1570 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 north parts of the world represented regions as remote and unfamiliar as the coasts of America, Africa, and Asia. The map covers the northern regions from the English Channel to the 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 (Estotiland), the apocryphal island of Frisland, and Mercator's speculative Arctic islands.

Ortelius's Sources

Part of Ortelius' genius was his aptitude as a compiler and editor, synthesizing the best sources that he could locate. For this map, these included the 1539 Olaus Magnus Carta marina et Descriptio Septentrionalium Terrarium for Scandinavia and Iceland; Nicolo Zeno's 1561 Septentrionalium Partium Nova Tabula for Estotiland, Iceland, Greenland, Icaria, and Frisland; Anthony Jenkinson's 1562 map of Russia, and Gerard Mercator's world maps of 1564 and 1569 for the high Arctic.

Zeno's Spurious yet Tenacious Geography

This is one of the few maps to depict Estotiland and Droegeo, both drawn from the narrative of the Zeno brothers, supposedly written in the 14th century, before Columbus, but actually 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 the discovery of these mysterious islands which appeared first on his own 1561 map, and which were eagerly copied by later mapmakers thirsty for geographical data on this remote part of the world. 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 cartographic 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.

Mercator's Arctic Islands

This is one of the earliest maps to illustrate Gerard Mercator's speculative Arctic Islands. When Mercator published his great wall map introducing the famous Mercator Projection in 1569, he recognized the essential problem with his map was that it massively distorted the polar regions. To rectify this, he included a polar projection as in inset on the map. It was this small projection, later refined in his 1595 Arctic map, that 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 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 upon the speculation. 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 map appearing in the 1579 Latin edition of the Theatrum. This is the third state of the map according to van de Broecke. The map in its many editions is well represented in institutional collections; separate examples of this 1579 edition is catalogued only in the Univerity of Bern and the Biblioteca Nacional de Espana.