Maps and Beyond: An Excursus on Sixteenth-Century Maps of American Coastlines, Collected in Italy, a GIS Approach

Abstract

In the late fifteenth and throughout the sixteenth century, European intellectual, scientific, and industrial influences manifested themselves brilliantly in the fields of geography, cartography, and printing and in improving maritime technologies. These areas of expertise came together in a fashion that made possible a rapid transference of information, in printed form, of the discoveries that Italian, Iberian, and later French, Dutch, and English explorers made. At that time, European scholars, wealthy patrons, and political and business figures attempted to understand the new discoveries, such as the Americas, through charts. In this article, the Italian cartographers and map publishers are considered to have shown a remarkable ability to depict North America, the challenge of placing these documents in the contemporary context is met through a GIS that solves the difficulty of viewing them through the rear-view mirror, 500 years later. The time frame chosen is from 1502 to 1536. Through a process of comparing and adjusting the original old maps with current maps, the GIS approach shows a geographical overview of the navigator's consciousness. The study tackles the time considered by studying five Italian maps and one Spanish map: the maps of Cantino, Maggiolo, Oliveriana of Pesaro, Castiglioni, Verrazzano, and Battista Agnese. Importing the maps into a geodatabase revealed significant geographical differences.