Washington Post review of John Hessler’s The Naming of America: Martin Waldseemuller’s 1507 World Map and the Cosmographiae Introductio
How was it that a German priest writing in Latin and living in a French city far from the coast became the first person to tell the world that a vast ocean lay to the west of the American continents?
That is one of the bigger mysteries in the history of the Renaissance.
But it is not the only one involving Martin Waldseemueller, a map-making cleric whose own story is sufficiently obscure that his birth and death dates aren’t known for certain.
Waldseemueller appears to have also known something about the contours of South America’s west coast years before Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and Ferdinand Magellan sailed around the bottom of the continent. History books record them as the first Europeans to bring back knowledge of the Pacific Ocean.