The South of Mare Oceanus: maps and geographical terms

CARLA LOIS Y JOAO CARLOS GARCIA

Berna (Suiza)

Conferencia; 22nd Internacional Conference on the History of Cartography; 2007

Swiss Society of Cartography, Cartographica Helvetica and Imago Mundi Ltd, University of Berne, Institute of Cartography of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich

In the XV and XVI centuries, the European maritime expansion towards the South and the discovery of the New World transformed the traditional Mare Oceanus into a new, huge and unknown ocean. Especially Spaniards and Portugueses explored the Atlantic Ocean and reached new places which were described, interpreted and occupied. Moreover, that ocean was the (cartographical) territory where Spanish’s and Portuguese’s Crowns essayed a line in order to split their domains. But there were also French, English and Deutschland navigators who mapped the ocean and baptized it with several names. Even more, some of them started to distinguish the Northern Ocean from the Southern one. The Oceanus Aethipicus of XVI and XVII centuries –as it appears in maps signed by Münster, Pigafetta, Oliva, Blaeu, and Janssonius- became the Mer Océan Meridionale de Bellin, and Buache, or the Southern Ocean in English atlases of XVIII century. In general, maps depicting the Atlantic Ocean are more involved in the representation of continental lands and islands than in the representation of the Atlantic it-self. This attitude is reflected in the labels naming “regional seas” next to particular coasts. In few words: maps display that extension, name/s, borders and identities of the Southern Atlantic Ocean have been registered in different ways. However, we noticed some connections between the ideas about the Atlantic Ocean in maps and some historical processes (such as the consolidation of market of slaves or the emergency of nationalist discourses). We will focus on the images of Southern Atlantic to examine some political, commercial, and aesthetical senses implied in the representation and naming of that pars meridionalis of the ocean in European maps made between XVI and XVIII centuries.