Ancient Origins
On a chilly winter day in 1929, Halil Edhem, the Director of Turkey’s National Museum, was hunched over his solitary task of classifying documents. He pulled towards him a map drawn on Roe deer skin. As Halil opened the chart to its full dimensions (two feet by three feet wide or 60 X 90 cm) he was surprised by how much of the New World was depicted on a map which dated from 1513.
The document was the legacy of a pirate turned Turkish Admiral, Piri Reis ( circa 1470-1554). He was born in Gallipoli, a naval base on the Marmara Sea and was the nephew of Kemal Reis, a pirate who had reinvented himself as a Turkish Admiral adventurer who had made his name in naval warfare. At the time, the distinction between pirate and Admiral was more flexible than might be expected from looking back through a Hollywood lens.
Map of the world by Ottoman admiral Piri Reis, drawn in 1513. ( Public Domain )
Piri Reis sailed with his famous uncle from 1487 to 1493. During these voyages, he was introduced to the lucrative spoils of piracy. The fleet fought pirates and captured and plundered enemy ships. In 1495, Kemal Reis’ great skill in the art of battle earned him an invitation to join the Imperial Turkish Fleet. His nephew accompanied him to his new assignment. The pirates were transformed into respectable Admirals.
After Kemal was killed during a naval battle in 1502 Piri Reis turned his back on the seafaring life and began a second career as a map maker. A perfectionist – Piri Reis would not tolerate the slightest error in his drawings – he created his famous map in 1513 using older source maps; including charts captured from Christopher Columbus. The Turks had boarded one of Columbus’s ships before the crew had a chance to throw the charts into the sea; standard practice in a time when the contours of the planet remained veiled in mystery and maps held secrets that were invaluable to pirates, admirals, kings and queens.
‘Christopher Columbus on Santa Maria in 1492’ (1855) by Emanuel Leutze. ( Public Domain )
A Columbus Controversy
The general public first learned of the existence of the Piri Reis map in the 27 February 1932 issue of the Illustrated London News . Entitled, “A Columbus Controversy: America – And Two Atlantic Charts”, the article noted that: “… Columbus got little further than the mouth of the Orinoco, in Venezuela, in his voyage along the coast of South America in 1498, so that the stretches of the South American coast given in the Piri Reis’s chart must have been copied from other sources.”
In the July 23rd edition of the magazine Akcura Yusuf, President of the Turkish Historical Research Society, wrote a more detailed account. The author pointed out a significant fact: “…the map in our possession is a fragment. If the Other fragments had not been lost, we should have had in our possession a Turkish chart drawn in 1513 representing the Old and New Worlds together.”
U.S. Navy’s Hydrographic Office.
An amateur scientist by the name of Captain Arlington Mallery made it his mission to determine the age of the source maps used by Piri Reis. So radical were Mallery’s conclusions that he hesitated to reveal them. In August 1956, he finally decided to reveal his findings on a radio show sponsored by Georgetown University. He explained that in June 1954 he was working in the map room of the Library of Congress when his friend “… the Chief Engineer of the Hydrographic Office handed me a copy of a map which had been sent to him by a Turkish naval officer. He suggested that I examine it in the light of the information we already had on the ancient maps. After making an analysis of it, I took it back to him and requested that the Officer check both the latitude and longitude and the projection. When they asked why, I said, ‘There is something in this map that no one is going to believe coming from me, and I don’t know whether they will believe it coming from you.’ That was the fact that Columbus had with him a map that showed accurately the Palmer Peninsula in the Antarctic continent.”
1753 world map by the French cartographer Philippe Buache. ( Public Domain )
Mr. Warren, the host of the radio show, interviewed Mallery and M.I. Walters of the U.S. Navy Hydrographic Office:
“HOST: You say that these maps have been checked by the Hydrographic Office of the U.S. Navy?
WALTERS: Yes.
HOST: As far as you are concerned, are they accurate?
WALTERS: Yes, they are.
HOST: How old are the maps?
WALTERS: These maps go back 5,000 years and even earlier. But they contain data that go back many thousands of years previous to that.”
Walters remarked on the comparisons between the Piri Reis Map and the newly (1954) discovered sub-glacial features of the Queen Maud region of Antarctica:
“We have taken the old charts and the new charts that the Hydrographic Office produces today and made comparisons of the soundings of salient peaks and mountains. We have found them to be in astounding agreement. In this way, we have checked the old work very closely. We put very much confidence in what Captain Mallery has disclosed.
HOST: Mr. Mallery, this must then lead to the conclusion that there were competent explorers and map makers along the coast of the Atlantic long before Columbus.
MALLERY: Several thousand years before. Not only explorers, but they must also have had a very competent and far-flung hydrographic organization, because you cannot map as large a continent as Antarctica as we know they did – probably 5,000 years ago. It can’t be done by any single individual or small group of explorers. It means an aggregation of skilled scientists who are familiar with astronomy as well as the methods required for topographic surveying.”
Hapgood and the US Air Force Cartographic Office
One of Charles Hapgood’s students told him about the radio broadcast. The Professor was immediately fascinated and decided to: “…investigate the map as thoroughly as I could… 4
Since Mallery had used the US Navy for his investigations Hapgood decided to get a second opinion from…
