Title: SEPTENTRIONALIUM Terrarum descriptio

Date: 1595
Place: Duisburg, Germany
Source: Atlas Sive Cosmographicæ
Description: Copperplate engraving, 14½"[H] x 15½"[W].

In 1569 Gerard Mercator published an 18-sheet world map using the projection which, to this day, bears his name. The Mercator projection increasingly spreads out the vertical space required to portray each degree as the latitude increases towards each pole. In fact, an infinite spread would be required to reach the actual north or south pole in this projection. For this reason, world maps drawn on a Mercator projection stop well short of 90°. Mercator, however, wanted to depict the north polar regions on his map, so he came up with the idea of including a small inset map, on a polar projection, which he drew in the lower left-hand corner of his large wall map. The map shown here, published in the first edition of Mercator's famous Atlas, is basically a copy of the polar inset from his 1569 world map, but with some added features.

In 1595 - never mind 1569 - no explorer had been anywhere near the North Pole, and today we view the ring of islands shown surrounding the North Pole on this map as pure fantasy. Yet Mercator based his polar depiction on the most credible information available to him at the time. His source was a work named the Itinerarium, writted by Jacob Cnoyen. No copy of this book is known to have survived, but Mercator quoted from this book in letters he wrote to the British polymath John Dee, in which he explained the source of his ideas regarding the geography of the far north.

Among the ideas shown on this map - ideas which are curious to us today - are that the North Pole was encircled by four land masses, separated from each other by rivers or channels in which the water flowed northwards from the surrounding oceans and then flowed into the earth at the North Pole, flowing beneath a large and tall black rock, 33 leagues around, that is located there.

Another idea, expressed in one of the text annotations on the map, is that "pygmies," at most four feet tall, live on one of these four arctic islands.

In the four corners of the map are the title and three insets showing islands of the North Atlantic: the Shetlands, the Faroes, and Frisland. This latter, Frisland, is one of the "phantom" islands that have appeared over the centuries in maps of the Atlantic. On the main map Frisland can be seen in the ocean south of Iceland and Greenland. Mercator copied Frisland from an Italian map of the mid 16th century, but he was unknowingly perpetuating an earlier cartographer's error; no island exists in that location.

Another surprising feature of the map is the placename "California," which appears on a very northerly part of the American landmass. This is not the first time the name "California" appeared on a printed map (it first appeared in a map published in 1562), but the northern location of the placename on Mercator's map is very unusual.

Not long after this atlas map was published, the Dutch discovered Spitsbergen, an island archipelago north of Norway. Jodocus Hondius, who acquired the plates to Mercator's Atlas in 1604, made a change to this plate, erasing part of one of the four arctic land masses and putting in a depiction of Spitsbergen. Mercator's Atlas went through many editions, under the stewardship of Hondius and his brother-in-law Jan Jansson. Only the first two editions of the Atlas, published by Mercator's son Rumold in 1595 and 1602, contain the pre-Spitsbergen version of this map, as shown in the image on this page. All the subsequent editions show Spitsbergen.

Smaller sized editions of Mercator's Atlas were produced by a number of Dutch publishers in the early 17th century, and these contained miniaturized versions of this map. Two smaller versions of this map were also published by the Cologne map-maker Matthias Quad, the first of these in 1600. But by the 1630s cartographers had begun to doubt the island-encircled view of the North Pole, and began producing maps showing a blank polar area - more accurately reflecting the lack of knowledge that existed at the time.

For more information about Mercator's map of the North Pole, see:

William B. Ginsberg, Printed Maps of Scandinavia and the Arctic 1482-1601, New York, Septentrionalium Press, 2006, pp.138-143 and p.203.

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