A Map Worth 12 Ducats

Cantino's letters survive. In one, from 1501, he says he overheard Gaspar Corte-Real report to King Manuel on his voyage to Newfoundland. How he got the map is debated: a bribe to a Portuguese official, a purchase, or both. His price, according to the letters, was 12 gold ducats. The map is huge, over two metres wide, drawn on six sheets of parchment. It already shows the Tordesillas line, the coast of Brazil and the Portuguese fort of Elmina, and it is the earliest surviving chart to place parts of Africa, Brazil and India by latitude. The secret did not last. In 1504 King Manuel banned mapmakers from drawing the African coast beyond São Tomé, but copies were already travelling, and the Cantino map itself aged fast: Caverio's and Waldseemüller's maps soon overtook it. It sat in the library of Ferrara, then Modena. In 1859 a revolt ransacked the palace, and the library director found it in a pork butcher's shop, pasted on a screen. Today it is in Modena's Biblioteca Estense. A copy is kept in Lisbon's Museu de Marinha, in Belém.