Infinitum

hic sunt dracones

“Here be dragons” is a phrase used to denote dangerous or unexplored territories, in imitation of the medieval practice of putting sea serpents and other mythological creatures in blank areas of maps.

The only known historical use of this phrase is in the Latin form “HC SVNT DRACONES” (i.e. hic sunt dracones) on the Lenox Globe (ca. 1503-07). Earlier maps contain a variety of references to mythical and real creatures, but the Lenox Globe is the only known surviving map to bear this phrase.

The term appeared on the Lenox Globe around the east coast of Asia, and might be related to the komodo dragons in the Indonesian islands, tales of which were quite common throughout East Asia.

The classical phrase utilized by ancient Roman and Medieval cartographers used to be HIC SVNT LEONES (literally, Here are lions) when denoting unknown territories on maps.

Dragons on maps

Dragons appear on a few other historical maps.

• The T-O Psalter map (ca. 1250 AD) has dragons, as symbols of sin, in a lower “frame” below the world, balancing Jesus and angels on the top, but the dragons do not appear on the map proper.
• The Borgia map (ca. 1430 AD), in the Vatican Library, states, over a dragon-like figure in Asia (in the upper left quadrant of the map), “Hic etiam homines magna cornua habentes longitudine quatuor pedum, et sunt etiam serpentes tante magnitudinis, ut unum bovem comedant integrum.” (“Here, indeed, are men who have large horns of the length of four feet, and there are even serpents so large, that they could eat an ox whole.”) The latter may refer to the dragons of the Chinese dragon dance.
• A 19th-century Japanese map, the Jishin-no-ben, depicts a dragon associated with causing earthquakes.

Other creatures on maps

• Ptolemy’s atlas in Geographia (originally 2nd century, taken up again in the 15th century) warns of elephants, hippos and cannibals.
• Tabula Peutingeriana (medieval copy of Roman map) has “in his locis elephanti nascuntur”, “in his locis scorpiones nascuntur” and “hic cenocephali nascuntur” (“in these places elephants are born, in these places scorpions are born, here dog-headed beings are born”).
• Cotton MS. Tiberius B.V. fol. 58v (10th century), British Library Manuscript Collection, has “hic abundant leones” (“here lions abound”), along with a picture of a lion, near the east coast of Asia (at the top of the map towards the left); this map also has a text-only serpent reference in southernmost Africa (bottom left of the map): “Zugis regio ipsa est et Affrica. est enim fertilis. sed ulterior bestiis et serpentibus plena” (“This region of Zugis is in Africa, it is truly fertile, however it is full of beasts and serpents.”)
• The Ebstorf map (13th c.) has a dragon in the extreme south-eastern part of Africa, together with an asp and a basilisk.
• Giovanni Leardo’s map (1442) has, in southernmost Africa, “Dixerto dexabitado p. chaldo e p. serpent”.
• Martin Waldseemüller’s Carta marina navigatoria (1516) has “an elephant-like creature in northernmost Norway, accompanied by a legend explaining that this ‘morsus’ with two long and quadrangular teeth congregated there”, i.e. a walrus, which would have seemed monstrous at the time.
• Waldseemüller’s Carta marina navigatoria (1522), revised by Laurentius Fries, has the morsus moved to the Davis Strait.
• Bishop Olaus Magnus’s Carta Marina map of Scandinavia (1539) has many monsters in the northern sea, as well as a winged, bipedal, predatory land animal resembling a dragon in northern Lapland.

Tags: Maps, Mythology

Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas

Biography

His father, Roderigo de Tordesillas, and his mother, Agnes de Herrera, were both of good family. After studying for some time in his native country, Herrera proceeded to Italy, and there became secretary to Vespasian Gonzago, with whom, on his appointment as viceroy of Navarre, he returned to Spain. Gonzago, sensible of his secretary’s abilities, commended him to Philip II of Spain; and that monarch appointed Herrera first historiographer of the Indies, and one of the historiographers of Castile.

Placed thus in the enjoyment of an ample salary, Herrera devoted the rest of his life to the pursuit of literature, retaining his offices until the reign of Philip IV, by whom he was appointed secretary of state very shortly before his death.

The Historia general de los hechos de los Castellanos

Of Herrera’s writings, the most valuable is his Historia general de los hechos de los Castellanos en las islas y tierra firme del Mar Oceano (Madrid, 1601-1615, 4 vols), a work which relates the history of the Spanish-American colonies from 1492 to 1554. The author’s official position gave him access to the state papers and to other authentic sources not attainable by other writers, while he did not scruple to borrow largely from other manuscripts, especially from that of Bartolomé de Las Casas.

He used his facilities carefully and judiciously; and the result is a work on the whole accurate and unprejudiced, and quite indispensable to the student either of the history of the early colonies, or of the institutions and customs of the aboriginal American peoples. Although it is written in the form of annals, mistakes are not wanting, and several glaring anachronisms have been pointed out by MJ Quintana. “If,” to quote Dr Robertson, “by attempting to relate the various occurrences in the New World in a strict chronological order, the arrangement of events in his work had not been rendered so perplexed, disconnected and obscure that it is an unpleasant task to collect from different parts of his book and piece together the detached shreds of a story, he might justly have been ranked among the most eminent historians of his country.”

This work was republished in 1730, and has been translated into English by J Stevens (London, 1740), and into other European languages.

Work’s value in solving puzzle on Mazaua, Magellan’s lost port

Unknown to Magellan scholars and navigation historians, Herrera’s work is central to a geographical conundrum related to Ferdinand Magellan’s travel in Philippine waters. It’s only now, in the 21st century, that this fact has surfaced.

Herrera, with Andrés de San Martín as authority, wrote Magellan’s fleet had anchored at an isle named “Mazagua“, an exact equivalent of a Butuanon word in that locality, “masawa”, meaning bright light. The “gu” is the Spanish equivalent of w which is absent in the Spanish alphabet. He wrote a mass was celebrated at that port on Easter Sunday, March 31, 1521. Also a cross was planted at the isle’s highest hill. Herrera’s account is faithful to the actual incident and coincides with the reports of eyewitnesses Antonio Pigafetta, Ginés de Mafra, Francisco Albo, Martín de Ayamonte, and The Genoese Pilot.

Herrera also provides an information found only in one other document in the entire Magellanic literature, the Ginés de Mafra account, that the rulers of Cebu, Mazaua and Butuan are blood relatives. The papers of San Martín were in the possession of de Mafra, entrusted to him by the astrologer before May 1, 1521 when San Martín is presumed to have died during the massacre of Magellan’s crew at Cebu.

Sole published work that has word Mazaua since 1521 to 1890

Herrera’s work is the only published document from the time of the 1521 anchorage at the tiny isle until publication of F.H.H. Guillemard’s biography of Magellan in 1890 that has the real name of the isle, Mazaua. Guillemard spelling was “Mazzava”–the spelling found in the three extant French manuscripts of Pigafetta, the Beinecke-Yale codex, Ms f. 5650, and Ms f. 24224. In that whole period, published works used the name popularized by Maximilianus Transylvanus, “Messana” and “Massana.”

Two 17th century Spanish Jesuit missionaries wrote an epitome–three paragraphs at most for each–of Magellan’s travel in the Surigao Sea. They used Herrera’s “Mazagua” ironically to negate Herrera’s account of the anchorage at the tiny isle. They Fr. Francisco Colín and Fr. Francisco Combés. The first coined a name, “Dimasaua”, a combination of a Bisayan prefix, “di” meaning “no” or “not” added to Herrera’s “Mazagua.” Colín’s “Dimasaua” means “not Mazaua“, pointing to an isle in southern Leyte at f9° 56′ N, 125° 35′ E. Four years later, Combés renamed the isle “Limasaua” which the isle retains to this day.

Two friars use Herrera’s Mazagua to negate Mazaua

Colín invented the name in the context of the Easter Sunday mass which his other source, the garbled Italian translation of Pigafetta by Giovanni Battista Ramusio, said took place at Butuan on March 31, 1521. Colín had correctly assumed Pigafetta being an eyewitness would be more accurate; what he didn’t know was that Ramusio had replaced Mazaua with Butuan. In the case of Combés, he got hold of another edition of Ramusio that still had the anchorage at Butuan but did not mention any mass there. While Combés adopts the solution of Colín of using Herrera’s “Mazaua”, he rejected the prefix “di” since he wasn’t dismissing a non-existent Easter mass in his Ramusio. He instead used a mystifyingly unknown prefix, “Li” which is unknown in Philippine languages and is neither Spanish or Portuguese or perhaps French, added before Herrera’s “Mazagua.”

At the beginning of the 19th century, an authentic Pigafetta account was published based on the transcription of a paleologist-scientist, the Augustinian Carlo Amoretti of the Ambrosiana library in Milan. In two footnotes Amoretti turned truth on its head. He said the word “Limasava” (as spelled) in a map of Jacques N. Bellin may be the Messana/Massana in Pigafetta. As proof he said both isles are found in the same latitude, 9° 40′ N. In reality Limasawa is in 9° 56′ N while Mazaua has been variously located at two other latitudes, 9° 20′ N by Francisco Albo and 9° N by The Genoese Pilot.

Coming full circle

The craft of history entails putting together pieces left by a past incident. The Mazaua conundrum has been unravelling first with the “discovery” of the little known Ginés de Mafra whose account turns out to be a mirror of the insights of the Renaissance navigation genius, Andrés de San Martín, who was in turn the authority of Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas for his Mazaua story. In connecting the three, the truth of Herrera’s Mazagua has gone full circle.

Herrera’s main works

Herrera’s main published works are the following:

• Historia de lo sucedido en Escocia a Inglaterra en quarenta y quatro annos que vivio la reyna Maria Estuarda (Madrid, 1589)
• Cinco libros de la historia de Portugal, y conquista de las isles de los Acores, 1582-1583 (Madrid, 1591)
• Historia de lo sucedido en Francia, 1585-1594 (Madrid, 1598)
• Historia general del mundo del tiempo del rey Felipe II, desde 1559 haste su muerte (Madrid, 1601-1612, 3 vols)
• Historia general de los hechos de los Castellanos en las islas y tierra firme del Mar Oceano (Madrid, 1601-1615, 4 vols)
• Tratado, relation, y discurso historico de los movimientos de Aragon (Madrid, 1612)
• Comentarios de los hechos de los Españoles, Franceses, y Venecianos en Italia, etc., 1281-1559 (Madrid, 1624, seq.).

Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Antonio_de_Herrera_y_Tordesillas&oldid=267288885 (last visited Apr. 28, 2009).

Tags: 16th Century, Magellan, Spain

The Voynich manuscript

By current estimates, the book originally had 272 pages in 17 quires of 16 pages each. About 240 vellum pages remain today, and gaps in the page numbering (which seems to be later than the text) indicate that several pages were already missing by the time that Voynich acquired it. A quill pen was used for the text and figure outlines, and colored paint was applied (somewhat crudely) to the figures, possibly at a later date. There is strong evidence that at one point in time the pages of the book were rearranged into a different order.

The text was clearly written from left to right, with a slightly ragged right margin. Longer sections are broken into paragraphs, sometimes with “bullets” on the left margin. There is no obvious punctuation. The ductus (the speed, care, and cursiveness with which the letters are written) flows smoothly, suggesting that the scribe understood what he was writing when it was written; the manuscript does not give the impression that each character had to be calculated before being inked onto the page.

Voynich manuscript

The text consists of over 170,000 discrete glyphs, usually separated from each other by narrow gaps. Most of the glyphs are written with one or two simple pen strokes. While there is some dispute as to whether certain glyphs are distinct or not, an alphabet with 20–30 glyphs would account for virtually all of the text; the exceptions are a few dozen rarer characters that occur only once or twice each.

Wider gaps divide the text into about 35,000 “words” of varying length. These seem to follow phonetic or orthographic laws of some sort; e.g. certain characters must appear in each word (like the vowels in English), some characters never follow others, some may be doubled but others may not.

Voynich manuscript

Statistical analysis of the text reveals patterns similar to those of natural languages. For instance, the word frequencies follow Zipf’s law, and the word entropy (about 10 bits per word) is similar to that of English or Latin texts. Some words occur only in certain sections, or in only a few pages; others occur throughout the manuscript. There are very few repetitions among the thousand or so “labels” attached to the illustrations. In the herbal section, the first word on each page occurs only on that page, and may be the name of the plant.

On the other hand, the Voynich manuscript’s “language” is quite unlike European languages in several aspects. Firstly, there are practically no words comprising more than ten glyphs, yet there are also few one- or two-letter words. The distribution of letters within the word is also rather peculiar: some characters only occur at the beginning of a word, some only at the end, and some always in the middle section – an arrangement found in Semitic alphabets but not in the Latin or Cyrillic alphabets (with the exception of the Greek letters Beta and Sigma).

The text seems to be more repetitive than typical European languages; there are instances where the same common word appears up to three times in a row. Words that differ only by one letter also repeat with unusual frequency.

There are only a few words in the manuscript written in a seemingly Latin script. In the last page, there are four lines of writing which are written in (rather distorted) Latin letters, except for two words in the main script. The lettering resembles European alphabets of the 15th century, but the words do not seem to make sense in any language. Also, a series of diagrams in the “astronomical” section has the names of ten of the months (from March to December) written in Latin script, with spelling suggestive of the medieval languages of France or the Iberian Peninsula. However, it is not known whether these bits of Latin script were part of the original text, or were added at a later time.

Tags: Bacon, Magic, Manuscript

Dieppe Maps

Dieppe Map

The Dieppe maps are a series of world maps produced in Dieppe, France, in the 1540s, 1550s and 1560s. They are large hand-produced maps, commissioned for wealthy and royal patrons, including Henry II of France and Henry VIII of England. The Dieppe school of cartographers included Pierre Desceliers, Johne Rotz, Guillaume Le Testu and Nicholas Desliens.

Because many of the inscriptions on the Dieppe maps are written in French, Portuguese or Gallicised Portuguese, modern historians generally accept that the Dieppe school of mapmakers were often working from Portuguese sources that no longer exist. There seems to be convincing evidence that Portuguese cartographers were bribed for information of the latest discoveries, despite the official Portuguese Politica de sigilo (policy of silence). An example of this is the Cantino map of 1502 (not a Dieppe school map) which clearly shows evidence of second hand Portuguese sources.

A common feature of most of the Dieppe world maps (see Vallard 1547, Desceliers 1550) are the compass roses and navigational rhumb lines, suggestive of a sea-chart. However, they are best understood as works of art, clearly intended to be spread out on a table, and containing information on the latest discoveries, side by side with mythological references and illustrations. For example, the Desceliers 1550 map carries descriptions of early French attempts to colonise Canada, the conquests of Peru by the Spanish and the Portuguese sea-trade among the Spice Islands. On the same map can be found descriptions of legendary Cathay, king Prester John in Ethiopia, and the race of Amazons in Russia. Other Dieppe maps also carry fictitious features such as the Marco Polo inspired Zanzibar/Îles des Geanz. (see Vallard 1547, Rotz 1542 and Dauphin c1536-42). As with other maps made before the seventeenth century, the Dieppe maps show no knowledge of longitude. While latitude could be marked in degrees as observed by astrolabe or quadrant, easting could only be given in distance. Mercator’s projection first appeared in 1568-9, a development too late to influence the Dieppe cartographers .

Tags: 16th Century, Maps, Portugese, unsolved

The 4th Crusade

There was something very odd about the 4th crusade (1202-1204).

For one – they didn’t head for the Holy Land, choosing instead to go after Constantinople, then Capital of the Byzantine Empire. Which was virtually entirely christian at the time, it was seen as one of the final acts in the Great Schism between greek and roman catholic churches. It has been often described as one of the most profitable and disgraceful sacks of a city in history.

One of the most important events in the sacking of the city was the destruction of the famouse Imperial Library, which held some of the most ancient texts in christendom. Many were saved but many more were lost in the fire.

Tags: 13th Century, Crusade, Library, Maps

Piri Reis Map

In 1929, a group of historians found an amazing map drawn on a gazelle skin.
Research showed that it was a genuine document drawn in 1513 by Piri Reis, a famous admiral of the Turkish fleet in the sixteenth century.
His passion was cartography. His high rank within the Turkish navy allowed him to have a privileged access to the Imperial Library of Constantinople.
The Turkish admiral admits in a series of notes on the map that he compiled and copied the data from a large number of source maps, some of which dated back to the fourth century BC or earlier.

Piri Reis Map

The Controversy The Piri Reis map shows the western coast of Africa, the eastern coast of South America, and the northern coast of Antarctica. The northern coastline of Antarctica is perfectly detailed. The most puzzling however is not so much how Piri Reis managed to draw such an accurate map of the Antarctic region 300 years before it was discovered, but that the map shows the coastline under the ice. Geological evidence confirms that the latest date Queen Maud Land could have been charted in an ice-free state is 4000 BC.

On 6th July 1960 the U. S. Air Force responded to Prof. Charles H. Hapgood of Keene College, specifically to his request for an evaluation of the ancient Piri Reis Map:

Tags: Antartica, Book, Maps