Earliest globe depicting the New World may have been found

The phrase 'Here Be Dragons' has been found scrawled on maps dating back for centuries, signalling potentially dangerous waters to adventurous seafarers. Now, the same phrase written in Latin on an ostrich-egg globe, may have helped identify it as the earliest known globe that depicts the New World.

This globe, constructed from the rounded halves of two ostrich eggs, is roughly the size of a grapefruit. It's intricately hand-carved to show the continents and oceans that were known at the time, including Europe, Asia, most of Africa and South America, and possibly part of Australia or Antarctica. What's telling about this particular globe, though, is that it shows North America, but only as a small string of islands, and the familiar 'Here Be Dragons' that appears on the globe is written in Latin.

There's only one other known globe that has this phrase in Latin. It's the Hunt-Lenox Globe, an engraved copper globe housed at the New York Public Library. It has been dated to 1510, and before this discovery, it was considered to be the earliest globe showing North America. Now, though, the researcher who investigated this new discovery, Stefaan Missinne, believes that the ostrich-egg globe pre-dates the Hunt-Lenox globe. In fact, Missinne believes that it was used to create the mould that the copper globe was cast from, which would date the new discovery to 1504.

"When I heard of this globe, I was initially skeptical about its date, origin, geography and provenance, but I had to find out for myself," Missinne said, according to the Washington Map Society. "After all no one had known of it, and discoveries of this type are extremely rare. I was excited to look into it further, and the more I did so, and the more research that we did, the clearer it became that we had a major find."

The person who carved the globe is still unknown, but one other detail of the artwork offers a clue to that, according to Missinne — a tiny ship carved into the globe's Indian Ocean.

According to the Washington Post, Missinne says that the style of the ship points to an artist who associated with Leonardo da Vinci. Thus, the artist may have worked in, or been influenced by, da Vinci's workshop, but not everyone believes that may be the case.

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John W. Hessler, a curator at the Library of Congress, believes that the link to da Vinci is "pure nonsense," according to the Washington Post, as it's possible that Missinne himself is the anonymous owner of the globe, which raises the issue of conflict of interest. Other researchers and scholars are apparently joining him in his skepticism, calling for more details and more research into the globe.

(Photos courtesy: Washington Map Society)

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