Lesson 1: Mapping the Past
When you finish this lecture, ask yourself these questions:
1. Why haven’t I heard about this before?
2. Is there academic suppression going on?
3. If there is, why?
4. Who made the original map?
5. When?
6. How?
I suggest that you print out this page.
After you read this page and the links, you will not have the same confidence in what passes for academic historical scholarship. You will have a fine example — or Finé example — of the games played by professional historians to evade embarrassing questions and even more embarrassing answers.
Reading assignment:
Timeline of the discovery of Antarctica. Download here.
Wikipedia’s full document (verification). Check the resource package. Read the first three pages.
We learn that Antarctica was sighted only in 1819.
The first official mapping of the coast was made between 1911 and 1914 by an Australian, Douglas Mawson.
But what of the unofficial mapping?
A CHRONOLOGICALLY EMBARRASSING MAP
Here is Oronteus Fineaus’s map of 1531, which is universally accepted as valid. A copy resides in the library of Congress.
The Library of Congress uses the heading of this map as its logo for the page on old maps.
Let’s take a closer look.
You might imagine that there is a detailed Wikipedia article explaining all this. You would be wrong. There is no Wikipedia article on this map. There is a brief biography or its author. He was one of the great polymaths of the sixteenth century, a physician, mathematician, astronomer, and cartographer. He was one of the earliest professors at the College Royale, one of the most distinguished academic institutions on earth, then as now. We read only this about the map:
Finé attempted to reconcile discoveries in the New World with old medieval legends and information (derived from Ptolemy) regarding the Orient. Thus, on one of his two world maps, Nova Universi Orbis Descriptio (1531), the legend marked Asia covers both North America and Asia, which were represented as one landmass. He used the toponym “America” for South America, and thus Marco Polo’s Mangi, Tangut and Catay appear on the shores of the present-day Gulf of Mexico. On the same map, Finé drew Terra Australis to the south, including the legend “recently discovered but not yet completely explored”, by which he meant the discovery of Tierra del Fuego by Ferdinand Magellan.
In other words, he made it up. Problem: it is precise.
I made a PDF of the original Wikipedia article. You can see it in the resource package.
For an obscure article that attempts to explain away this obviously impossible artifact, click here. Just in case this Web page goes away, I have made a copy. Do its arguments make sense? Do they persuade you that the 1531 map does not contain a clear image of antarctica?
It gets even more curious. Professor Charles Hapgood, the author of the long-ignored book, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (Chilton, 1966), wrote to the U.S. Air Force in 1960. He sent a photocopy copy of this map. In 1961, he received a response from the 8th Reconnaissance Technical Squadron’s Cartographic section. Here is the reply:
c. It is our opinion that the accuracy of the cartographic features shown in the Oronteus Fineaus [sic] Map (1531) suggests, beyond a doubt, that it also was compiled from accurate source maps of Antarctica, but in this case of the entire continent. Close examination has proved the original source maps must have been compiled at a time when the land mass and inland waterways of the continent were relatively free of ice. This conclusion is further supported by a comparison of the Oronteus Fineaus [sic] Map with the results obtained by International Geophysical Year teams in their measurements of the subglacial topgraphy. The comparison also suggests that the original source maps (compiled in remote antiquity) were prepared when Antarctica was presumably free of ice. The Cordiform Projection used by Oronteus Fineaus [sic] suggests the use of advanced mathematics. Further, the shape given to the Antarctic continent suggests the possibility, if not the probability, that the original source maps were compiled on a stereographic or gnomic type of projection (involving the use of spherical trigonometry).d. We are convinced that the findings made by you and your associates are valid, and that they raise extremely important questions affecting geology and ancient history, questions which certainly require further investigation.
Got that? The map is accurate, except that it shows what would have existed, had there been no ice.
In a detailed article on Oronce Fine that is posted on a page of the website of the Turnbull School of Mathematical and Computational Sciences of Scotland’s St. Andrews Universoty, the unnamed author tries to explain this. I regard this as representative of modern scholarship when it comes face-to-face with an impossible artifact — impossible according to theories of cultural evolution: “older is primitive.”
Charles Hapgood was a teacher who, in 1956, got his students to undertake a project studying ancient world maps. Hapgood was particularly excited by Fine’s 1531 map of the world and he began to develop rather amazing theories about the map. These theories were published in Hapgood’s Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings in 1965. What struck Hapgood when he examined Fine’s world map was that there was a fairly accurate representation of Antarctica on the map. It was drawn in 1531 yet Antarctica was not discovered until 1820. How was this possible? The fairly accurate representation of Antarctica, however, shows rivers and the Ross Sea which cannot be seen for the thick sheets of ice which cover the continent. Hapgood’s theory that Fine was in possession of an ancient map, drawn at a time when Antarctica was not covered in sheets of ice, seems too ridiculous to discuss. However, we are still left with the problem of how Fine knew that Antarctica was there. The most likely is the following. It had long been believed that there had to be a balance between the land masses of the northern hemisphere and the southern hemisphere so some land mass in the south was necessary. Leonardo da Vinci, for example, produced a globe with a southern land below Africa more than twenty years before Fine drew his map. The northern coast of Australia had probably been visited by Europeans by this time and the northern coast of Fine’s Antarctica is probably drawn from such representations. There may also have been reports which did indeed represent the sighting of Antarctica and Fine put the reports together to produce a half real, half guessed, map. Of course this explanation puts the fact that Fine’s Antarctica looks quite close to the actual Antarctica down to just good luck.
I see. It was just good luck. What amazing good luck. What unbelievable good luck!
I mean this. Unbelievable.
The page is here. If it ever gets removed, you can find a PDF of it in the resource package.
How precise is the map? Hapgood provides information: the original map vs. the same map, but on a projection similar to a modern map. First, the original map.
Here is a modern map next to the Finneaus map. The ice covers the “rivers.”
We read the following in an encyclopedia article on Fineaus — an article that carefully omits any mention of the map of Antarctica.
In his Latin thesis of 1890, L. Gallois dealt only with Fine’s cartography: a large map of France on four sheets and two cordiform world maps, one of the eastern hemisphere and the other, doubly cordiform, of the northern and southern hemispheres. Gallois held that the world maps were original creations and provided the source of the similar maps executed by Schoner and Apian.10 This hypothesis is unlikely: and in the absence of an established chronology of these maps, it may be supposed that the relations of dependence were in fact the reverse, for Fine’s usual procedure was to elaborate his astronomical works on the basis of the writings of others. This was undoubtedly the case with his map of France, but the scarcity of the surviving documents does not allow its genesis to be reconstructed.
This leads to an obvious question: Who produced the map that he copied?
Next question: When?
Next question: How?
These are three of the six questions that historians seek to answer, “five W’s and an h”: what, where, when, who, why, and how?
It turns out that Antarctica appears on the 1520 globe of Johannes Schöner. This is hidden in plain site on Wikipedia.
But where did he get the original?
We are not supposed to ask. The historians think this will not occur to us.
It occurred to me in 1966 when I read Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings. I was in grad school. None of my professors ever mentioned any of this. I doubt that they knew.
Interesting but neglected fact: other map-makers put Antarctica on their maps. The most famous map-maker who did was Mercator — the most famous map-maker in history. To view his 1602 map, check the resource package.
The school systems of the world have concealed all this from students for over 400 years. Yet these maps have been known to specialists and collectors for centuries. Yet they say nothing.
The experts are silent on other things besides maps. I will cover some juicy ones in my course. You will be introduced to a concealed world — a world dropped down the “memory hole” by the academic community.
You have now seen the tip of the iceberg. Would you like to see more?
Take my course.
CONSPIRACY HISTORY
There is a conspiracy operating in the academic world: a conspiracy to keep people from asking obvious historical questions. It was easy to do this before the World Wide Web. It is more difficult today.
People who ask such questions and then try to answer them are called “conspiracy historians” by professional historians who are well paid to keep people from asking such questions.
The question you should ask is this: “Who are the real conspiracy historians?”
I hope this course will help you answer this question accurately.