Dating Maps with Sir Francis Drake’s Route of Circumnavigation

This paper describes the nine sixteenth-century maps, texts, and globes that showed Sir Francis Drake’s route of circumnavigation of the world. It shows the relationships between these nine artifacts and suggests the year of disclosure for each. The oldest of these is the Whitehall map, which was the direct or indirect precursor of the Drake-Mellon map, the French-Drake Van Sype map, the Dutch-Drake map, and the Hondius Broadside map. Most world maps published between 1561 and 1588 have a huge bulge on the coast of Chile. However, eight of the maps discussed in this paper shrank the bulge and moved it to the southern tip of Chile, using updated information from Drake’s voyage.