uropean interest in goods
produced in the Orient stimulated a search for sea routes to Asia,
around Africa and across the Atlantic. The
Treaty
of Tordesillas, sanctioned by the Pope in 1506, divided the Atlantic
and Americas between
Spain
and
Portugal.
This was a hindrance to English
mercantile ambitions, but England could not directly challenge the two
dominant maritime powers. The proposed solution was to find a northern
passage between Atlantic and Pacific that avoided Spanish and Portuguese
territories. A series of
maps
produced between 1520 and 1570, based on a combination of imagination,
theory and fact, show the development of this idea of a
northwest passage.
The earliest suggestion of the existence of a northwest passage
appears on the globe produced by
Johannes
Schöner in 1520. It shows
straits to the south and to the north of "America", each
separating "America" from other southern and northern land
masses.
The Ambassador's
Globe, created some time between 1525 and 1553,
more clearly reveals a northwest passage, and is suspected as being
the prototype for the passage depicted by later mapmakers such as
Frisius and Mercator.
A map (1529) by
Girolamo da
Verrazzano led many to believe that a shorter, easier route to Asia
existed. It was based on a voyage his brother had undertaken in 1524 for
France, along the east coast of North America. This model too was copied by
mapmakers for many years.
In 1531,
Oronce
Finé, professor of mathematics in Paris, produced
the first map to show four Arctic islands with a north polar sea
and a separate island of Greenland. For centuries, other mapmakers -
such as Mercator - copied these features onto their own maps.
The idea of a northwest passage continued to develop through the work of
Gemma
Frisius. Having access to Portuguese and Spanish map sources,
he accepted that the Corte Real brothers had travelled through a
northern strait from the Atlantic to the Orient (1500-1502).
On his 1537 globe, he called the northern strait "Arctic strait of the
three brothers". His work, particularly this globe which his student
Gerard
Mercator helped to construct, was well-known in England.
A map (1558) by Diogo Homem of Portugal was commissioned by
Queen Mary and completed, after her death, at the request of Queen
Elizabeth. It was based on French exploration (mainly
Cartier's) between 1534 and 1544 and focused on the northeast
American shoreline, the St. Lawrence Gulf and River. He depicted
North America as a narrow continent with many straits leading to
the Pacific. By contrast, a
map by Bolognino
Zaltieri, in 1566, showed North America as a huge land barrier which
could only be bypassed via a northern passage.
Also in 1558 Nicolo
Zeno produced an influential
map of the North
Atlantic, supposedly based on ocean voyages by members of the family
in the 1380s, although we have no other evidence of such travels. It
placed most features at too northerly a latitude, causing later
cartographic confusion and leading Frobisher to think he had visited
the island of "Friesland", when in fact it was Greenland.
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Nicolo Zeno, 1558
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Portrait (1613) of cartographers Gerard Mercator and Jodocus Hondius
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1595 world map by geographer Gerard Mercator
Courtesy of the National Archives of Canada ( NMC 016097 )
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It was Mercator's work that made the theory of a northwest passage more
popular. Already by 1538, the date of his first world map, he was becoming
widely known and respected. His world map of
1569 was one of the greatest compiled up to that time.
Abraham
Ortelius' world map of the following year was part of a pioneering
compilation, essentially the
first modern
atlas, and was also important in the history of cartography.
Thus, those who conceived, planned or invested in the Frobisher
expeditions could potentially have been influenced in their
decisions by seeing any of a series of maps showing differing
versions of the Northwest Passage. Some mapmakers built on what
their predecessors had produced, while others generated their own
theories entirely.
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