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The Cantino planisphere

The Cantino planisphere is the earliest surviving map showing Portuguese discoveries in the east and west. It is named after Alberto Cantino, an agent for the Duke of Ferrara, who successfully smuggled it from Portugal to Italy in 1502. The map is particularly notable for portraying a fragmentary record of the Brazilian coast, accidentally discovered in 1500 by the Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral (he correctly conjectured that he had landed on part of a continent previously unknown to Europeans) ^[1] and subsequently explored by Gonçalo Coelho and Amerigo Vespucci.

Most probably the Cantino Planisphere is a copy of the official prototype exising at Casa da Índia (The House of India), in Lisbon, where the new discoveries made by the Portuguese were recorded. It is conjectured that Cantino was able to bribe certain Portuguese government mapmakers to copy this map for him. While it enlightened the Italians to many new territories as of yet unknown to them, it was obsolete within months due to subsequent mapping voyages by the Portuguese. Nevertheless, its importance to the Portuguese-Italian trade relations should not be understated; this map provided the Italians with knowledge of Brazil's coastline and that of much of the Atlantic Coast of South America long before other nations even knew South America extended so far to the south. The geographical information given on the Cantino map was copied into the Italian-made Canerio (or Caveri) map shortly after the Cantino map arrived in Italy and the Canerio, in turn, became the primary source for the design of the newly discovered western lands on the highly influential wall map of the world produced by Martin Waldseemüller in 1507 under the auspices of Rene, Duke of Lorraine.

1. ↑  Harvey, p. 145.

• Harvey, Miles The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime. New York:Random House, 2000. ISBN 0-7679-0826-0. (Also ISBN 0-375-50151-7).

• Ancient world maps
• World map
• Timeline of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact
• Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact

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