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Updated: May 29, 2025
GEMMA FRISIUS, SEBASTIAN MUNSTER, JULIUS SCALIGER, ORTELIUS and MERCATOR contended for the former; SALMASIUS, BOCHART, CLUVERIUS, and VOSSIUS for Ceylon: and the controversy did not cease till it was terminated by DELISLE about the beginning of the last century.
Scarce a commentator of them all, for more than a hundred years, but thought, as Alphonso of Castile did of Creation, that, if he had only been at Shakespeare's elbow, he could have given valuable advice; scarce one who did not know off-hand that there was never a seaport in Bohemia, as if Shakespeare's world were one which Mercator could have projected; scarce one but was satisfied that his ten finger-tips were a sufficient key to those astronomic wonders of poise and counterpoise, of planetary law and cometary seeming-exception, in his metres; scarce one but thought he could gauge like an ale-firkin that intuition whose edging shallows may have been sounded, but whose abysses, stretching down amid the sunless roots of Being and Consciousness, mock the plummet; scarce one but could speak with condescending approval of that prodigious intelligence so utterly without congener that our baffled language must coin an adjective to qualify it, and none is so audacious as to say Shakesperian of any other.
Crowe having listened to these remarks with earnest attention, replied, after some hesitation, "I am bound to you, brother, for your kind and Christian counsel I doubt as how I've steered by a wrong chart, d'ye see as for the matter of the sciences, to be sure, I know Plain Sailing and Mercator; and am an indifferent good seaman, thof I say it that should not say it.
To the famous and renowned Gerardus Mercator, his Reuerend and singular friend at Duisburgh in Clieueland, these be deliuered. This very man himselfe hath trauelled to the riuer of Ob, both by land, through the countreys of the Samoeds, and of Sibier, and also by Sea, along the coast of the riuer Pechora Eastward.
We learn from Hakluyt, II. 647, that this narrative was written by Mr Edward Wright, an eminent mathematician and engineer, who was the real author of that admirable invention for charts, commonly called Mercators projection, but unjustly, as Mr Wright complains in his work entitled Vulgar Errors, where he charges Mercator with plagiarism.
Hainzel is interesting from its curious outline; Cichus for the huge yawning crater on its eastern wall; Capuanus for a brilliant shining crater also on its eastern wall; and Mercator for possessing bright craters on both its east and its west walls. Vitello has a bright central mountain and gains conspicuousness from its position at the edge of the dark Mare Humorum.
Even as early as the reign of Edward III. of England, Nicholas of Lynn, a voyager to the northern seas, is thought to have definitely fixed the magnetic pole in the Arctic regions, transmitting his views to Cnoyen, the master of the later Mercator, in respect to the four circumpolar islands, which in the sixteenth century made so constant a surrounding of the north pole.
The maps of the world by Mercator of Leyden, published on a large scale, together with many astronomical and geographical charts, delineations of exploration, and other scientific works, at the magnificent printing establishment of William Blaeuw, in Amsterdam, the friend and pupil of Tycho Brahe, and the first in that line of typographers who made the name famous, constituted an epoch in cosmography.
To prove that the balance of trade, in spite of a prevailing impression to the contrary, not only might be, but had been, on the side of England, was the chief purpose of Mercator.
The same doctors, Mercator in other of his globes and maps, Moletius in his sea-card, nevertheless doubting of so great continuance of the former continent, have opened a gulf betwixt the West Indies and the extreme northern land; but such a one that either is not to be travelled for the causes in the first objection alleged, or clean shut up from us in Europe by Greenland, the south end whereof Moletius maketh firm land with America, the north part continent with Lapland and Norway.
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