Essays on the cartographers, navigators and printers — Ramusio, Ortelius, Van Linschoten and their world — and the stories behind the objects we offer.
How an Antwerp map-colourist invented the atlas, and quietly guessed at continental drift
He began as a dealer who coloured maps by hand at the Frankfurt fair. In 1570 he gathered the whole world into a single book and changed how Europe saw the earth.
How a Dutch clerk in Goa copied Portugal's deepest secret and opened the sea road to the East
For a century Portugal guarded the routes to the Indies like crown jewels. One observant Dutchman copied them down, and the VOC was born.
A Venetian civil servant who never crossed an ocean, and gave Europe its first great library of voyages
Before Hakluyt, there was Ramusio. From the heart of Venice he gathered the testimony of Marco Polo, Magellan and Cortés into one monumental work, then a fire and his own death nearly undid it.
Two ships, a search for the Northeast Passage, and the first European winter in the high Arctic
In 1596 the city of Amsterdam staked two ships on a dream: a northern sea road to Asia. What followed was discovery, disaster, and one of the great survival stories of the age.
Five ships and some two hundred and forty men sailed in 1519. Three years later one ship returned, and the map of the world had to be redrawn
A Portuguese captain in Spanish service, a Basque mutineer who finished the job, a Venetian passenger who wrote it all down, and the printed accounts through which Europe learned what they had done.