica and afterward, almost everyone drew Madagascar as one large island quite detached from Africa. One final mistake is the huge island (the size of Great Britain) between India and the Horn of Africa. Wallis (1984) suggested that the cartographer of the Drake-Mellon map had more time to study the Whitehall map than the cartographer of the French-Drake map and therefore was more correct.
The following two items are unique to the French-Drake map, but they do not help us to differentiate or date the maps. In some Medieval and Renaissance styles of writing, the letter z stood for the number 2. This evaluation criterion differentiates maps from the first and second halves of the sixteenth century, with earlier maps more likely to use z=2. In concurrence, the last map we have found with this is the D. Teixeira 1573 World map (Bahill 2021). The French-Drake map is anomalous in this respect because it consistently used z=2. This could hint at an earlier year for the French-Drake map. The French-Drake map had two icons of Queen Elizabeth’s coat of arms, one below Terra del Fuego and the other west of Nova Albion. This also did not help date this map.
The bottom center cartouches on all three WHD maps state that below the Strait of Magellan, there are many islands and not a large continent. Earlier maps, for example, by Mercator in 1569 and Ortelius in 1570, show a southern continent (Terra Australis) close to the South American mainland, so that the Strait of Magellan is the only route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. However, the French-Drake, Dutch-Drake, Hondius Broadside, and Silver maps have their southern continent around 500 to 700 miles away from the South American mainland. This is the Drake Passage.
The Drake-Mellon map, the J. S. G map in Hakluyt (1587) (sometimes called the Martyr-Hakluyt map), the Molyneux globe, the De Bry map, and the Wright-Molyneux map do not have this southern continent at all. Therefore, they also have ample room for the Drake Passage below South America. Most other maps of this era have Terra Australis close to the South American mainland. This wide passage was touted by many as an important discovery by Drake. All of the C8 have this wide Drake Passage.
Drawing Terra Australis on a sixteenth-century map was certainly not new. The first such representation may have been on the Piri Reis 1513 map (McIntosh 2000). Later cartographers who did this included Cabot in 1544, Mercator in 1569, and Ortelius in 1570. What was unique about the French-Drake, Dutch-Drake, Hondius Broadside, and Silver maps was leaving a large expanse of open ocean south of mainland South America and north of Terra Australis.
The C8 correctly did not put toponyms on Terra Australis. Sixteenth-century maps with toponyms on the Terra Australis are pure fantasy. These can be found, for example, in Gutiérrez & Cock 1562, G. Mercator 1569, Ortelius 1570 to 1587, Thevet 1575, R. Mercator 1587, Plancius 1590 and 1594, De Jode 1593, and Van Langren 1596.
The Dutch-Drake map cleaned up some of the French-Drake map’s mistakes by (1) removing the peninsula protruding from Marseille, France almost to Africa, (2) drawing Madagascar as one large island well separated from Africa, (3) removing the huge island between India and the Horn of Africa, and (4) adding land above Europe, north of the Arctic Circle. It left some mistakes, and it added some of its own, such as moving the Azores east of the zero-longitude meridian.
The Dutch-Drake map uses Dutch and French for the cartouches, Latin and Spanish for toponyms, and French for the title. The Dutch-Drake map shows a wide Northwest passage. IThis passage looks similar to those of Gerald Mercator 1569, Ortelius 1570–1587, Belleforest 1575, Urbano Monte 1587, and Rumold Mercator 1587. It has also added the Northeast Passage and Florida.
There are two versions or states of the Dutch-Drake map. The one in the Huntington Library has the letters MA RE O C CE AN US spread out across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The copies at Christie’s (since sold, but an image can still be reviewed) and Daniel Crouch Rare Books (Figure 5) instead spell out MAR DEL NORTE, OCEANUS AETIODICUS, and MAR INDICUM (Aker 1970, 77).
A very strange feature of the Dutch-Drake map is that it labels the meridians of longitude starting with zero and increasing going westward to 360°. The only other cartographer that we know of who consistently followed this practice was Herman Moll, who published in the eighteenth century. We have no conjecture about this very odd feature.
The Silver maps were commissioned by Drake. We assume that he gave the cartographer directions and maybe a map with his route of circumnavigation. Therefore, the cartographer would not have needed to see the Whitehall map. Thus, the arrow from the Whitehall map to the Silver maps has been diminished going from Figure 1 to Figure 12. The cartographer of the Silver maps was not Michael Mercator. Born in 1567, he was probably too young. He was the engraver of only the cartouche and the maker of only one of the silver medallions. The handwriting in the cartouche is different than the handwriting on the rest of the medal (Bahill 2022b).
The Silver maps label the landing at Mucho island (the Drake-Mellon map, the Broadside map, and the Hakluyt text also do) and do not have the landings at Río de la Plata, S. Julian, Pe lima, and Sierra Leone as the French-Drake and Dutch-Drake maps do.
The Silver maps are the only constituents of the C8 that removed the bulge on the coast of Chile, like the Ortelius 1588 Typus Orbis Terrarum (Figure 9), unlike the other C8 that shrank it and moved it to the southern tip of Chile as shown in Figure 10. Hence the Silver maps have minimal relationships with the three WHD maps.
Another unique feature is that only the Silver maps, the Drake-Mellon map, and the Molyneux globe label Virginia. The Silver maps label Terra Australis and place it far away from South America, so that there is plenty of room for the Drake Passage. Only the French-Drake, Dutch-Drake, Hondius Broadside, and Silver maps have this feature.
The Silver maps do not have the cartouches that (1) state “Since almost all think that south of this part is a Continent … ,” (2) show the Golden Hind being towed ceremoniously into Ternate, or (3) show the Golden Hind grounded on a reef near Celebes island.
These features emphasize that the Silver maps are different from the WHD maps. The Silver maps have greater affinity with the Hakluyt text and the Ortelius Typus Orbis Terrarum map. We conclude that the cartographer of the Silver maps received his information from Drake himself, whereas the cartographers for the Whitehall-derived maps received their information from the Whitehall map.
The Molyneux Globe 1592 has the routes of circumnavigation of both Sir Francis Drake 1577–80 and Sir Thomas Cavendish 1586–88. The Molyneux globe has the distinctive bulge at the southern tip of Chile (Wallis 1984, 152).
The Jodocius Hondius 1595 map, Vera Totius Exbitionis Nautica, nicknamed Broadside, is similar to the Drake-Mellon, French-Drake, and Dutch-Drake maps, with respect to Drake’s route of circumnavigation and the cartouches at the bottom of the maps.
This map has an additional inset in the upper-left corner labeled “Portus Novae Albionis” that describes the place where Drake spent five weeks in the summer of 1579. However, this is not useful for us, because in 1700 AD the magnitude 9 Cascadia Earthquake and its resulting 40 foot (12 m) tsunami wave resculpted the Pacific northwest coast (Schulz 2015; Williams, Marken, and Peterson 2017). Therefore, the bay shown in the inset in the upper-left corner of the map and the place where Drake spent those five weeks, if it still exists, would be completely unrecognizable today.
Its major difference is that it uses the Mercator double-hemisphere equatorial stereographic projection instead of an equirectangular. However, numbers along the equator indicating longitude in the western hemisphere are all ten degrees too large. This map is 56 cm wide and 41 cm high.
The 1599 De Bry map is a copy of the 1595 Hondius Broadside map, except that it has no cartouches or graticule. The De Bry map has the distinctive small bulge on the southern coast of Chile. Although it is not as distinctive as the other C9 maps, it does complete the collection of sixteenth-century maps with Drake’s route of circumnavigation. There are many copies of this map in varied sizes. The map on the front cover of his book is about 23 cm wide and 12 cm high.
One of our not-very-speculative conclusions is that the Dutch-Drake map was copied from the French-Drake map. This is also the conclusion of Shirley (1983) and of many others. The Dutch-Drake map was made in a later year by a mapmaker different than the one that made the French-Drake map. The general route of Drake’s circumnavigation is the same on both maps. However, the Dutch-Drake map has many additional toponyms that are not on the French-Drake map, such as California, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Saint Helena; no toponyms from the French-Drake map were removed. Secondly, the Dutch-Drake map more accurately depicts the shapes of the Black Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, Madagascar, Newfoundland, and all lands north of the Arctic Circle. As expected, new knowledge made the copy more correct than the original. Third, the handwriting in the cartouches is different between the two maps. The original and the copy were engraved by different hands. Figure 1 shows the Drake-Mellon and French-Drake maps being derived from the Whitehall map and the Dutch-Drake map being derived from the French-Drake map. There is no evidence that the creator of the Dutch-Drake map used any information directly from the Drake-Mellon map or the Whitehall map.
Our second conclusion about copying is that the French-Drake map was not copied from the Drake-Mellon map. One piece of evidence for this is the shapes of the Amazon River. Between 1545 and 1600, most maps that included South America represented the Amazon River as a giant snake, as in Figures 2, 3, 9, and 10 (Bahill and Gitzen 2021). The Drake-Mellon map has this feature, but the French-Drake map does not. Drake’s maximum northern latitude is 39° on the Drake-Mellon map and 45° on the French-Drake map. This was a key point that was widely discussed, as it would help determine how much land the English could claim from the Spanish along the Pacific coast of North America. On the Drake-Mellon map, the shape of Madagascar is correctly shown as one large island, whereas the French-Drake map shows it as many small islands near the coast of Africia. The Drake-Mellon map labeled three regions in North America, namely California, Florida and Virgina. If the cartographer of the French-Drake map had seen this he surely could have remembered them and put them on his map. These two maps were both disclosed in 1589, so there was not enough time for either to copy from the other. Finally, the Drake-Mellon map is a manuscript map: we speculate that it was hidden in the privy chamber of the Queen’s palace to shield it from the prying eyes of the despicable Spanish.
The purpose of these last two sections has been to show the relationships between the C9. These relationships were applied to Figure 1 to produce Figure 12. No one fact is responsible for any one arrow, but taken together, all of these facts constitute evidence for the arrows. The next section will derive the dates shown in Figure 12.
Our earliest disclosure dates are usually a year after the event that precipitated them. For example, Queen Elizabeth’s ban on disclosing details of Drake’s circumnavigation ended in August of 1588. It is unlikely that some cartographer had a map all ready to go when the ban on disclosure evaporated, so that they could quickly release it in the last months of 1588. Therefore, our earliest dates of disclosure are 1589.
Furthermore, we think that it would take around a year to learn a new map projection, engrave a new map or set of dies, and then publish the map or stamp the medallions. For example, the Mercator double-hemisphere equatorial stereographic map projection was first published in 1587 by Rumold Mercator. So, maps that used this projection were certainly made years after 1587. Indeed, the first maps adopting this map projection were the 1589 Silver maps and the Plancius 1590 map. Similarly, the name Virginia originated in 1584, but it did not appear on a known map until the 1587 Hakluyt-Martyr map (Hakluyt 1587, 19).
The purpose of this section is to present evidence for the years of disclosure given in Figure 12. For maps that were printed, this would be the year of publication, if this were known. For one-of-a-kind objects, like the Whitehall map, the Drake-Mellon map, or the Molyneux globe, this would be the year the creator gave the object to its recipient or made it open for public view. Thus, these would be the years that:
This section breaches our general principle of using only information printed on maps.
Drake’s route of circumnavigation was kept secret for over eight years. Queen Elizabeth wanted to keep all of Drake’s discoveries secret from the Spanish, whom she loathed. Therefore, in 1580, she forbade Drake’s crew from revealing any of these state secrets under pain of death.
Here is a review of the extinction of the Queen’s ban. “Drake had been given express orders that ‘none shall make any charts or descriptions of the said voyage,’ a prohibition of publication that was to remain in force until 1588” (Harley 1988, 61). “Secrecy about the Drake voyage was kept through the decade. When the new edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles was published in 1587, it was immediately recalled and censored” (Kelsey 1990, 448). “A further prohibition of any publication giving details of the route and reports of the discoveries appears to have been in force until at least 1588” (Wallis 1984, 136). In 1589 four important descriptions of Drake’s route of circumnavigation were published (Toppin 2013), namely: (1) Vera descriptio expeditionis nauticae Francisci Draci Angli, colloquially called the Drake-Mellon map; (2) Richard Hakluyt, “The famous voyage of Sir Francis Drake…” in The Principall navigations, voiages and discoveries of the English nation, (text only, no map); (3) the Silver maps; and (4) the French-Drake, La Herdike Enterprinse Faict Par Le Signeur Draeck D’Avoir Cirquit Toute La Terre. Because of Queen Elizabeth’s ban on disclosing information, we think that all of the Whitehall map derivatives were first disclosed in 1589.
In August of 1588, the English navy and a fierce storm in the North Sea destroyed almost all of the Spanish ships, sailors, and soldiers of the Armada. After this calamity for her enemies, the Queen no longer feared the Spanish, and thus her ban on disclosing details of Drake’s circumnavigation faded away. Thomas Cavendish completed the third circumnavigation of the world just a month after the defeat of the Spanish Armada and his maps and journals were not subjected to the secrecy that Drake’s were.
If the French-Drake and the Dutch-Drake maps were printed on the European continent, then they may have escaped the Queen’s ban on divulging information. But then, how did the cartographers get their information? The Queen’s ban seems to have been highly effective for eight years: there were no documented leaks.
The prohibition of disclosing information about Drake’s circumnavigation is our strongest evidence for dating all of the C8 as after 1588. In the following paragraphs, we will abbreviate this as “QueensBanEnded1588.”
Our policy is that we try to only use information contained in maps. We prefer not to rely on (1) historical texts, (2) family, friendship, and religious relationships, (3) geographical location of the cartographers, or (4) present-day human biases, speculation, and mistranslations. In this subsection, we will break with this policy and offer speculation based on historical texts.
Maps of South America were becoming common in the first half of the sixteenth century. However, in the middle of the sixteenth century, on the west coast of Chile, cartographers introduced a large bulge, a bulge three times the size of Chile itself. These are probably the maps that Drake had with him when he rounded the bottom of South America. He started following these maps, but their inaccuracy, along with severe weather, left him wandering the South Pacific. He was angry with the cartographers who provided such lousy maps. On his voyage home he and his cousin John made some good world maps that included the South and North American Pacific Ocean coasts. When he returned to England, he gave an accurate world map to Queen Elizabeth. She loved it, but she did not want the dirty-rotten Spanish scoundrels to profit from knowledge about Drake’s voyage. So, she forbade Drake’s crew from disclosing any details. It worked. Everyone kept silent.
About eight years later, after the English navy and a horrendous storm demolished the Spanish Armada, the Queen stopped fearing the Spanish and her ban on disclosing details of Drake’s circumnavigation faded away. During those eight years, many cartographers evidently began to doubt the existence of the great bulge on the coast of Chile.
Ortelius had been updating his Typus Orbis Terrarum map annually for twenty years. Suddenly, in 1588, he dramatically removed the bulge on the coast of Chile on his Typus Orbis Terrarum and two other maps. What followed was a mad scramble by other cartographers to publish their maps without this bulge. A large group of cartographers simply chopped off the bulge, as shown in Figure 9. However, the C8 (without the Silver maps) shrank it and moved it down a thousand miles (sixteen hundred km) to the southern tip of Chile (see Figure 10).
Cartographers who had seen the Whitehall map or had heard Drake’s complaints had a head start on fixing the bulge on their maps. This likely applies to Ortelius, Drake-Mellon, French-Drake, the Silver maps, the Hakluyt text, and Hondius. They may have even secretly started revising their maps earlier. Thus, they were able to get their maps out in 1588–90. For those who did not see the Whitehall map, it took longer for them to get their maps published. However, we date all of the C8 as after 1588. In the following paragraphs, we will abbreviate this as “ChileBulgeRemoved1588.”
The equirectangular map projection was used almost exclusively by European cartographers in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. All three of the Whitehall-derived maps (the Drake-Mellon, French-Drake, and Dutch-Drake) used this projection, which by the late sixteenth century had become antiquated and uncommon. For maps published in Shirley (1983) between 1587 and 1607, less than ten percent used an equirectangular map projection; between 1620 and 1650, none did. These WHD maps were likely some of the last equirectangular maps made in the sixteenth century.
The 1589 Silver maps, the 1590 and 1595 Jodocius Hondius Broadside map, the Plancius 1590 map, and the 1599 Theodor de Bry map used a Mercator double-hemisphere equatorial stereographic projection. This map projection was developed by Rumold Mercator and was first published in 1587. This fixes the earliest creation year for these three maps as 1588. This is compelling evidence for dating these maps. In the following paragraphs, we will abbreviate this as “MapProjectionInvented1587.”
The three WHD maps in Figures 2, 4, and 5 use the Ptolemaic model for the Nile River system. This model originated with Ptolemy in the second century CE, and began to spread to European maps once his Geographica was translated into Latin in the late fifteenth century. In the basic model there are four (or possibly two) lakes around 10° S latitude. Their inputs come from a range of mountains to the south known as the Montes Lunae or Mountains of the Moon. The outputs of these lakes feed the White Nile going north, which merges with the Blue Nile to form the Nile River that flows north to the Mediterranean Sea. From the late fifteenth century, this model remained the standard up through the mid nineteenth century.
The 1501–02 Kunstmann III map (Figure 11) was a watershed in African cartography (McIntosh and Gaspar 2021). It was the first sixteenth-century map with this model of the Nile River, though not the first map to show the sources of the Nile in the Mountains of the Moon. The contemporary world maps of Cantino 1502 and Juan de la Cosa 1500 do not have use the Ptolemaic model for the Nile River, though Waldseemüller 1507 and later sixteenth-century maps do (Van Duzer 2020). The Kunstmann III is also the first of the portolan latitude maps. It has a scale of latitude and a rudimentary scale of longitude, as shown in Figure 11. The Kunstmann III map is the predecessor for sixteenth-century maps of Africa.
Figure 11. The Kunstmann III 1501–02 map. See also McIntosh and Gaspar (2021, 164). www.raremaps.com/gallery/detail/66577/early-photographic-facsimile-of-kunstmann-iii-anonymous. This is an equirectangular latitude chart. It has a latitude scale on the upper-left side. Numerous toponyms arranged perpendicular to the coasts, rhumb lines emanating from the compass/wind roses, and the red circle through them emphasize the map’s portolan chart roots. However, the large amount of inland detail and the latitude scale belie its portolan chart origins.
Between 1545 and 1600, most maps that included South America represented the Amazon River shaped as a giant snake, as in Figures 2, 3, 9, and 10 (Bahill and Gitzen, 2021). The first exploration of the Amazon River by Europeans occurred in 1541–42. For the next 60 years, few Europeans explored the Amazon, so the information about it remained static. Then around the turn of the seventeenth century, many explorers and proselytizers traversed South America. Knowledge about the shape of the Amazon River became better. This new knowledge instigated the creation of better models with straight lines rather than snake-like undulations. Of our three WHD maps, only the Drake-Mellon map has this snake-like river model. The Broadside map does not have the Amazon River at all. Strangely, the French-Drake and Dutch-Drake maps represent the Amazon as a straight, wide river: this suggests that they were made later.
In the sixteenth century, Virginia referred to the east coast region of North America not occupied by Spain or France, roughly present-day North Carolina. In 1584, Sir Walter Raleigh sycophantically suggested the name Virginia for this region in honor of Queen Elizabeth, who was known as the Virgin Queen. Later in that same year, Arthur Barlowe, in “The First Voyage to Roanoke” (Hakluyt 1589), lavishly described “the country now called Virginia.” The next year Raleigh established a colony on Roanoke Island in this region.
The earliest use of this name on a map was likely in Hakluyt’s publication of Peter Martyr’s De Novo Orbe on a map dated 1587 (Hakluyt 1587; Verner 1950).
This map is titled Novis Orbis. It is signed F. G. S. and is dated 1587. It is contained in Hakluyt’s revised edition of Peter Martyr’s De Novo Orbe which was published in Latin in Paris in 1587. Two 1889 copies of the original 1587 map are available online, one in the David Rumsey Map Collection at (www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/s/98740o) and one at the Art Institute of Chicago (www.artic.edu/artworks/152508/novus-orbis).
The Drake-Mellon map, the Silver maps, and the Molyneux globe have the label “Virginia” (or “Virginea”). Therefore, they were probably made after 1587. In the following paragraphs, we will abbreviate this as “NameVirginaUsed1587.”
Drake returned to England in September 1580. In his first meeting with Queen Elizabeth, Drake presented her with a large map. There is no doubt about when Drake gave the Whitehall map to Queen Elizabeth. Thus, we assign it a year of disclosure of 1580.
The Drake-Mellon map has Drake’s route of circumnavigation and his Caribbean Sea voyage of 1585–86. Therefore, this map must have been made after the Caribbean trip ended in 1586, assuming that this route was not added later to the finished map. Therefore, this map was certainly created after 1586. This map represents the Amazon River shaped like a giant snake; therefore, it was surely made before 1600.
For the above reasons and because of the factors of the QueensBanEnded1588, the ChileBulgeRemoved1588, and the NameVirginaUsed1587, we date the Drake-Mellon map as 1589.
There are nine known existing medallions with the Drake Silver map. The Library of Congress has two of them and gives the location of the others (Kraus 2022b, item 58). One of these has a cartouche on the old-world side that reads “Micha Merci: fiat extat Londi: prop tempt ũ Gallo: Ano 1589.” We translate this as “Made in London by Michael Mercator … 1589 CE.” Therefore, there is no controversy about when this particular medallion was made. Because this cartouche was engraved on the die, this has to be the last of the known medallions made with this die (Christy 1900). The others were made before it, as they feature no cartouche, which is the only known difference between the nine existing medallions. We date the Silver maps as 1589.
There are other points in favor of this year. These medallions used the Mercator double-hemisphere equatorial stereographic map projection that was first published in 1587 by Rumold Mercator. So, they were certainly made after 1587 (Bahill 2022b). This is our strongest point.
Probably sometime after the destruction of the Spanish Armada in 1588, Drake commissioned these remarkable silver medallions with his route of circumnavigation engraved upon it. We think that it would certainly take more than a quarter of a year to engrave a set of dies and stamp medallions.
Unless the cartographer was Rumold Mercator, who had already engraved the plates for his Orbis Terrae Compendiosa Descriptio map using his Mercator double-hemisphere equatorial stereographic map projection.
Therefore, this further supports the notion that the earliest year of disclosure should be 1589.
For the above reasons but mostly because the QueensBanEnded1588, the ChileBulgeRemoved1588, the MapProjectionInvented1587, and the NameVirginaUsed1587, we think that the Drake Silver map with Michael Mercator’s cartouche was made in 1589. The other Silver medallions were most likely made earlier in that same year.
A thousand copies of Richard Hakluyt’s The Principall navigations, voiages and discoveries of the English nation, were printed in London in 1589. A hundred dated copies are still in existence. Therefore, there is little doubt about the year of publication. This assumes that the twelve-page unnumbered section entitled “The famous voyage of Sir Francis Drake into the South Sea, and there hence about the whole Globe of the Earth, begun in the year of our Lord, 1577” was inserted in the original printing of the book and not in a later printing that surreptitiously kept the original publication year.
We assume that Hakluyt collected the 800-plus pages that he wanted in his book. He arranged them in sequence and numbered the pages. Then after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, he added the twelve unnumbered pages in between the pages numbered 643 and 644. These are images 661 and 674 in the Library of Congress copy at memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=rbdk&fileName=d027/rbdkd027.db&recNum=661, and images 684 and 697 in the Hathitrust copy at babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=aeu.ark:/13960/t20c5qh1x&view=1up&seq=685.
There is no reason to doubt that Hakluyt’s text was published in 1589 and that the insert was published with it (Hakluyt 1589, between 643–644). For these reasons and because the QueensBanEnded1588 and the ChileBulgeRemoved1588, we date the Hakluyt text as 1589.
In the upper-left cartouche, this map calls Drake a Knight (Chevalier), so this map must have been printed after Queen Elizabeth knighted him in 1581.
Drake was born around 1541 (see footnote 1). The French-Drake map has a portrait of Drake in an oval frame stating that he was 42 years old when the portrait was painted. The original portrait, from which the image on the map came, had to be painted before the map was printed. Therefore, this map must have been printed after 1583.
Wagner (1926, 427–434) dates this map as 1641 because five of the six French-Drake maps that he examined were bound in 1641 French translations
Translation usually refers to translations of the text of an atlas not of text on the maps. In an atlas a single map might have up to a dozen pages of text associated with it. The translation would be of the text pages and perhaps the text on the verso side of the maps. They probably did not change the maps or the words on them.
of “The famous voyage of Sir Francis Drake….” However, this does not preclude the possibility of an earlier publication. The French-Drake map treats California as a peninsula, not as an island. Sixty percent of the maps made between 1625 and 1650 that are in Shirley (1983) treat California as an island. None of those published before 1625 do. This is a weak suggestion that the French-Drake map was published before 1625.
The French-Drake map has the statement, “A map seen and corrected by the aforesaid Sir Drake.” It is highly doubtful that his portrait and this statement were on the Whitehall map: it just does not fit the character of Drake (Wallis 1984, 143). Therefore, the French-Drake map might not have been copied from the Whitehall map, but rather from some apocryphal missing copy of it (Wallis 1984, 143): hence the grey dashed arrow in Figure 1. Because of the “A map seen and corrected by the aforesaid Sir Drake” and the fact that Drake died in 1596 means that the French-Drake map must have been made in 1596 or before.
For the above reasons but mostly because the QueensBanEnded1588 and the ChileBulgeRemoved1588, we date the French-Drake map as 1589.
The Dutch-Drake map is a copy of the French-Drake map. Therefore, it must have been made after the French-Drake map. The version in the Huntington Library is bound in with Bigges (1586) but Stephen Tabor, Curator of Rare Books, has suggested that this is a mis-binding. Furthermore, the Library of Congress’s version of Bigges has no maps. Wagner (1926, 424–426) dates the Dutch-Drake map as after 1587.
The Dutch-Drake map has a peninsula coming down from the North Pole near Russia that is labeled Nova Zembla. The Ortelius Typus Orbis Terrarum 1570 to 1595, R. Mercator 1587, Plancius 1594 Orbis Terrarum Typus …, Hondius 1597, and Van Langren 1596 maps also label this area but they spell it Nova Zemla. The Dutch-Drake map spells it Nova Zembla. Plancius and Waghenaer first used the Zembla spelling on maps in 1592. Therefore, the Dutch-Drake map was surely made after 1592. Nova Zembla on the Dutch-Drake map is drawn as a peninsula of one of the giant circumpolar islands. But in 1594 cartographers started correctly showing it as a discrete island far away from the North Pole. After 1598 almost everyone drew it as a discrete island. After 1603 no one showed it as a peninsula.
Our strongest evidence for dating the Dutch-Drake map as 1594 is its labeling of Nova Zembla and drawing it as a peninsula. It had to be after Plancius and Waghenaer first used the spelling Zembla on a map in 1592 and before everyone started drawing it as an independent island in 1598.
For the above reasons and also because the QueensBanEnded1588 and the ChileBulgeRemoved1588, we date the Dutch-Drake map as 1594.
The Emery Molyneux Petworth House Globe, which was unveiled in 1592, is displayed in the Petworth House (Wallis 1951). An early draft of it was shown to Queen Elizabeth in 1591. A copy of it, the Molyneux Middle Temple Globe that is kept in the Middle Temple, was printed from the same plates. This revision was made public in 1603.
The Jodocius Hondius map, Vera Totius Exbitionis Nautica (colloquially called the Broadside map) shows the circumnavigation routes of Sir Francis Drake 1577–80 and Sir Thomas Cavendish 1586–88. Therefore, it had to have been made after 1588. The the Library of Congress, dates its copy as around 1595 (lccn.loc.gov/92680608). However, some authors (e.g., Wallis 1984, 145; Toppin 2013, 4) speculate that Hondius might have published some of his Broadside maps while he was still in England around 1590. Daniel Crouch Rare Books dates it from 1589 to 1595 (crouchrarebooks.com/maps/the-drake-map).
For the above reasons and also because of the QueensBanEnded1588, the ChileBulgeRemoved1588, and the MapProjectionInvented1587, we date the Hondius Broadside map as after 1588, with 1590 likely and 1595 a sure thing.
The Theodor de Bry map was on the cover of his book America Pars VIII, which was published in 1599: library.princeton.edu/visual_materials/maps/websites/pacific/drake/map-world-drake-1599.jpg.
Table 4 lists the C9 along with their previously proposed publication years and our new years of disclosure. For maps that were printed, this would usually be the year of publication, if this were known. For one-of-a-kind objects, like the Whitehall map, Drake-Mellon map, or the Molyneux globe, this would be the year the creator gave the object to its recipient or made it open for public view.
Table 4. Years of disclosure for the C9.
The Whitehall map was not published. Only one copy of this map was made and it was presented to Queen Elizabeth by Francis Drake in 1580.
While Table 4 lists the previous estimates of the year of publication of the C9, we are not in a position to specifically refute each of these. Many scholars did not give detailed reasons for their speculation about creation dates. In any case, our fundamental guiding principle has been to use only the information on the maps themselves in making our arguments. We wanted to show that research papers could be written relying only on information available on the Internet.
So far in this paper, most statements have been based on the maps themselves. Now, however, in this section we switch to speculating that the French-Drake and Dutch-Drake maps were made on the European continent (Wagner 1926). This would mean that they would not have been subjected to the Queen’s prohibition on revealing details of Drake’s voyage and they, therefore, might have been printed before her ban lapsed in 1588. But then, what would have been their source of information? Such foreigners certainly would not have had access to the Whitehall map in the Queen’s privy chamber. Some authors speculate that Drake might have discussed his findings with these foreigners, given them a text with his findings, or shown (or given) them a copy of the Whitehall map. King Philip II’s ambassador to London, Bernardino de Mendoza, wrote to his King on 20 April 1582 that Mendoza’s spy, Sir James Crofts, had seen Drake’s chart and discussed it with him (Wagner 1926, 89). These authors offer, as supporting evidence for a leak, speculation that Drake gave a fancy copy of this map to his friend John Foxe, the Archbishop of Canterbury (Nuttall 1914, xxvii; 357). However, John Foxe was never the Archbishop of Canterbury. Nuttall (1914, xlv) also cites a letter written in 1585 by King Henry III of Navarre (soon to become King Henry IV of France) to Sir Francis Walsingham, where he “begs the Queen to command the ‘chevalier de Drac’ to send him the collection [of charts?] and the discourse of his great voyage” This means that as of 1585 King Henry still did not have a copy of the map. Therefore, it is not likely that there was a description of the Whitehall map that the makers of the French-Drake and Dutch-Drake maps used much before 1585.
Who made the information about Drake’s circumnavigation public? Drake himself was suspected of having leaked the information to someone. Could that someone have been Nicola van Sype, whoever he was? However, there is no evidence that the Queen was angry with Drake: he made her rich, she knighted him in 1581, gave him the commission to raid the Caribbean Sea in 1585–86, and made him Vice-Admiral of the fleet that destroyed the Spanish Armada in 1588. He was in her good graces throughout the decade. Therefore, Drake was not likely to have leaked the information.
Putting together everything presented in this paper we formulate the Continental Theory shown in Figure 12.
Figure 12. The Continental Theory for the relationships of the sixteenth-century objects that show Drake’s route of circumnavigation. Time runs roughly from the top to the bottom. The red dashed line divides maps made in England from those made on the European continent. Black arrows show information flows. Gray arrows show suspected information flows. Dashed grey arrows show ghost connections, that is, connections that may or may not have existed.
The fact that Ortelius chopped off the Chile bulge instead of shrinking it and moving it down to the bottom of Chile suggests that he did not see the Whitehall map. Instead, we speculate that he heard a discussion of it. Rather than feed information to the C9 cartographers of Figure 12, he mostly got information from them. He did not have Drake’s route of circumnavigation on his maps. He is in the figure because he knew everybody and everybody knew his maps.
The theory that the French-Drake map was made on the continent, and out of the Queen’s control, creates a puzzle as to why it sycophantically has two icons of Queen Elizabeth’s coat of arms, one below South America and the other west of Nova Albion. These indicate the Queen’s right of domain or authority over these regions.
The Continental Theory also requires that the Hondius 1590 and 1595 Broadside map be put on the dividing line between England and the Continent because much of its research and early development was done in England but it was finished and printed in Amsterdam.
There are limitations to using only information on published maps in research on nautical world maps. In this paper, we necessarily supplemented the information found on maps with information from texts when the maps were insufficient. For example texts were used for the date and place of publication because these are seldom on the maps themselves. Of the C8, only the De Bry map is explicitly dated.
Likewise we used texts to understand Queen Elizabeth’s ban on disclosing details of Drake’s circumnavigation, the destruction of the Spanish Armada, and the Queen’s subsequent ignoring of the ban; these facts were not on the maps.
The Whitehall Map has not been seen in five centuries. So, we used texts and maps to construct a textural and visual mental model of this map. We then compared this mental model to other maps. Secondly, some information was not put on maps, such as Drake’s meanderings south of the Strait of Magellan. To construct the route shown in Figure 10, we used written texts. For this reason, the route shown is questionable. Thirdly, the Continental Theory posits that the French-Drake and the Dutch-Drake maps were made on the continent, not in England. Such information is not on the maps themselves.
Using only information on published maps limited our research to maps made by European cartographers in the fourteenth century and onward. In fact, the C9 were all made by sixteenth-century English and probably French and Dutch cartographers. We used no maps by Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, or Chinese cartographers.
We did not use manuscript maps because their dates cannot be ascertained with certainty. A manuscript map is a one-of-a-kind, hand-drawn map that was not mass-produced or published. Material can be added to an unpublished manuscript map at any later date. This is why our policy is to not use unpublished maps. Our only exception is the Drake-Mellon manuscript map.
We strove to have at least two sources for every fact that we presented. Often this meant using information from texts rather than from maps for our second source. The explanation of the galleon icons along Drake’s route on the WHD maps fell into this category.
Finally, using only information on maps, we cannot get the opinions and feelings of people such as Queen Elizabeth. On the other hand, our database, at sysengr.engr.arizona.edu/URLsForSixteenthCenturyMaps.xlsx, makes extensive use of historical texts. It has a different purpose and a different result.
We found three things that were particularly hard to do when looking only at maps. First, unless the date was written on the map, it was difficult to determine the date of disclosure. We think our dates, necessarily derived from information external to the map content, are correct to within plus or minus one year. Second, we found that it is difficult to translate from one language to another, especially for text that is five centuries old. Synonyms and archaic grammar can make each translation different. There is no one correct translation—a fact which is true even when converting between present day texts. Finally, it was hard to determine which map projection the cartographer used, unless he told us, which they never did.
One of the main purposes of this paper is to introduce a new genre of research papers about sixteenth-century nautical charts. With the exceptions listed above, these papers are based only on material contained on sixteenth-century nautical maps and charts and not modern interpretations of them.
We will now list milestones in the study of world maps. In the second century CE, Ptolemy wrote his books and created his world maps. A researcher could consult these on a quick trip to Alexandria. A millennium later, in the fourteenth century, the creation of portolan charts revolutionized the appearance and content of large-scale maps. A century later, Ptolemy’s book Geographica was translated from Greek to Latin and then into other common languages. This revolutionized the world’s view of the world. Also, in the fifteenth century, Gutenberg’s invention of the moveable-type printing press greatly accelerated the printing of books and maps. Although woodblock printing had been used for a millennium in China it was first used in Europe for printing maps in the fifteenth century. Woodblock printing allowed multiple copies of maps to be made cheaply. The sixteenth-century invention of copperplate engraving allowed fine detail on multiple copies. This leads us up to the late sixteenth century and the events of this paper.
In 1570 Ortelius invented the atlas, which was a collection of maps with extensive text discussing those maps. The maps and text were arranged geographically, not chronologically. Atlases allowed a researcher to study scores of maps in one setting.
In the sixteenth century, for expansion and political control, many countries closely guarded their maps. The Spanish kept them in the Padrón Real. The Portuguese kept them in the Padrão Real. And the English kept them in the privy chamber in the Queen’s palace. These were usually manuscript maps: meaning only one hand-made copy was produced. They contained the best geographical knowledge at the time. But only the crown and the trading companies could benefit from this valuable secret intelligence. Publicly accessible printed maps lacked detail and accuracy. Crown officials were the most common patrons of cartographers. Therefore, these public maps were laden with political and ideological messages. To get correct geographic information, cartographers had to compare several maps and filter out the propaganda.
From the seventeenth to the twentieth century research like that exhibited in this paper was done by researchers who visited libraries and other repositories of maps and charts. The researcher would spend days or weeks extracting all the knowledge he could and then he moved on to another repository.
In the twentieth century books about nautical maps appeared. They often gave great detail for one or a few maps. Atlases such as Shirley (1983) displayed hundreds of maps from a given period of time. And dozens of professional research journals published research papers about maps. In the last decades of the twentieth century the Internet evolved. Specific libraries opened their collections to online browsers, these libraries included those at the British Museum, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), the Library of Congress, Brown University, Yale University, and Stanford University. This is the era in which this paper was researched and written.
This is also the era where authors tried to interpret maps as vehicles for the exercise of power and to effect social-political ends. They tried to analyze what the cartographers were thinking or what their motives were. Such speculation introduced intentional and unintentional human biases (Smith et al. 2007). We strictly avoided such papers. We shunned them like the plague.
This paper is an experiment. We wanted to show that research papers like this could be written based solely on information shown on charts and maps that are freely available via the Internet.
After we wrote this paper, we discovered the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/s/3aq715. It is the perfect solution for our problem. It contains over 125,000 maps and related images dating from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. This online digital database was designed so that it could be read by anyone, anywhere. Rumsey said that he wanted to provide “open access to all art … freely available via the Internet (Hessler 2023).” The David Rumsey Map Collection “… allows searching maps by toponyms and text on the maps (Hessler 2023).” This database should offer a whole new genre for researching sixteenth-century nautical maps.
Present artificial intelligence (AI) systems are built upon huge libraries of text and digital data. Soon they will store maps. Using AI systems may soon be the first step in a preliminary literature review for a new study. Is this then the future of cartographic research? No. Not yet. While AI is becoming useful, these systems are built not so much with a mind toward collecting quality literature as collecting as vast a quantity of text as possible. These documents are not corrected for factual and grammatical errors. These systems lack validation. They are inherently racially biased because, for example, Black writers have historically not contributed the same quantity of classical English literature as white writers have.
At present you must already have maps to evaluate the opinions of an AI system. If you already know the answer to a question, then it is acceptable to ask an AI system the question. For then you will be able to tell when it has made a mistake. But, if you do not know the answer beforehand, then you had better not trust an AI system. They lack validation. An AI system does not know what it does not know.
Now, to conclude this section, was our novel experiment a success? We wanted to show that research papers like this could be written based solely on information shown on charts and maps that are currently available via the Internet. We think that we were successful, except that there were certain specific facts that we had to gather from texts.
We suggest that other authors adopt this unique approach. It eliminates intentional and unintentional human biases introduced by recent authors who tried to interpret maps as vehicles to exercise power and affect social-political ends, authors who tried to analyze what the cartographers were thinking or guess what their motives were.
Our approach was revolutionary for its time. However, it should become common now that the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University has greatly increased the power of using the internet. Furthermore, AI developers might invent methods for validating their systems and then they might contain the necessary power to further develop studies of sixteenth century nautical maps.
From 1577 to 1580, Captain Francis Drake and his men circumnavigated the world in the Golden Hind. When he returned to England, he presented Queen Elizabeth with a map containing the route of his journey. She hung it on a wall of her Whitehall palace. Thus, it is called the Whitehall map. But, because she feared and loathed the Spanish, she did not want them to learn anything about Drake’s voyage. Therefore, she forbade her subjects from disclosing any details under pain of death. Finally, after about eight years, after the defeat of the Spanish Armada and thus the Spanish threat to England, the ban faded away. Then (i.e., from 1588) a series of maps, texts, and globes were made showing Drake’s route, which are described in this paper:
These nine artifacts are called the C9. The C9 without the Whitehall map are called the C8.
Using the C8 and the Purchas first-hand textual description, we have surmised what the Whitehall map must have looked like. It would have
The Drake-Mellon, French-Drake, and Dutch-Drake maps also had all of these features, except for the language. The Whitehall map might have been hand-drawn or Drake’s route and important toponyms could have been drawn on a previously printed, copper plate engraved map.
The strongest evidence for concluding that the Drake-Mellon map 1589, the French-Drake map 1589, the Dutch-Drake map 1594, and the Hondius 1590 and 1595 Broadside maps were derived from the Whitehall map, is the similarity of the content of the cartouches. In particular, their bottom center cartouches that state:
Since almost everyone thinks that south of the strait [of Magellan] is a Continent, let them know for certain that these are islands that are passable by sailors, and that the southernmost of them is named ELIZABETH by its discoverer Francis the Dragon.
Drake’s navigation was a magnificent feat. But he could not brag about it because the Queen forbade Drake and his crew from disclosing any details, due to rivalry with the Spanish. Finally, eight years later, after the defeat of the Armada, she relented. In late 1588, we conjecture that Drake commissioned a fantastic silver medallion with his route of circumnavigation engraved upon it. The result was the nine extant Drake Silver medallions and probably many others. At about this same time the Drake-Mellon map, Hakluyt’s book, and the French-Drake map appeared showing Drake’s route of circumnavigation. The Queen’s secret was no secret anymore.
Most nautical world maps published between 1561 and 1588 have an enormous bulge on the western coast of Chile as shown in Figure 9 (left) (Bahill 2022a). This mistake in the coastline of Chile seems to have caused Drake difficulty in navigating around Cape Horn. After he returned to England cartographers were probably impatient to correct this error, but for eight years the Queen’s edict of secrecy prevented them from doing so. After the English defeated the Spanish Armada and her shroud of secrecy dissolved, there was a flurry of activity to change the coast of Chile on maps. One group led by Ortelius simply omitted the bulge. A second group, including our C9 (except for the Silver maps), shrunk it and moved it down to the southern tip of Chile. As noted earlier, a third group, the outsiders who did not get the word, continued with the bulge all the way up to 1600.
The 1589 Silver maps, the 1590 and 1595 Jodocius Hondius Broadside map, and the 1599 Theodor de Bry map used a Mercator double-hemisphere equatorial stereographic projection, developed by Rumold Mercator and first published in 1587. This fixes the earliest reasonable year of disclosure for these three maps as 1589.
The strongest evidence for the years of disclosure of the C8 is the use of the Mercator double-hemisphere equatorial stereographic projection starting in 1589 and the destruction of the Spanish Armada in 1588 causing the demise of Queen Elizabeth’s ban on disclosing Drake’s route of circumnavigation.
In the sixteenth century, Sir Francis Drake circumnavigated the world. When he returned to England in 1580, he presented a map containing the route of his journey to Queen Elizabeth. The Queen forbade publication of details of his journey with an edict that lasted for eight years. Thereafter, the C8 were published in a narrow time window, in the last decade of the sixteenth century. They were, plus the Whitehall map, the only sixteenth-century maps (etc.) to show Drake’s route of circumnavigation of the world. They were also the only maps to reduce the size of the bulge on the coast of Chile and move it a thousand miles down the coast. No other maps did this. In this paper we have revealed the intricate set of relationships between each of these artifacts. The C8 is a remarkable collection of maps, representing a remarkable journey.
We thank Mike Horner for the French-to-English translations. We congratulate the Cartographic Perspectives journal and its editor: that was the most thorough pair of reviews we have ever had.
We have provided a list of Internet sources for the maps mentioned in this paper. This list/database is located at sysengr.engr.arizona.edu/URLsForSixteenthCenturyMaps.xlsx.
Aker, Raymond. 1970. Report of Findings Relating to Identification of Sir Francis Drake’s Encampment at Point Reyes National Seashore. Point Reyes, CA: Drake Navigators Guild.
Albo, Francisco. 1874. “Logbook of Francisco Albo.” In The First Voyage Round the World, by Antonio Pigafetta, translated by Lord Stanley of Alderley. London: Hakluyt Society. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_First_Voyage_Round_the_World/Logbook_of_Francisco_Alvo_or_Alvaro.
d’Anghiera, Peter Martyr. 1587. Novus Orbis. Paris. https://jcb.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/s/e1y9sq.
Bahill, A. Terry. 2021. “The Second Engraver of the Library of Congress Mystery Map.” International Journal of Cartography 9 (1): 29–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/23729333.2021.1988042.
———. 2022a. “Sixteenth Century Bulge on the Coast of Chile.” Journal of Geographical Research 5 (2): 11–27. https://doi.org/10.30564/jgr.v5i2.4357.
———. 2022b. “Dating the Sir Francis Drake Silver Maps.” Cartographica 57 (4): 291–304. https://doi.org/10.3138/cart-2022-0011.
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