Exploration: The Globe and Beyond

We have very little information about the workshop practices of early sixteenth-century cartographers – about how they created their maps. Martin Waldseemüller's Carta Marina of 1516 offers a rare opportunity to obtain just this sort of information. By examining the cartographer's sources, both cartographic and textual, as well as his use of those sources, we can reconstruct how he went about creating this magnificent map, and gain a unique and unprecedented view of an early modern cartographer at work.