480 pages, Free Press, ISBN-13: 978-1416535348
Toby Lester’s The Fourth Part of the World: An Astonishing Epic of Global Discovery, Imperial Ambition, and the Birth of America is much more than the tale of how a groundbreaking map of the world got drawn, published and circulated (though it tells that tale well); it also provides a portal into the opening decades of the discovery of the transatlantic world and how, even though the the ancient lore from Herodotus to Ptolemy got transformed, the old myths managed to endure. The map in question is the Waldseemüller Map, or the Universalis Cosmographia – the Universal Cosmography – by German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, originally published in April 1507, and is known as the first map to use the name “America” on what is now called South America on the main map, bestowed in honor of the Italian, Amerigo Vespucci. As for that “Fourth Part of the World”, it refers to the somewhat mythical-yet-actual undiscovered lands (after Asia, Europe and Africa) described by the ancients which we know now as America, North and South.
In the world we live in today, where there are no significant undiscovered lands and few major geographical puzzles left to solve, this book is particularly enticing as it put me squarely back in the minds of all those Medieval and Renaissance travelers, scholars and mapmakers as they struggled to put together a jigsaw puzzle to which half the pieces were still missing and produce an accurate view of the world they were still discovering. Following in their footsteps was exhilarating, thanks both to the facts themselves and to Lester’s extremely knowledgeable but always lively writing. While Lester does great work in making the process of map-making itself understandable, he doesn’t shun the livelier bits and pieces of the story, such as the way “Mongol Chic” spread through western Europe the late 13th and early 14th Centuries (Italian parents even named their sons after Mongol khans!) This book was sheer delight to read, as it combined intellectual history (the story of the transmission of knowledge and of how new discoveries were incorporated into and transformed the way people viewed their world), science (the art of navigation and marine map-making, for instance) and the stories of the explorers, both those whose curiosity could be pursued only from the Medieval version of an armchair as well as those like Columbus and Vespucci who took the helm of their ships and sailed off into the unknown (I confess I particularly enjoyed the attention given to some of the more obscure figures, from the mapmakers who finally produced the map bearing the label “America” to early 14th Century Papal scholar Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini).
The Fourth Part of
the World is an
historical adventure story about a 1507 map that had been lost for centuries and
about how America got its name, but more importantly it is about human progress
and the unending quest to discover who we are, how we got here and where we fit
into the grand scheme of things. Lester gives the reader great insight into the
minds of educated people during the middle ages and the Renaissance as we learn
of their fears, ignorance, superstitions, hopes and ambitions, and of mankind’s
slow but steady progress through the centuries in learning about ourselves, our
environment and our limitations.
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