Carol Gano - Atlas

The story of atlases is as jagged as the coast of Norway. Early maps were incredibly incorrect, laced with enticing lies such as: "gold is buried at The X 3 paces from the oak tree". Not being drawn to scale but it made no difference! There was gold fever in the Old World and every country wanted to make a claim - if not in gold, in lands, slaves and trade.

What was it like to voyage beyond the horizon? For rum and bread you could be on a boat swabbing the decks, shimmying up the sale mains or peeling spuds in the kitchen.

It was considered bad form and bad luck to be carting women folk around the planet. So 50% of us didn't get a looky look unless we disguised ourselves and hoped not to be thrown overboard or raped if the truth be found out and we were exposed as women. The consequences to be heaped upon us were life threatening. 

More on the atlases! 

The early ones were created onto animal skins with inks made from squid, charcoal or paint. Were these very different from early man's cave drawings in the Southern part of France maybe they're more similar than first expectations were works of art if a botanist was included in the crew then a reasonable expectation would be that plant drawings would adorn the margins of the map where travel had not occurred and the land island and water was unknown early explorers from the old world were from Spain Holland Italy the UK Portugal and included the names such as men like Ponce de Leon, Cortez, Columbus, Jensen in 1606, Tasman in 1642, Cook in 1770, deTorres in 1606 and Hertog in 1616.

But even before these fellows explorers were the Babylonian maps in six hundred BCE and the fourth century Roman maps. Abraham Ortelius in 1570 created the first atlas, a set of uniformly sized maps and he termed it, the Theatreum Orbis Terrorum.