The Profile and Place Names of the Colombian-Venezuelan Coastline in the Lusitano-Germanic Cartography of the First Quarter of the 16th Century

Abstract

Currently displayed in the Library of Congress of the United States as “America’s Birth Certificate” (despite the fact that said toponym was inscribed exclusively over what is now generally referred to as South America), the planisphere Universalis Cosmographia, drawn up by Martin Waldseemüller in 1507 and rediscovered in 1901 by Joseph Fischer in Germany, has monopolized much of the literature on early cartographic representations of the continent as the most important sample of the Lusitano-Germanic cartography of the early 16th century, precisely because it is the first to incorporate the controversial name that our continent bears today. However, along with the designation America, there are other toponyms that have not had the same prominence and that even, most of the time, go unnoticed, but that also tell us about the history of the then called New World and the process through which its map was constructed. This article seeks to account for the typical characteristics of the contour and nomenclature of the current Colombian-Venezuelan coast within this cartographic current and for how this design, with its omissions, inaccuracies, and alternative names, was reproduced without major additions, corrections, and updates for more than two decades in Central Europe. By extracting the profiles and toponymy corresponding to said coastline in the Lusitano-Germanic maps of the first quarter of the 16th century and by their analysis in correlation with the primary sources related to the first voyages of discovery, the physical geography of the region, and the corresponding secondary bibliography, we expose and argue how the Germanic cartography of the so-called “tierra firme” suffered an empirical stagnation that expanded throughout the first three decades of that century.