1570 / 1641 Ortelius Map of the North Atlantic / Arctic: Scandinavia, Britain, Greenland

One of Abraham Ortelius' most interesting maps, this is his 1570 map of Scandinavia and the Arctic. During the Age of Discovery, these northern parts of the world represented regions as remote and unfamiliar as the coasts of America, Africa, and Asia.

A Closer Look

The map covers the northern regions from the English Channel to just south of the North Pole and from America to Russia, including England, Scandinavia, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, and Greenland, as well as parts of America. It was a significant vector for the dissemination of the geographical fraud of Nicolo Zeno, as evidenced by the appearance of Estotiland on the coast of North America and the phantom islands of Icaria, Drogeo, and Frisland. Zeno's depiction of Greenland is also preserved, as are Mercator's speculative Arctic islands.

Ortelius's Sources

Part of Ortelius' genius was his aptitude as a compiler and editor, synthesizing the best sources available. For this map, these included the 1539 Olaus Magnus Carta marina et Descriptio Septentrionalium Terrarium for Scandinavia and Iceland and Nicolo Zeno's 1558 Carta Da Navegar De Nicolo et Antonio Zeni Furono In Tramontana Lano MCCCLXXX for Estotiland, Iceland, Greenland, Icaria, and Frisland. Ortelius also drew on Anthony Jenkinson's 1562 map of Russia and Gerard Mercator's world maps of 1564 and 1569 for the Arctic.

Zeno's Spurious yet Tenacious Geography

This is one of the few maps to depict Estotiland and Drogeo, both drawn from the narrative of the Zeno brothers, supposedly written in the 14th century, before Columbus, but published in 1558 as a deliberate fraud by the Venetian merchant and statesman Nicolo Zeno. Most subsequent cartographers associated Estotiland with Labrador based upon Zeno's description,

… the fishing vessel 'Frise' was blown westward by a storm, and arrived at a land named 'Estotiland,' whose inhabitants traded with 'Engroenelandt.' This country, 'Estotiland,' was very fertile, and had mountains inland. The king of this country possessed books written in Latin, which he did not understand. The language that he spoke and his subjects shared no similarity to that of the Vikings. The king of Estotiland, seeing that his guests sailed safely with the aid of an instrument (the compass), persuaded them to make a maritime expedition to another land to the south called 'Drogeo.'

Also prominent are Zeno's imaginary islands of Icaria and Frisland. As with Estotiland, Zeno credited his 14th-century predecessors with discovering these mysterious islands, which appeared first on his own 1558 map and were eagerly copied by later mapmakers thirsty for geographical data. Despite Zeno's work being a fraudulent Venetian attempt to co-opt the achievements of the Genoese Christopher Columbus, it remained influential in the 16th and 17th centuries, absent better reconnaissance of the North Atlantic. Not only Ortelius but his competitor De Jode and the Dutch mapmakers of the early 17th century embraced the Zeno geography. It appears likely that Zeno's fraud came to Ortelius and Mercator not directly but via the intermediary of Ruscelli's 1561 edition of the Zeno Map. It appeared in Ruscelli's edition of Ptolemy, which primarily consisted of the works of Ptolemy and Gastaldi, the two great pillars of geography. The appearance of the Zeno map amidst the works of these two great authorities would have had the effect of bestowing their imprimatur on Zeno's imposture.

The Spanish verso text paraphrases the Zeno narrative but also references the English having found Frisland, naming it 'West England.' This refers to Martin Frobisher's July 1576 sighting of southern Greenland - which the explorer took to be Frisland. He promptly claimed the newly-discovered land for Queen Elizabeth I.

Mercator's Arctic Islands

This is one of the earliest maps to illustrate Gerard Mercator's speculative Arctic Islands. When Mercator published his 1569 wall map introducing the famous Mercator Projection, he recognized the essential problem with his projection was that it massively distorted polar regions. To rectify this, he included a polar projection as an inset on the map. This small projection, later refined in his 1595 Arctic map, introduced Mercator's idea of four arctic islands surrounding an open Arctic Sea, at the center of which was a great whirlpool. Two of those islands are visible here, one unnamed, and the other just north of Norway, labeled Pigmei hic habitant, for Mercator's assertion that it was the home of a race of female pygmies. The channel between the islands, possibly Mercator's interpretation of the Davis Strait, was described as having violent currents. Variants on Mercator's Arctic islands continued to appear in various forms well into the 17th century until the discoveries of Spitzbergen and other factual Arctic islands began to intrude. The islands disappeared entirely in Hondius's 1636 Arctic map Poli Arctici et Circumiacentium Terrarum Descriptio Novissima.

Publication History and Census

This map was drawn by Abraham Ortelius and engraved by Franz Hogenberg for inclusion in the first modern atlas, Ortelius' Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. It appeared in all editions of that work, beginning in 1570. Based on the typography of the verso text, this example corresponds to the 1609 Spanish edition of the Theatrum, which appeared again in 1612 and 1641; according to van den Broecke, the state of this example corresponds to the final state of the map appearing in the 1641 Spanish edition, of which only twenty-five were printed. The map in its many editions is well represented in institutional collections; however, only one example of this 1641 edition is cataloged, appearing in the collection of the Denver Public Library.