Publication of Mercator's World Nautical Chart

Timeline

1. 1560–1569Duisburg · DuisburgMercator gathered new coastal data from the Age of Discovery in his Duisburg cartographic workshop and sought a method to draw spherical rhumb lines as straight lines on a plane. He may have drawn on the rhumb-line studies of Pedro Nunes and others. To accompany publishing plans such as that year's Chronologia, he personally engraved the copper plates, unfolding the world into a large wall chart for navigational correction.
2. 1569Duisburg · DuisburgThe 1569 publication 'New and More Complete Description of the Earth, Corrected for the Needs of Navigation' was assembled from eighteen copper plates of about 33×40 cm each, the whole map measuring about 202×124 cm. The title states it both presents global geography as then known and provides projection corrections for navigation: meridians are evenly spaced vertical lines, parallels increase in spacing with latitude, making rhumb lines straight. Land areas at high latitudes are greatly enlarged, but plotting compass courses is thereby greatly simplified.
3. 1570Cartographic centers of the Low Countries and Rhineland · Low CountriesThe original map was too large to spread conveniently on shipboard; though several hundred copies were printed, its geographic details were quickly revised by new discoveries. But its projection principles were absorbed by sea-chart workshops in the Netherlands, England, and elsewhere, becoming standard for Atlantic and Indian Ocean charts in the seventeenth century. Ortelius's 1570 atlas took a different, compilatory path; together with Mercator's map it marks a turning point in European world maps of the later sixteenth century.