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An enthralling biography of the man who created the first real map of the world and changed civilization
Born at the dawn of the age of discovery, Gerhard Mercator lived in an era of formidable intellectual and scientific advances. At the center of these developments were the cartographers who painstakingly pieced together the evidence to create ever more accurate pictures of the planet. Mercator was the greatest of all of them-a poor farm boy who attended one of Europe's top universities, was persecuted and imprisoned by the Inquisition, but survived to coin the term "atlas" and to produce the so-called projection for which he is known. Devoutly religious, yet gripped by Aristotelian science, Mercator struggled to reconcile the two, a conflict mirrored by the growing clash in Europe between humanism and the Church.
Mercator solved the dimensional riddle that had vexed cosmographers for so long: How could the three-dimensional globe be converted into a two-dimensional map while retaining true compass bearings? The projection revolutionized navigation and has become the most common worldview.
Nicholas Crane-a fellow geographer-has combined a keen eye for historical detail with a gift for vivid storytelling to produce a masterful biography of the man who mapped the planet.
- Sales Rank: #2160386 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Henry Holt and Co.
- Published on: 2003-01-02
- Format: Deckle Edge
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.58" h x 1.30" w x 6.56" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 368 pages
- Jacket with map of the world
From Publishers Weekly
In the course of a life that nearly spanned the 16th century, that glorious age of exploration, a Flemish peasant's son, Gerard Mercator, helped shape the modern perception of the planet while seldom venturing beyond the confines of a corner of northwestern Europe. Crane (Clear Waters Rising), a British geographer and adventurer, makes much of Mercator's long life and uses this longevity as an organizing theme of the biography: "surviving for twice as long as many of his contemporaries, he was able to mature through two consecutive life spans." In the first half of his life, the comparatively impetuous Mercator, struggling with his ideals, was imprisoned under the inquisition. In the second, with his passions more focused, he conceived and drew the first modern map using a "projection" that solved certain navigational problems; eventually, he created the first unified compilation of maps of the world, called an atlas. The raw material here is rich: there's the story of a poor boy makes good, explorations into civil and martial turmoil, and the excitement of new discoveries. While Crane sometimes loses track of the main story amid the minutiae of shipping manifests, he does demonstrate a real talent for incorporating letters and documents from diverse sources into very readable prose, as well as teasing Mercator's personality out of sometimes scant or tangential sources.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Famous cartographer Gerhard Mercator was a fellow graduate of Erasmus' alma mater and absorbed the Renaissance humanist spirit of the 1500s. In his 86 years, Mercator saw the opening wars of the Reformation, courtesy of Charles V's and his son Phillip II's campaigns to restore Catholic power in the Spanish Netherlands. These two themes of Mercator's era, the rejuvenation of inquiry and religio-political war, frame Crane's quite detailed biography, the first in English about the geographer. One of its most surprising aspects is the cradle-to-grave abundance of information about Mercator that Crane has pulled together, which is especially surprising since lowly cobblers' sons--as Mercator was--usually leave no historical records. But relatives and teachers took to Mercator, and their confidence in the boy was eventually vindicated by his seminal cartographic achievements. Illustrations of them--his mentors and his maps--abound in this stolid volume of Mercator's techniques and turbulent times. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"This rich and rewarding biography of the man who changed the way we look at the world . . . stands at the peak of Crane's achievements so far." -The Times (London)
Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Mercator Was a Person, Not Just a Projection
By Lauren S. Kahn
Who hasn't heard of "Mercator projection"? You see it every time you pick up an atlas and look at a world map with all its longitude and latitude lines.
Well, lo and behold, Mercator was a person, Gerardus Mercator, not just a projection.
This is a terrific book for anyone interested in history that goes beyond the ordinary. In fact, there have been a lot of books about scientific history and this is a worthy addition to the genre.
Mercator was born in poverty in the Low Countries and lived to become the preeminent geographer of his time when drawing an accurate map involved doing the best you could from limited resources. Starting with globes he created the conventional way of putting a map on a flat surface with minimal distortion.
This is not the easiest book to read, but it was excellent. I recommend it to anyone who wants to deal with history beyond the usual political history.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
At times more cartographic history than biography
By Galen K. Valentine
A good biography gives you not only a sense of the person, but also of the place. The very best can leave you believing the person a cousin, or even a distant brother or sister - that sense of person and place magnified almost to familial relation. I have found such books an excellent adjunct to the study of history. Not the least because they bring color and life to the sometimes dry and academic prose wielded by so many historians. Nicholas Crane's, "Mercator " is at times a lively look at the life and achievements of Gerard Kremer (known to most as Mercator); with more emphasis placed on achievement than on character.
The book begins appropriately with Mercator's birth. Crane's style is generally fluid throughout the entire work, but I found myself rereading the first two or three chapters because of what seemed to be inconsistency in dates. It turned out to be more the long expositions on current affairs that Crane sprinkles throughout than any chronological errors. The other problem I encountered was his occasional use of commodity prices to explain current conditions with little other context than implication. How much a particular item costs is useful to the extent that the reader knows such other information as how much the average worker earned in a month, or a year, and the cost of other basic necessities. Crane often fails to provide this context. Once past the bumpy beginning the rest is pretty much smooth sailing.
There are plenty of color and b&w plates. But since most of the originals are large wall-sized maps or enormous globes (at least by the standards of today) the reproductions are nearly useless for detailed examination. They are nonetheless beautiful. Mercator's innovations Crane explains textually, but the lack of useful diagrams makes understanding difficult. This is perhaps a criticism for the publisher rather than the author. The cost of including color plates and diagrams may have been prohibitive - but in that case I would have rather had less breadth and more depth i.e. fewer items reproduced but with each spread over more than one plate to permit detailed study.
"Mercator" sometimes reads more like a history of 16th century cartography than a biography of Gerard Mercator, due perhaps to insufficient primary source material. And that is my most significant criticism - that it loses incisiveness by attempting to cover both subjects rather than allowing his life to take center stage with place as a backdrop. Crane's biography will not take its place beside Ron Chernow's, "Titan" or H.W. Brands, "The First American" as one of the very best. But it is still a pleasant read and aside from my literary criticisms I have no reason to doubt Crane's scholarship. Consider it more of an appetizer than an entrée.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Mapmaker to the World and to the Centuries
By Rob Hardy
Cartographers are generally an anonymous bunch. If you know one cartographer, it is probably Mercator, and you probably only know his last name because of his ingenious projection to make a flat map of our spheroid Earth. Gerard Mercator was a mild and modest man, less interested in making a name for himself than in improving knowledge of our planet. It was for others of his era within the bustling sixteenth century to cross the seas and bring back riches, and more importantly, geographical data. Mercator himself never even approached an ocean, his exploring restricted mostly to libraries and obscure reports from those who made the voyages. He never had a biography in English until Nicholas Crane produced _Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet_ (Henry Holt). The life of the cartographer is integrated with the tumultuous military, political, and meteorological events around him, for an engaging look at an original thinker.
Mercator was born as Gerard Kremer to poor parents (his father was a cobbler) in Flanders in 1512. He was fortunate in being helped in his education, and became an apprentice to a maker of instruments and globes. His engraving into copperplate was beautiful and influential. In 1537, Mercator published his first map, a portrait of the Holy Land. Four years later, he made his first terrestrial globe, and Crane makes understandable how huge such a project was. Making the lens-shaped map papers to glue onto the sphere may have inspired Mercator to calculate his projection, a map that was to be an aid to navigators ever after. Mercator lived in a tumultuous time, and his moderate views, shared with the humanists, about such things as faith in Christ being more important than ritualistic ceremony, were considered heretical by others. In 1544, he was actually imprisoned for seven months for alleged Lutheran sympathies (charged with "_lutherye_"). He remained busy until the end of his long life, during the final three decades of which he worked on a book of maps of lands all over the world which was only completed by his grandsons. There had been other such books, but Mercator's was more comprehensive. It was also more influential; he named it after a Titan of Roman mythology, and ever since, any book of maps has been called an atlas.
We are less surprised by maps than those in Mercator's time; we have instantaneous satellite pictures of the world, whenever we want them, and _terra incognita_ continues to dwindle. Everyone recognizes the true silhouettes of continents. There was a time when such knowledge was still new, and tentative. Crane has written about the many influences on his subject within this complicated historical period, and has produced a remarkably full portrait. Mercator assimilated information and made a new picture of the world, a picture now familiar to us all. His influence is not even confined to the Earth he served so well; when the Mariner missions mapped Mars, the resultant charts were Mercator projections.
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