Terra Incognita
 Rodney Broome
 (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
 2001 Educare Press
  ISBN: 0944638228


The True Story of How America Got Its Name.

Ahha! Here be dragons, me hearties! Come with me & Rodney Broome into the gloom of the past when sea travel was as thrilling & dangerous as space travel is today. When men went down to the sea in ships no bigger than bungalows & sailed the bounding Main to the edge of the world & didn't drop off!

& who were these daring men? Mostly merchants, looking for bigger & better cargoes to bring back to their citified brethren & their wives, ever-hungry for something new, something delectable, something Mrs. Jones didn't have, whether that be a monkey or a new flavor of tea, an Indian or...

Terra Incognita is the telling of history from another point of view, connecting the dots between voyages, ships, cargoes & paymasters.

“Terra Incognita, the fourth continent, lay dormant as if shrouded in a fog until the year 1502. The native peoples...the Inuit, Micmac, Aztec, Inca, and Apache--had not participated in the ambitions of a Euro-centric world that had expanded to encompase Africa and Asia...[v]isitors had been to its shores before...[w]hat was different about Christopher Columbus's arrival at the Caribbean Islands in 1492, and, five years later, John Cabot's voyage to New England and Nova Scotia was that neither man was interested in the land he had reached. They were both trying to get to Asia...[m]ost of the explorers involved in the discovery of the Americas in the late 1400s either knew or were known to each other...the only person who did not meet any of the central characters was a mapmaker...whose fluid pen & the timely invention of movable type had a lasting effect on the way we view our world today.#148; (Pp. xxiii/xxiv).

By the way, Columbus was looking for India & Cabot wanted to get to China.

In 1507, Martin WaldseemÜller, then 34 years old & an accomplished cosmographer & cartographer, published, for the Duke & the Canon of St. Die, a revolutionary World Map, just 15 years after Columbus had landed on Hispanola. It was the first map to show the New World as separate continents & accurately depicted the length of the equator. It was on this map that the word “America” was written across what we now call Brazil. The map was produced & printed by men working in a Benedictine monastery in a small mountain town near Strasborg. As Rodney Broome reminds us, men of exploration knew each other & none other than Amerigo Vespucci were busy making & producing maps. At some time Martin's path crossed Amerigo's & the rest...as they say...is history, which Rodney Broome manages to tell in a marvelously convoluted, detailed & entertaining way.

If you like to know the who, why, when & how of historical things & events, then Terra Incognita will thrill you. Into this little book is packed a ton of trivia that is both fascinating & extra-ordinary -- about the exploration of the world from the “Twelve Wooden Plates” upon which this new map was secured for printing to “The Commercial Revolution” in which the Black Plague had people sailing away to the farthest reaches of the globe (a newly invented item at the time!) to “A Young Genoan Arrives in Bristol” being excerpts from journals of this icon of exploration to “Bristol Ships in Lisbon and Huelva” where “CC” had been dwelling to “Shipshape and Bristol Fashion” wherein a medieval proverb comes to life & so on into the legends, facts & fictions.

Very well done & certainly for every history buff, & anyone interested in reading or writing about merchant seamen, explorers & maps. The only quibble I have is that the dark green of the jacket & the dark red of the text made it impossible for me to read the “blurb!”

& why does Rodney Broome know so much about those days of yore? Because he was born in Bristol, England, the harbor from which Cabot sailed all those centuries ago & has the sea in his veins, so much so that he landed up here in Seattle, Washington. This book has been reprinted without the “Terra Incognita” in its title.
(05/11/03)

Rebecca