by it, as though he already knows it bathes half the world.
In 1520, Ferdinand Magellan ventures with fiveSpanish ships into the Pacific, and measures its width in hardship:
“We were three months and twenty days without getting any kind of fresh food,” Magellan’s Italian navigator, Antonio Pigafetta, writes of the crossing. “We ate biscuit, which was no longer biscuit, but powder of biscuits swarming with worms, for they had eaten the good. It stank strongly of the urine of rats. We drank yellow water that had been putrid for many days. We also ate some ox-hides that covered the top of the mainyard to prevent the yard from chafing the shrouds, and which had become exceedingly hard because of the sun, rain, and wind. We left the hides in the sea for four or five days, and then placed them for a few moments on top of the embers, and so ate them; and often we ate sawdust from boards. Rats were sold for one half-ducado apiece, and even then we could not get them.”
In the heat of this age of exploration, in 1543, a Polish cleric publishes a book that moves the entire world to a new locale.
De Revolutionibus,
by Nicolaus Copernicus, plucks the earth from its stationary post at the hub of the celestial spheres, and sets it spinning around the Sun, between the orbits of Venus and Mars. The strangeness and unpopularity of Copernicus’s opinion nearly silence it, but within one hundred years, against all expectation, the Sun takes over the center of the universe, and our world voyages as a wandering star.
Doesn’t this new planet deserve a name? If Champlain can christen his lake and Hudson his bay, why must the newly mobile globe labor under an old, inaccurate term? “Earth” recalls the ancient division of all ordinary matter into four elements—earth, water, air, fire—and the designation of earth as the heaviest, least heavenly among them. In that scheme, water flowed over earth, air floated above both, and fire rose through air to the threshold of the celestial spheres, where planets and stars embodied a fifth element—quintessence. With world order shifting on maps of the heavens, might not “the earth” take a proper name from mythology? But already it is too late to dislodge the old name, too late even to change it from “earth” to “water,” now that seas can be seen to yawn and stretch in all directions.
Mapmakers decorate the blank expanses of ocean with ships, with whales and sea monsters, with puff-cheeked cherubs exhaling gales, and also with map titles and legends framed in elaborate cartouches as large as some countries.
At least one compass rose, a flower-like emblem often rendered in gold leaf, indigo, and cochineal, now orients each map, with thirty-two painted petals pointing in every possible direction of wind and headway. The rose realizes all the logbook shorthand of exploration’s zigzag course—ENE, SSW, NW by N—and mirrors the face of the magnetic compass that dictates those notations.
The magnetic compass, indispensable to mariners since at least the thirteenth century, helps them find the North Star even when clouds obscure it—even when their ship has sailed so far south as to plunge that guiding light below the horizon. Many think the compass needle must be attracted to the Pole Star, if not to some invisible celestial point close by it.
But no, the earth itself is the magnet that draws all compass needles to its iron heart. William Gilbert, an English doctor, discovers this truth through experimentation in 1600, and demonstrates the effect for Queen Elizabeth by using a small spherical magnet to model the earth. Furthermore, Gilbert scorns the universal prohibition against garlic on shipboard, by showing that neither garlic fumes nor garlic smeared on a compass needle can diminish its magnetic power.
The magnetic nature of the earth leads Gilbert and others to suspect magnetism as the force that keeps the planets in their orbits. Newton’s universal gravity trumps
In 1520, Ferdinand Magellan ventures with fiveSpanish ships into the Pacific, and measures its width in hardship:
“We were three months and twenty days without getting any kind of fresh food,” Magellan’s Italian navigator, Antonio Pigafetta, writes of the crossing. “We ate biscuit, which was no longer biscuit, but powder of biscuits swarming with worms, for they had eaten the good. It stank strongly of the urine of rats. We drank yellow water that had been putrid for many days. We also ate some ox-hides that covered the top of the mainyard to prevent the yard from chafing the shrouds, and which had become exceedingly hard because of the sun, rain, and wind. We left the hides in the sea for four or five days, and then placed them for a few moments on top of the embers, and so ate them; and often we ate sawdust from boards. Rats were sold for one half-ducado apiece, and even then we could not get them.”
In the heat of this age of exploration, in 1543, a Polish cleric publishes a book that moves the entire world to a new locale.
De Revolutionibus,
by Nicolaus Copernicus, plucks the earth from its stationary post at the hub of the celestial spheres, and sets it spinning around the Sun, between the orbits of Venus and Mars. The strangeness and unpopularity of Copernicus’s opinion nearly silence it, but within one hundred years, against all expectation, the Sun takes over the center of the universe, and our world voyages as a wandering star.
Doesn’t this new planet deserve a name? If Champlain can christen his lake and Hudson his bay, why must the newly mobile globe labor under an old, inaccurate term? “Earth” recalls the ancient division of all ordinary matter into four elements—earth, water, air, fire—and the designation of earth as the heaviest, least heavenly among them. In that scheme, water flowed over earth, air floated above both, and fire rose through air to the threshold of the celestial spheres, where planets and stars embodied a fifth element—quintessence. With world order shifting on maps of the heavens, might not “the earth” take a proper name from mythology? But already it is too late to dislodge the old name, too late even to change it from “earth” to “water,” now that seas can be seen to yawn and stretch in all directions.
Mapmakers decorate the blank expanses of ocean with ships, with whales and sea monsters, with puff-cheeked cherubs exhaling gales, and also with map titles and legends framed in elaborate cartouches as large as some countries.
At least one compass rose, a flower-like emblem often rendered in gold leaf, indigo, and cochineal, now orients each map, with thirty-two painted petals pointing in every possible direction of wind and headway. The rose realizes all the logbook shorthand of exploration’s zigzag course—ENE, SSW, NW by N—and mirrors the face of the magnetic compass that dictates those notations.
The magnetic compass, indispensable to mariners since at least the thirteenth century, helps them find the North Star even when clouds obscure it—even when their ship has sailed so far south as to plunge that guiding light below the horizon. Many think the compass needle must be attracted to the Pole Star, if not to some invisible celestial point close by it.
But no, the earth itself is the magnet that draws all compass needles to its iron heart. William Gilbert, an English doctor, discovers this truth through experimentation in 1600, and demonstrates the effect for Queen Elizabeth by using a small spherical magnet to model the earth. Furthermore, Gilbert scorns the universal prohibition against garlic on shipboard, by showing that neither garlic fumes nor garlic smeared on a compass needle can diminish its magnetic power.
The magnetic nature of the earth leads Gilbert and others to suspect magnetism as the force that keeps the planets in their orbits. Newton’s universal gravity trumps
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