The Inhabited Universe

Abstract

Toby Lester. The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave its Name. New York: Free Press, 2009. xii + 463pp. Maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00 (cloth); $16.99 (paper). Sometime around the year 1500, a Spanish mariner named Juan de la Cosa, who had sailed on the second and third westward voyages of Christopher Columbus, created a chart of the Atlantic basin, including much of the At- lantic coast of the Western Hemisphere. The details are incorrect, at least in comparison to later maps of the area. But La Cosa understood, in a way that modern satellites cannot, that one can use a map to do more than present certain geographical forms. Near the western edge, he inserted a small pic- ture of St. Christopher carrying the baby Jesus Christ on his shoulders over a portion of the mainland beyond the Caribbean. The device served three pos- sible functions. First, he used the image to illustrate Columbus' central role in introducing Christianity to the presumptively heathenish natives of the Americas. Second, he obscured geographical information that he might have known, perhaps to keep some information secret so that his patrons could take advantage of it before others. (Other cartographers of the sixteenth century did the same thing, presumably to keep their rivals at bay. 1 ) And third, the image hid his imperfect knowledge of part of the hemisphere. La Cosa's map, then, revealed not only his geographic knowledge but also perhaps his politics, an observation that will come as no surprise to historians who have benefited from the insights of the late cartographic historian J. B. Harley. 2 Toby Lester's wonderful Fourth Part of the World is less obviously concerned with the politics of cartography than with telling the story of a great map: Martin Waldesmuller's world map of 1507, the earliest known to use the name America in a depiction of the Western Hemisphere. In Lester's hands, the rediscovery of the map—which had disappeared from sight for almost four centuries—becomes the centerpiece of an often-riveting narrative, punctuated with tales about the efforts of medieval and early modern European scholars to understand the shape of the Earth and to plot its parts, as can be seen in the many maps (including La Cosa's) dispersed through the text. He interweaves moderns into the narrative too, including the scholars who found the map and