For the love of cartography?!

A New Law For Scotland: Nobody Puts Shetland In A Box

From 1507, the map by Amerigo Vespucci showing his fantasy of the "new world," soon to be named America in a corruption of his given name:

What is this place? Image search says it's El Paso. Is that right?

It does say El Paso on the bottom of the map (albeit using a really unnecessarily convoluted and ugly, garish and mostly unreadable font).

Yes, it's a map of El Paso, Texas.

It's a high resolution image, so you can zoom in for more detail.

The view is from Mexico, south of the Rio Grande.

Source

After a long civil war in England in the 12th century, known as The Anarchy, Maud the Empress--Matilda of Normandy, daughter of the first King Henry--secured the agreement of Stephen of Blois, the king of England, that her son Henry would succeed him on the throne upon his death. The year before, Maud had married him off to Eleanor of Aquitaine. What we call the Hundred Years War was really just the final phase of a war that lasted for 300 years, from the marriage of Henry Plantagenet to Eleanor in 1152 until the final defeat of the English in 1453. As you should be able to tell from the map below, between them, Henry and Eleanor claimed more than half of what was then France.

I have seen many maps of this age in this style. I believe it was the way things were done at the time. I will see if I can find similar examples that I have seen.

http://www.historicmapworks.com

Vespucci was the first person to identify the American land-mass as a new continent (Columbus thought it was the Asian coast). But it was a German cartographer, Waldesmueller, who was the first to draw a world-map showing the new continent discovered by Vespucci. Waldesmueller named that new continent "America", after the Latinization of Vespucci's first name. The latinization of Vespucci's name is Americus Vespucius. Hence America, and the name stuck.

Vespucci was a very technically expert navigator. I read that he knew how to determine longitude by the Lunar method, a difficult method that very few people could use (longitude wasn't easy to determine until Harrison invented the marine chronometer.)

Vespucci's ability to determine his longitude is probably the reason why he knew that he wasn't at the Asian coast, and was at a new continent. Columbus didn't know that, and, as I said, Columbus thought that he was at the Asian coast.

So: Vespucci was the first European (if you don't count the Vikings in Laborfador--but why wouldn't you count then??) to identify the new continent. Of course the first discoverers of the new continent were the migrants from Asia who later have become known as the Native-Americans.

And Waldesmueller was the first person to make a world map showing the new continent. ...and gave it its current name.

Incidentally, it seems to me that the map-projection that Waldesmueler used was one of Ptolemy's map-projections, or the (now called) Bonne Projection, which differed from Ptolemy's map only by equally-dividing each parallel with its meridian-crossings (something that didn't matter in Ptolemy's time, when no one could determine longitude anyway).