Beau topo du Times ce matin sur le contexte entourant le baptême de l'Amérique. J'ai séjourné à quelques reprises à St-Dié dans les Vosges, là où on a référé pour la première fois au nom Amérique pour désigner le nouveau continent sur une carte. Si je connaissais déjà certains pans de cette histoire, l'article apporte quelques éclaircissements supplémentaires.
"We call ourselves Americans today because of the map’s makers, Martin Waldseemüller and Mathias Ringmann, young clerics in the cathedral village of St.-Dié, France. By incorporating early New World discoveries, their map reached beyond the canonical descriptions of Old World geography handed down from Ptolemy in the second century. On a lower stretch of the southern continent, the mapmakers inscribed the name “America” in the mistaken belief that Amerigo Vespucci, not Columbus, deserved credit for first sighting a part of that continent, South America.
Or possibly they favored Vespucci because he held more firmly to the growing consensus that this was indeed a New World, not the Indies (as Columbus so wanted to believe), and because he wrote more colorfully than Columbus about the people he encountered.
The map is also the source of an abiding mystery. How did Waldseemüller and Ringmann already know so well the configuration of South America, before any recorded Spanish or Portuguese voyages around the horn to the west coast? How did they know of the Pacific before Balboa made his sighting in 1513? Hard to believe it was just a guess or futuristic vision of what world geography would come to be.
Were the cartographers themselves dropping a hint when they wrote on the map that “if you are not familiar with the new discoveries, do not be afraid of what it is you see on this map, for it is how you will come to see your world in the future”?
La suite:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/26/science/the-america-map-review-of-a-renaissance-globemakers-toolbox.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130326&_r=0
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