Читать книгу Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories - Simon Winchester - Страница 18

In a matter of months after the death of Christopher Columbus in 1506, three men — a Tuscan from Chianti who at one time or another was a sailor-explorer, a pimp, and a sorcerer; and the two others simply solid German cartographers from Freiburg — put the requisite two and two together and gave formal birth both to a continent that would be called America and to a recognizably self-contained ocean called the Atlantic.

Columbus had found only the vaguest adumbrations of a continent-sized landmass. He had encountered, charted, and colonized hundreds of tropical islands, as well as a subequatorial coastline that sported rivers big enough to suggest that they drained something rather larger. But in all of his voyages he had found no real evidence of a great land that was large enough to block westward passage on all the navigationally available latitudes.

But then towards the turn of the century news started to trickle in from other explorers that hinted that such a body might exist. John Cabot, for instance, had almost certainly landed in eastern Newfoundland in 1497, reporting back to his sponsors in Bristol on the presence of a large landmass. Then two Portuguese brothers, Miguel and Gaspar Côrte-Real, reached a variety of points also on the northern coast, and on their return to Lisbon in the autumn of 1501 suggested - and for the first time by anyone - that the land they had just encountered in what are now the Canadian maritime provinces might well be physically connected to the landmasses already discovered to the south - the body of land we now know as Honduras and Venezuela.

A somewhat inelegant little map had also started to confirm the gathering suspicions of the educated European public. It had been drawn in 1500 by Juan de la Cosa, a Cantabrian pilot who had twice accompanied Columbus and who would make five further voyages to the New World - only to be murdered by natives with poisoned arrows in 1509, on the Atlantic coast of Colombia near Cartagena. But his map, held today in Madrid’s naval museum, lives on; it was the first ever made that displayed a representation of the New World - an edge-to-edge border of territory on the map that lay far to the west of Europe. It was marked by an enormous concave embayment, with the lands found by Cabot on its northern side, those found by Columbus and company to the south (and all of the territory, thanks to the Treaty of Tordesillas,¹⁶ supposedly Spanish). But no names were offered on the map, either on the landmass or on the sea.

That was to happen just seven years later, in 1507. It took the German mapmaker Martin Waldseemüller to fasten the name America onto what now even more clearly was a newly recognised continent. Waldseemüller and his poetically inclined colleague, Matthias Ringmann, did so despite a welter of confusions, deceptions and falsehoods that have intrigued scholars and occupied writers for centuries, because of a vastly popular booklet they had lately seen. This slender book, truly more of a pamphlet, was known as the Mundus Novus, and together with a subsequent brief document known as the Soderini Letter, was purportedly written by Amerigo Vespucci, the colourful Italian explorer and sorcerer (and in later life the aforesaid pimp) who appears to have been the very first to claim from his own navigational evidence that the great body of land in the west was in fact a separate continent, the fourth part of the world.

The Mundus Novus is a prolix, flamboyant, and in detail quite unreliable work, thirty-two pages long, printed and written in Latin, addressed initially to his Medici sponsor and then published in 1503 simultaneously, like the opening of a modern feature film, in many cities around Europe. Printers in Paris, Venice and Antwerp saw to it that Vespucci’s graphic descriptions of his sailing adventures along the coasts of what we now know to be Guyana, Brazil (where he was the first European to enter the mouth of the Amazon), and perhaps even Patagonia, enjoyed a massive circulation.

The book was indeed wildly popular - helped no doubt by Vespucci’s loving discussions of the cosmetic self-mutilation, anal cleanliness and sexual practices of the people he met along the way. It was a book that not only gave him personal immortality: it also led to the explosion of European interest in the New World and the beginnings of a rolling tide of exploration and immigration that one might fairly say has not abated since.

The crucial sentence in Vespucci’s pamphlet stated simply that “[on] this last voyage of mine … I have discovered a continent in those southern regions that is inhabited by more numerous peoples than in our Europe, Asia or Africa, and in addition I found a more pleasant and temperate climate than in any other region known to us….” He had found a new continent - or, more precisely, he had identified the land that he had found as a new continent, something that Columbus, some years before, had been entirely disinclined to do. To Columbus it was - and it wrongly was — an already existing continent: Asia. To Vespucci it was — and it correctly was — a totally new continent, and at the very outset it was a continent without a name.

It fell to the Freiburg mapmakers to give it one. At the time the pair happened to be working in an academic community in the Vosges mountains of eastern France - and it was here that they got finally to christen this great body of land, and to offer it an identity it would then have for all time. Both of the mapmakers had read the Mundus Novus; both had read and were taken in by the more evidently forged Soderini Letter. Both agreed that in the preparation of an enormous new world map that had been commissioned from them, they would give, at least to the thinly sinuous southern part of the new continent that would be drawn on their masterpiece, a name. They would give it the feminine form of the Latinized version of Amerigo Vespucci’s Christian name: the properly feminine place-nouns of Africa, Asia and Europa would now be joined, quite simply, by a brand-new entity that they would name America.

And so, in 1507, when the new map was published, and with images of the two giants of Ptolemy and Vespucci presiding in profile over an entirely fresh cartographic representation of the planet (but with neither Leif Eriksson nor Christopher Columbus in illustrated evidence anywhere), in large letters across the southern half of the southern continental discovery, just where Uruguay is situated today, was this single word. America. It was written in majuscule script, a tiny bit crooked, curiously out of scale and looking a little last-minute and just a little tentative — but nevertheless and incontrovertibly, there.

The name caught on. A globe published in Paris in 1515 has the word written on both segments of the continent, north and south. It was published in a Spanish book in 1520; another from Strasbourg five years later listed “America” as one of the world’s regions; and finally, in 1538, Mercator, the new arbiter of the planet’s geography, placed the phrasal titles “North America” and “South America” squarely on the two halves of the fourth continent. With that the name was fully secure; and it would never be changed.

And with a new continent in place, so the sea that lay between it and the Old World continents of Europe and Africa - the sea that had variously been named the Ocean Sea, the Ethiopian¹⁷ Ocean, Oceanus Occidentalis, the Great West Sea, the Western Ocean, Mare Glaciale, and by Herodotus in The Histories in the fifth century BC, the Atlantic - became, at last and with certainty, a discrete and bordered ocean, too.

It was no longer appended to any other sea. It was no longer a part of some larger and more amorphous worldwide body of water. It was a thing — a vast and, back then, almost unimaginable thing, true - but it was a thing nonetheless, with borders, edges, coastlines, a rim, a margin, a fringe, a brink, and a northern, a southern, a western, and an eastern limit.

From a simply inexplicable green-grey immensity that stretched without apparent cease beyond the Pinnacle Point tide pools, to an even more frightening turbulence of waves and winds raging beyond the Pillars of Hercules, to a warm sea stained with purple dye or a cold sea choked with ice, and to a body of little self-importance and which was supposedly conjoined with other seas that lay far beyond, the Atlantic Ocean now at last, and from the moment of being given the early-sixteenth-century imprimatur of Mercator, had a proper identity, all of its own.

It remained now to find out just what that identity was, and to set this new-found ocean in its rightful place on the world stage.

The Atlantic had been found. Now it demanded to be known.