You can date this Ortelius map by a mistake

A bulge in the coast of South America pins this plate of the Americas to the 1570s.

Here is a detail for map nerds. The south-west coast of South America on this Ortelius map of the Americas bulges outward — a distortion that Abraham Ortelius corrected on a later plate of 1587. So the bulging version you see here must be from the first plate, issued in the 1570s.

The map comes from the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570), generally considered the first modern atlas, and was engraved by Frans Hogenberg. Other tell-tales of the early plate include the large ship sailing west across an otherwise empty Pacific and the ungraduated equator.

Down at the bottom, beyond the Strait of Magellan (Fretum Magellanicum), Tierra del Fuego is drawn as the northern edge of a vast southern continent that everyone in the sixteenth century was certain must exist to balance the globe. It would take two more centuries of voyaging to prove it wasn't there.

Sources: van den Broecke, Ortelius Atlas Maps · Barry Lawrence Ruderman — raremaps.com ↗

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