The Erdapfel Globe

Through the wonders of twitter I came across a fabulous bit of map history: the Erdapfel (German for Earth Apple), sometimes called the Globe of Martin Behaim. This is possibly the oldest surviving globe in the world and it was made in Nuremberg in 1492, the year Columbus sailed.

Here's a picture of it taken from this site:

There's a lot that's amazing about this map. For one, the creator of the map was quite well traveled for a person living in the late 15th Century. He personally visited Portugal and western Africa. He therefore received some of his knowledge for this globe first hand.

The globe also shows an empty expanse between the western part of Europe and the far east. That said, the map maker used some of the same sources as Columbus, or at the very least, he agreed with the Italian explorer that the world was round. 

The map contains some beautiful illustrations, like this huge whale and boats:

It also contains a great many inaccuracies, as can be imagined. Most notably, perhaps, Japan is further north than shown on this map. Malaysia is shown as a large peninsula and the shape of Africa is incorrect including the shape of Madagascar which is shown as north of Zanzibar.

Anyone who really wants to get into the fine details of this map can take a look at this very comprehensive history here, or this shorter summary, here.

Anyone who wants to see the globe, would have to go to the Germanic Museum in Nuremberg. It seems that in 2011 there was an effort to have the globe digitized, but I can't find any place online where it's viewable.

In all cases, this is an amazing piece of world history and map history and a real, visual time capsule of European understanding of the world at a time contemporary to Columbus.

15th Century Viking Map of Vinland Being Studied by Yale

I recently came across this article about Yale doing an examination of the Vinland Viking map. I had heard about Vinland, but don't recall having heard about this map before. In short, Vinland is an as yet undiscovered location supposedly settled, at least briefly, by the Vikings in the 15th Century, before Columbus reached the New World. This map, which would have been almost as old as the Viking discovery, showed Vinland.

Here is an image of it from Wikipedia.

It's a pretty cool map, and very exciting to have so old a map of the new world. The problem is, it's almost universally considered to be a fake. There is some disagreement on this, but the majority of scholars have dismissed this map as being inauthentic for a number of reasons including the chemical composition of the ink used (it contains substances unused until the 1900s) and the way it was bound into a larger manuscript which would have rendered much of it illegible.

Nonetheless, Yale is putting some serious work into researching this map. They are looking at the topography of the map itself, studying the DNA of the animal skin it was printed on, and examining the maps's chemical composition. It's all very impressive, and still, they don't expect to prove its authenticity. Instead, they're trying to study a document which has become so culturally important, that many atlases feature it even with the notation that it's probably fake.

So then, what is Vinland? The answer is that nobody's quite sure. There are disagreements among experts as to what the word Vinland meant to the Vikings and whether it was a single place, or multiple places. If Vinland does refer to vines, or wine, as some suggest, it means that it must be at least as far south as the south shore of the St. Laurence River, where Jacques Cartier found wild vines. One thing that does seem more certain is that the only actual archaeological evidence of Viking settlement in North America, the site at L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, is not Vinland.

L'Anse aux Meadows is a remote site at the northernmost point of Newfoundland. Viking artifacts have been found there, as well as building materials from Iceland and Greenland that date to around 1000 C.E. This is conclusive evidence that there were Vikings living in Newfoundland, for at least a short time,  around 500 years before Columbus and any other European reached the area. The site, however, is considered by historians to be a base, or a waypoint for onward exploration. It was probably just a place to stop, maybe repair boats, take on more supplies, and then keep exploring onward. As such, the location of Vinland remains a mystery, and this map will likely not be helpful in finding it.

As an aside, I had the good luck of visiting L'Anse aux Meadows, which is not an easy place to get to, but which is stunningly beautiful and worth the trip. It also has a reconstruction of what the Viking settlement on the spot may have looked like. It's a long trip, but in my view, absolutely worth it. Check out some pictures I took while there.

This depression was the actual site of a Viking structure.