World Map, 1550—Historical Map
Historical maps tell us about the geography of different places, but they also show what people knew about those places at the time the maps were made. This map shows what a mapmaker in the mid-1500s thought the world looked like.
Primary Source
Source: Courtesy of the National Archives of Canada.
Background
In the 1400s and 1500s, new inventions in shipbuilding and navigation allowed European explorers to travel to new lands. Unlike today, they had no accurate maps of the world because no one was quite sure what it looked like. In the 1500s, cartographers created maps based on the knowledge and assumptions they had of land, oceans, and geography.
Look at the historical map shown above. Sebastian Munster, a German professor and cartographer, created it in 1550. Munster placed this map in an edition of his publication, Cosmographia. Along with maps, Cosmographia contained information about geography and descriptions of the world. Munster's work influenced many other cartographers.
