Waldseemüller's monumental modern map of the world from the celebrated Strassbourg edition of Ptolemy's Geography, the most important cartographer of the early sixteenth century (Karrow).

Double-page woodcut map of the world, with full margins. This so-called Admiral's Map; the first of two maps in Waldseemuller's atlas that relate to New World discoveries, and is referred to in the index as the 'Hydrographia sive Charta marina…', and in the 'Ad Lectorem' as the 'Charta Marina', where it is clearly stated that the geographical facts have been made known "through the most authentic voyages of a former Admiral of the most serene King of Portugal, Ferdinand, and those of other explorers" (The Admiral's Map What Was It? And Who the Admiral? Samuel Mc Coskry Stanton, Isis, Vol. 22, No. 2. (Feb., 1935), pp. 511-515).

The map was created for inclusion in the Strasbourg 1513 edition of Ptolemy's Geographia: Gymnasium's Geographie Opus Novissima Traductione e Graecorum Archetypis, signaling the beginning of the section of twenty modern maps added to the twenty-seven Ptolemaic originals.
This world map provides a more accurate outline of East Asia than Ptolemy's. It contains Greenland, which is attached to Europe, but only a tiny section of North America, meant to represent either Newfoundland or Labrador. With the Caribbean islands of Spagnolla [Haiti/Dominican Republic] and Isabella [Cuba], an unnamed small piece of land in the mid-Atlantic with an eastern coastline delineated, Greenland is depicted as an elongated peninsula attached to the north of Scandinavia, Great Britain is shown as a single island, with rhumb lines intersecting at 17 points. The coastline of South America is left unfinished, with only five place names provided.

The map was included in the Gymnasium's Geographie Opus Novissima Traductione e Graecorum Archetypis, printed in 1513 in Strasbourg, by Johannes Schott. Schott published a single further edition of the book in 1520. There were no alterations to this block.
The current map bears a watermark similar to Piquet 127481, manufactured in Como in 1519. This suggests the map was printed for the 1520 Strassburg edition, using the same woodblocks. Both editions are rare in the private market, with the 1520 edition being the rarest of the two.

Martin Waldseemüller (1470-1521) was a German scholar and cartographer. He studied under Gregor Reisch at the University of Freiburg and then moved to Basel in the late 1490s, where he met the printer Johannes Amerbach. In 1506, he moved to Saint-Dié in Lorraine, where Duke René II had established a humanist academy, the Gymnasium Vosagense. There, he read about Amerigo Vespucci's voyage to the Americas and Portuguese accounts of circumnavigating Africa.

Together, they proved that the Indian Ocean was not landlocked. He and his colleagues created a map that compared Vespucci's geographical information with Ptolemy's and explained why they had deviated from Ptolemy's precepts. That work, 'Cosmographia introductio', was published in 1507. It contains the first printed instance of the name 'America' being applied to the discoveries over the Atlantic: "The fourth part of the earth, we have decided to call Amerige, the land of Amerigo we might even say, or America because Amerigo discovered it".

Read more about Ptolemy and Waldseemüller.

Reference: Sabin 66478; Shirley, World 35.