Created from a redrawing of Behaim’s Globe (1492) in Paullin and Wright, Atlas of the Historical Geography.

On a globe, the Atlantic had to be accounted for. This is because unlike a flat map or chart, a globe presents the world as a sphere. Martin Behaim commissioned a globe that predates Columbus’s voyage in 1492. A merchant from Nuremberg, Behaim had lived for some time in Lisbon, and when he returned home he worked with skilled local artisans to create the globe. Behaim supplied information from the usual sources: Ptolemy’s Geography, other classical texts, maps he had consulted, travel accounts he had read, and mariners he had met. Behaim fills the eastern Atlantic Ocean with the archipelagoes known to Atlantic sailors, such as the Azores, the Canary Islands, Madeira, and the Cape Verde Islands. Parallels and meridians bisect its waters. Many textual legends occupy the empty space. The result was that even if the Atlantic remained largely unknown Behaim’s globe implied that its waters were fully accessible to mariners. The Behaim Globus survives to this day and may be seen in the German National Museum in Nuremberg. The 1908 facsimile of the globe gores by Ernest George Ravenstein appears in color here, and the gores are georeferenced in GoogleEarth here by the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection. See especially the digital copy of the globe in the online exhibition A Land beyond the Stars: Amerigo Vespucci’s and Waldseemuller’s Map of the World at the Museo Gallileo, Florence.

The globe in figure 1.8 was created from a printed facsimile of the globe gores created in the early twentieth century. The process used was texture mapping on a sphere.