One of the most famous cartographers of the past – Gerardus Mercator during his life compiled a detailed geographical atlas, which was published in 1594. You can find a lot of interesting things on his maps. And his famous Mercator projection formed the basis of the most popular navigation maps today. Below you can get acquainted with the main Mercator maps and download them in high resolution.
You can download the entire Mercator Atlas here: Mercator Atlas 1594
The work of Mercator’s life – “Atlas or cosmographical meditations upon the creation of the universe, and the universe as created.” includes maps of continents, detailed maps of Europe, and European countries. There are even maps of Russia and the Arctic. Of course, Europe is best represented, and the further away from it the more distortions there are. After all, Mercator is a European cartographer who was born in the territory of the modern Netherlands and worked first at the University of Louvain – now it is Belgium, and then in the city of Duisburg – Germany. Therefore, it was difficult for him to collect information about distant countries. Nevertheless, Mercator’s maps are very detailed and therefore interesting to study.
As we can see, Europe is really drawn very well, and does not differ much from modern maps. Moscovia and Russia are also in place, perhaps the only thing that immediately catches the eye is the huge Caspian Sea. It really used to be bigger, much bigger. And if you look more closely, then to the south of Iceland there is an island that does not exist now – Friesland.
We see a lot of new interesting details on the map of Asia. There is also a mysterious Tartary, which historical science prefers to keep silent about. And the island of Iapan, which is much larger than modern Japan and contains a group of islands that are now under water.
The map of Africa is no less interesting, if only because there is no Sahara desert the size of a third of the continent. In this place there are mountains, rivers, lakes, cities – a lot of rivers, there is clearly a continent with a different climate than now.
The Americas on Mercator’s maps are distorted very much. Most of all, attract attention by the fact that South America is separated from Antarctica only by a thin strait. Now there is a huge gap in this place, with a suspicious sea relief. North America is represented only by general contours. And Mercator clearly had problems with Australia – it is connected to Antarctica in a single white spot.
And of course the most mysterious map in Mercator’s atlas is the Arctic. At least because there is no ice on it. But there is a continent divided into four parts by four rivers originating from the central lake. And in the center is a huge mountain. In general, according to the description, on the contrary, water from the oceans flows into the center of this continent and goes into a huge funnel near the north pole. But on the map we see ordinary rivers with sources and delta… Historians say that Mercator depicted the Arctic simply according to the description from the lost book by James Kane, which tells about the journey of a monk to the North Pole. A dubious version, but the map is very clear. It remains only to honestly figure out when there was so much land, with mountains and rivers.
Mercator’s world map includes maps of the western and eastern hemispheres. Such a map is a projection of the globe onto a plane perpendicular to the equator – an azimuthal equatorial projection. At the same time, the grid of the map is made in such a way as to convey the sphericity of the Earth. This is quite convenient for visual use, since it causes small distortions of the scale, but, for example, for navigation, routing, other equiangular projections are used.
Mercator is known as one of the first creators of a high-quality map for navigation, which is called the Mercator Projection.
This map is made in a cylindrical equiangular projection – the grid of such a map is rectangles, north is always at the top, and south is at the bottom. It is very convenient for navigation, that’s why it bears the postscript “for sailors” in the name. Now this projection is used by Google and Yandex maps known to everyone in the world. But such a projection has one side effect: with a change in latitude to the north or south, the scale is greatly distorted. This is clearly noticeable by the gigantic size of Greenland and Russia. In reality, the territories in the north and south are much smaller than on the map in the Mercator projection.
