A highly influential English world map on Mercator’s Projection

A rare English world map, published in Hakluyt's 'Second Volume of the Principal Navigations, Voyages, Trafiques and Discoveries of the English Nation...'. This example is of the second state, also 1599, with the cartouche with engraved text describing Drake's discoveries in the Americas, added lower left.

Gerhard Mercator (1512-1594) revolutionized cartography with his development of a projection which mapped the spherical world onto a flat plane, but never published practical guidelines on how use it. Edward Wright (1558?-1615), a professor of mathematics at Cambridge University, modified Mercator's system and published his results, The Correction of Certain Errors in Navigation, in 1599. Wright's work gave English navigators a huge advantage, contributing to the success of the Royal Navy in the next century. His corrected Mercator's Projection is still in use today.
This chart, published the same year, was the first to use the corrected Mercator's projection, and was still one of the first to use any variant of the projection at all. It is believed that Wright had the help of Emeric Molyneux because of similiarities with a Molyneaux globe if 1592. It quickly became famous, even catching Shakespeare's attention: in 'Twelfth Night', first performed 1602, Maria says of Malvolio, 'he does smile his face into more lines than is in the new map with the augmentation of the Indies' (Act III, Scene II).

On the map the new discoveries in Arctic America are marked, as is 'Lake Tadouac', a very early attempt to map a 'Great Lake', a decade before any known European visit; Drake's 'Nova Albion' is used instead of the usual 'Anian'; and the south side of Magellan's Strait is made up of islands rather than a large Tierra del Fuego. In Arctic Russia the discoveries of Barentz around Novaya Zemlya are marked. In the Far East the mapping extends to Korea, correctly shown as a peninsula. Wright has avoided the temptation to augment the facts: the extreme north west and north east are left blank and the 'Terra Australis' is confined to the 'Beach' coastline.

Top left are the arms of Elizabeth I; top right a strapwork cartouche with a text about Francis Gaulle's discoveries in the Pacific; and bottom centre another cartouche with a general description of the chart.