Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
The Northern Mariner / Le marin du nord Changes in shipbuilding and sharpened accuracy in charting allowed capitalism to blossom, and those historically active traders in Venice were ready to take every advantage to prosper -even more than they had when Constantinople was in Orthodox hands.The lay priest Mauro and the other Camaldolese religious (a monastic order of hermits) at the San Michele monastery on an island off Venice who worked for years on the map were cartographers for hire.Mappamundi weren't for the masses; they were commissioned.Mauro's original was for Venice and there were two copies.One of those went to the King of Portugal, eager to grow his trading options in Atlantic Africa."The Indian Ocean and its islands and coastlines as drawn by Fra Mauro were important because this is the area of the spice trade from which Venetian merchants had made their wealth."Outside of Marco Polo and Nicolo de Conte, to whom Small gives great credit, that ocean was "virtually unknown."The map also places Japan off Asia for the first time.Small's achievement in Dark Sea is remarkable since she was working from "vague and little documented" evidence on how the map was built and Mauro's life.With those two challenges as given, her narrative correctly carries a shroud of mystery through the work.Crucial to the telling of this story is Small's recognition from cover to cover of text is the human desire to define a sense of place in their lives.( 92)Dark Sea is directed to the cartographer in us all-academic, layman, sailor, landsman.
Tracie Grube-Gaurkee (Fri,) studied this question.