The Legacy of Exploration on World Geography

The voyages of this era drove a genuine cartographic revolution. Medieval European maps had often followed schematic religious conventions, such as the T-O map centered on Jerusalem, or relied on Ptolemy's ancient Geography, which underestimated the size of the Earth and had no knowledge of the Americas at all. Martin Waldseemüller's 1507 world map was among the first to depict the Americas as a separate landmass, and the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator's 1569 map introduced the Mercator projection, which preserved compass bearings as straight lines — an enormous practical aid to navigators — at the cost of severely exaggerating the size of landmasses near the poles relative to those near the equator, a distortion still debated in cartographic and educational contexts today.