The pink outlines are a present-day elliptical projection
from Xerox.
The brown portions are from a 1516 nautical chart in the
Huntington
Library
This virtual cut-and-paste shows how the master maps were
constructed.Until the nineteenth century maps were pieced
together by master map-makers using information gathered
from different individuals or expeditions. Each brown pieces
represents information gathered on a separate voyages. On
the coast of Brazil there are two separate sections--most
likely from the two separate Gonzalo Coelho expeditions. And
the three separate pieces from Mossel Bay (South Africa) to
north of Mozambique are in all probablity the three missing
voyages between Bartholomew Dias (1487) and Vasco da Gama.
(1497). (For more on the navigational difficulties of this
area, find out about the Agulhas
current.)
Since the earth is a slightly stretched-out circle
(ellipse), master map-makers drew the outlines of continents
as they would appear on an ellipse.
