Brussels International
Map Collectors' Circle
This extraordinary personality came into the frontline of international attention again when, in September 2002, Christie's held an Africa sale in London offering over 200 lots from his personal effects that had been kept by his family since his death. Apart from what was called the first map of the Congo (see our article in Newsletter No 15, January 2003), which fetched the incredible sum of EUR 104 000, there were wall maps and slides he used for his lectures, some maps which had also appeared in books, a sextant, some photo albums, a Winchester rifle, and other Stanleyana'.
Stanley was not a cartographer; he was, above all, a journalist, an explorer, a colonialist and, during the latter part of his life, a politician. In 1871 he found Livingstone on the eastern shores of Lake Tanganyika, in 1874 he set out from Zanzibar to become the second explorer, after Cameron, to cross the continent from East to West, and as of 1879 he began to open up the Congo for the Belgian King Leopold II. From then until he returned to England in 1890 he continued to explore Central Africa in the services of the Leopold II, and then, on his last expedition (1887-1890) he rescued the enigmatic Emin Pasha and brought him to the East coast.
During the 16 years of his travels through the dark continent, he made hundreds of route sketches of which quite a few have survived in his diaries and sketch books. Many of these were copied and found their way into the drawing offices of cartographic firms such as Petermann's in Gotha, Sampson Low and Stanford in London. These maps of Central Africa on scales between about 1:500 000 and 1:6 000 000 were published in books, including those by Stanley himself. Only three of these (as far as could be ascertained at this moment), carry the mention Map … by H.M. Stanley or Survey … by H.M. Stanley. To investigate to what extent his sketches were really used by European cartographers to update their maps would be an interesting project. It might give this intrepid traveller more cartographic credit than he had had before.
We hope to bring you more about this in our Newsletter of May 2004, the month he died one hundred years ago.
The Portuguese merchant-traveller Duarte Lopes arrived in Luanda in 1578 and stayed in the Congo until 1584. It was during his mission to Pope Sixtus V in 1588 as ambassador of the King of the Congo, Alvaro I, that he met Filippo Pigafetta in Rome. This widely travelled Italian humanist wrote down Lopes's account in Italian and had it published in 1591 by Bartolomeo Grassi under the title Relatione del Reame di Congo et delle circonvicine contrade. This became an immediate success and was translated into Dutch in 1596, English and German in 1597, and into Latin in 1598. Eight etchings and two maps are also contained in this book of 84 pages.
The map of the Congo — Tavola del Regno di Congo — was the first detailed map of this region and had a great influence on the mapping of Africa in the 17th century. Ortelius used it in an inset on his map of Fez and Morocco (1595), a curious combination geographically speaking, but undoubtedly motivated by its topical importance at that time, and by the fact that Ortelius himself had not shown this region in detail in any of his previous maps of Africa or its parts. The other map covers most of the continent, east of about 9° E, from the Mediterranean to the Cape. One of its distinctive features is the north-south alignment of the two major interior lakes, in sharp contrast to the then current convention of placing what are called the two Ptolemaic lakes in an East-West alignment, south of the Equator. Of interest also on this map is the use of letters and figures for 37 additional toponyms in Egypt, decoded in a special cartouche. This makes Egypt the most detailed part of both maps. Although totally unrelated to the Congo, Pigafetta probably wanted to document his travels in Egypt in 1575, of which no other map exists, as far as I know.
One of Filippo Pigafetta's ancestors is Antonio Pigafetta, author of Magellan's Voyage, the account of the first circumnavigation (1519-1522). Filippo, though best known for his Relatione, was also a military officer engaged in different conflicts around the Mediterranean, and a brilliant man of languages and letters; he is responsible for the first translation of Ortelius's Theatrum Orbis Terrarum into Italian, published posthumously by Vrients in Antwerpen in 1608.
by Wulf Bodenstein