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Ostrich-egg globe hailed as ‘oldest’ orb showing Newfoundland and the New World
http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/08/25/ostrich-egg-globe-hailed-as-oldest-orb-showing-newfoundland-and-the-new-world/Sorry; I'm a cartography nerd...
A European collector of antique maps claims to have identified the oldest known globe depicting the New World — including the future Canada — after spending a year researching what he concluded is a 509-year-old ostrich egg transformed into a one-of-a-kind cartographic orb from the first decade of the 16th century.
The grapefruit-sized object, acquired by an anonymous antiquarian at last year’s London Map Fair for about $1,500, closely matches the geographical features shown on the renowned Hunt-Lenox Globe, an engraved copper sphere dated 1510 and counted among the great treasures of the New York Public Library’s world-class artifact collection.
In a lengthy essay published in the latest issue of The Portolan, the peer-reviewed journal of the Washington Map Society, Belgian map collector and historical researcher Stefaan Missinne argues that the ostrich-egg globe not only predates the Hunt-Lenox Globe but was probably used as the model for casting the more famous copper object.
If true, then the small, unnamed island shown to the far north in the “Mundus Novus” portion of the egg-globe’s western hemisphere — a crude depiction of the “New World” as it was understood just a few years after the discovery voyages of Christopher Columbus, John Cabot and others — is the earliest image of Newfoundland or any other part of Canada on any surviving globe in the world.
The grapefruit-sized object, acquired by an anonymous antiquarian at last year’s London Map Fair for about $1,500, closely matches the geographical features shown on the renowned Hunt-Lenox Globe, an engraved copper sphere dated 1510 and counted among the great treasures of the New York Public Library’s world-class artifact collection.
In a lengthy essay published in the latest issue of The Portolan, the peer-reviewed journal of the Washington Map Society, Belgian map collector and historical researcher Stefaan Missinne argues that the ostrich-egg globe not only predates the Hunt-Lenox Globe but was probably used as the model for casting the more famous copper object.
If true, then the small, unnamed island shown to the far north in the “Mundus Novus” portion of the egg-globe’s western hemisphere — a crude depiction of the “New World” as it was understood just a few years after the discovery voyages of Christopher Columbus, John Cabot and others — is the earliest image of Newfoundland or any other part of Canada on any surviving globe in the world.
(Trivia: Columbus didn't prove to anybody the world was round; they knew that perfectly well. They just also knew how big it was, and that if there wasn't a continent between Europe and Asia to the west then the sailors would starve to death before they got there.)
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