About World Globes

Sabastian Cabot, (1474? – 1557?) Explorer, Cartographer and Navigator during the age of discovery.  During his life Sabastian Cabot was employed by England and Spain to find the Northwest Passage and a way to China.

By 1512 Sebastian was employed by Henry VIII as a cartographer at Greenwich.

About 1525, he received the rank of captain general from Spain.  He began a trip with four ships and 200 men around the world (1526-1529) that was supposed to sail to China and the
Moluccas (the Spice Islands, in Indonesia).  Upon landing in Brazil, however, rumors of the wealth of the Incan king and the nearly-successful expedition of Aleixo Garcia caused Cabot to abandon his charge and instead further explore the interior of the Río de la Plata (a river between Argentina and Uruguay in South America).

All that remains of his personal work, (the account he wrote of his journeys has been lost), is a map of the new world drawn in 1544; one copy of this was found in Bavaria, and is still preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, where it still remains.

Present day world globes and maps have a rich history of courage exhibited by explorers like Sebastian Cabot.

“Martin Waldseemüller was a German cartogrpher best known for his Universalis Cosmographia, a 12-sheet woodblock map dated 1507.  Not only was it one of the first maps to precisely chart latitude and longitude, but it also marked the first time the name “America” was used, referring to South America and honoring Amerigo Vespucci.”¹   In 1525 Waldseemüller appears to have had second thoughts about the name, in his reworking of the Ptolemy atlas, the continent is labelled simply Terra Incognita (unkown land).  But despite the revision, 1,000 copies of the world map had been distributed and the original suggestion took hold.  Four copies of the globular map survive in the form of “gores”: printed maps that were intended to be cut out and pasted onto a ball. Only one of these lies in the Americas today, residing at the James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota.

¹ Replogle Globes “Age of Exploration“

Vincenzo Coronelli, born in Venice in 1650, is regarded as one of Italy’s finest cartographers.  Coronelli was a cleric and encyclopedist with a particular interest in geography and cartography. He was author of more than 140 titles and produced several hundred maps.   As Royal Cartographer to King Louis XIV, Coronelli was granted access to the latest documentation sent from the colonies to the French Academy of Sciences.  His globe gores were produced to be assembled into spherical form and sold as complete globes, rare examples were kept aside to be published in sheet form.  Coronelli’s considerable works represented the pinnacle of geographic knowledge of the world in the late 17th century.