Making Sense of the New World This map from 1540 represents one of the earliest efforts to make geographic sense out of the New World (Novus Orbis on the map). The very phrase New World suggests just how staggering a blow to the European imagination was the discovery of the Americas. Europeans reached instinctively for the most expansive of all possible terms—world, not simply places, or even continents—to comprehend Columbus's startling report that lands and peoples previously unimagined lay beyond the horizon of Europe's western sea.

Gradually, the immense implications of the New World's existence began to impress themselves on Europe, with consequences for literature, art, politics, the economy—and of course for cartography. Maps can only be representations of reality, and are therefore necessarily distortions. This map bears a recognizable resemblance to modern map makers' renderings of the American continents, but it also contains gross geographical inaccuracies (note the location of Japan—Zipangri—relative to the North American west coast) as well as telling commentaries on what sixteenth-century Europeans found remarkable (note the Land of Giants—Regio Gigantum—and the indication of cannibals—Cannibali—in present-day Argentina and Brazil respectively). What further clues to the European mentality of the time does the map offer? In what ways might misconceptions about the geography of the Americas have influenced further exploration and settlement patterns?