Nova Totius Terrarum Orbis Geographica ac Hydrographica Tabula

My younger daughter and I just finished a puzzle of this wonderful world map by Dutch geographer Henricus Hondius the Younger, published in 1630. It was great fun. (Wikipedia has a very big image of this map, a less colorful than the above but clearer.) 

Gazing at the complete puzzle I fell into a reverie about the wonder this map represents. Imagine that men in a chilly corner of northwestern Europe boarded little wooden ships and sailed across the entire globe, to Siberia and Patagonia and Sumatra and Madagascar. And not only did they sail to these places, they worked out, by staring at the sun and stars through little brass instruments, where on the globe they were, rendering the whole planet into an image that can be taken in at a glance. They were the first humans to know the shape of our world.

Imagine the voyaging that lay behind this extravagant listing of all the ports in South America.

I believe that this is what birthed the modern world. What made our age different from all that came before was the mapping of the whole globe and the connection of the planet into a single system through which goods and ideas could flow. European expansion was a violent cataclysm accompanied by much death and disaster, but it was also creative in the deepest and most profound sense: it changed the world.

Much was lost: peoples, cultures, dreams of strange worlds over the horizon inhabited by monsters or angels. But without the knowledge that lies behind this map, and the voyages that produced it, we would not be here.