The World of Gerard Mercator: The Mapmaker who Revolutionised Geography

The World of Gerard Mercator: The Mapmaker who Revolutionised Geography

by Andrew Taylor

Harper Perennial, $144

Fans of The West Wing may recall the Cartographers for Social Equality suggesting the Mercator projection of the world be replaced with the Gall-Peters projection, which corrects cylindrical distortion and makes Africa 13 times bigger than generally perceived. They then flipped the map upside down. 'But you can't do that ... you're freaking me out,' says White House spokeswoman C.J. Cregg. We see the world largely through the Dutch eyes of Reformation cartographer Gerardus Mercator, who in 1569 solved the mathematical problem of expressing a spherical world on a flat sheet of paper of practical use to sea-going navigators. Although a map of infinite size would be needed to express the poles, his stretching of the lines of latitude and longitude was adopted by Nasa for mapping Mars in the early 1970s. In The World of Gerard Mercator, Andrew Taylor tackles a fascinating subject, but the man proves elusive. Why was he imprisoned by the Inquisition? Was it the map he drew of Palestine in 1537, criticised for failing to show the exact spot Moses received the tablets of stone?