Peter Martyr map

The Peter Martyr map is a Spanish woodcut map composed in 1511 or 1514 and included in most or some copies of the 1511 edition of Decades of the New World by Peter Martyr d'Anghiera. The map depicts the insular and continental Caribbean coastlines and soundings as understood in the early 1510s by Iberian authorities. It is deemed the first print map of the Caribbean, and possibly the first such to focus specifically on the New World.

History

Details of the map's provenance remain unclear, though a good few theories have been proposed. Traditionally, it has been dated to 1511 and attributed to Martyr, in keeping with the provenance of the first edition of Decades of the New World. Recently, however, the University of Valladolid-affiliated scholar, Jesús Varela Marcos, has proposed that the map was created jointly by Martyr and Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca in 1514, and thereafter included a posteriori in copies of the former's 1511 edition of Decades. Varela Marcos argues that the map's noticeable distortion is political in nature, and proffers Fonseca as the most likely candidate for said influence. Furthermore, they argue, (i) the map depicts post-1511 discoveries, (ii) some exemplars of the 1511 Decades have no map, and (iii) at least some exemplars with the map have had it inserted at a later date. The Varela Marcos provenance has been accepted in some, but not all, recent literature.

Curiously, Varela Marcos claims the following Decades passage, describing a map-making session by Martyr and Fonseca, in fact describes a 4 December 1514 session in which the very Peter Martyr map was composed.