http://www.usnews.com/usnews/culture/ar ... 022906.htm10/14/02
A new wrinkle
Did someone else discover Magellan's strait?
By Jay Tolson
Pity Ferdinand Magellan. Several months ago, British amateur historian Gavin Menzies suggested that a Chinese fleet circumnavigated the world more than a century before the Portuguese mariner did. A book presenting the scholar's case, 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, hits the bookstores next month. This week, at the Library of Congress, another Magellan "first" is being challenged. Former CIA analyst Peter Dickson will deliver a paper--also appearing in the upcoming issue of Exploring Mercator's World--exposing what he calls "the best-kept secret in human history."
According to Dickson, at least 15 years before Magellan's 1520 passage through the strait at the bottom of South America that bears his name, a Portuguese expedition made its way to the west coast of the New World and sailed north as far as Acapulco. Its findings were kept secret, Dickson believes, because Lisbon did not want to provide intelligence to the rival Spanish, in whose service Magellan sailed on his voyage of 1519-21. But the information leaked out to European cartographers.
As primary evidence, Dickson points to the Waldseemuller map, made by Germans in Lorraine in 1507, the last known copy of which the Library of Congress holds and hopes to buy. Known as the "baptismal certificate of the New World" because it is the first map on which the name "America" appears, it is also remarkable for being the first to show that there were two distinct oceans and that the western one was a wide expanse of water separating America from Asia.
Too good. But the feature most puzzling to Dickson was the map's depiction of the western coastline of South America. The more he studied it, correlating its longitude-latitude grid with that of modern maps, the more he felt that information based on "direct observation" had to inform the depiction of such details as the "sharp angle shift in the coastline where Chile and Peru meet."
As further, noncartographic proof, Dickson quotes the account of one of Magellan's men: "He knew where to sail to find a well-hidden strait, which he saw depicted on a map in the treasury of the king of Portugal." And that map, like the Waldseemuller, probably drew on a pre-1507 Portuguese expedition to the other side of the New World.
"Correlation does not equal explanation," says geographer David Woodward, who awaits "other major archival evidence" before he gets excited about the hypothesis. But Kenneth Nebenzahl, a historian of cartography, is more generous: "I can't endorse Mr. Dickson's theory, but he has forced me to ask why I didn't ask that question when I wrote my last book."
