The claims
The suggestion that the Antarctic continent is represented on the map was first proposed by retired Captain Arlington Humphrey Mallery in 1956. He was an amateur archaeologist who believed that North America had been extensively colonised by Celts, Vikings and other Old World peoples, who possessed accurate maps lost to later ages. Tellingly, Mallery used the word ‘decipher’ to describe how he analysed and reconstructed what he believed the sixteenth- to eighteenth-century maps depicted. He thought that a combination of numerous maps was used to produce a single map, but that the later copyists did not recognise that their sources had different points of origin, different scales and different projections. It was therefore necessary to rearrange different parts of a single map to understand what the hypothesised originals had shown.
Bizarrely, Mallery managed to influence a few other people, including several officers of the US Navy Hydrographic Office, who came forward to endorse his reconstructions. He also made a powerful impression on Charles Hapgood (1904-1982), a history of science teacher who saw the transcript of a radio broadcast on Mallery’s interpretation of the Piri Re’is map. Hapgood had developed the hypothesis of what he called earth crustal displacement during the 1950s. According to this hypothesis, the earth’s crust is poorly bonded to the underlying mantle and occasionally slips over it, causing worldwide devastation. One of the causes of these displacements is the build up of ice at the poles, which causes the crust to become top-heavy and mover towards the equator through centrifugal force. Correspondence with Albert Einstein (1879-1955) impressed the theoretical physicist so much that he wrote a foreword to Hapgood’s 1958 book Earth’s shifting crust. Hapgood was the first to draw wider public attention to maps that he claimed showed Antarctica over three centuries before its accepted discovery in the nineteenth century. Based on aerial photographs taken by the US Air Force, Hapgood compared Piri’s map with an azimuthal equidistant projection of the world centred near Cairo.
Hapgood assumed that the original source maps, which he believed derived from an ancient survey of Antarctica at a time when it was free from ice, were extremely accurate. Because of this, he also assumed that any difference between the Piri Re’is map and modern maps were the result of copying errors made by Piri. Starting from this position, it mattered little to Hapgood if he adjusted the scales between stretches of coastline, redrew ‘missing’ sections of coastline and altered the orientation of landmasses to ‘correct errors’ on Piri’s map to match the hypothesised source maps, a technique derived from Mallery. Hapgood found it necessary to redraw the map using four separate grids, two of which are parallel, but offset by a few degrees and drawn on different scales; a third has to be turned clockwise nearly 79 degrees from these two, while the fourth is turned counterclockwise almost 40 degrees and drawn on about half the scale of the main grid. Using this method, Hapgood identified five separate equators. To make matters worse, it is necessary to ignore the placenames that fill the map. The placenames given by Piri match those found on other maps from the early sixteenth century, many of which continue to be used to the present day.
In the 1960s, Hapgood’s ideas, which had not attracted much attention when first published as his arguments were complex and his results unorthodox, were popularised by a number of writers, including (most influentially) Erich von Däniken. He simply repeated Hapgood’s assertion that Piri’s map depicts an ice-free Antarctica as if a proven fact and suggested that the only explanation is that it must have been made by extraterrestrials, either at an early date when Antarctica was indeed free from ice or because their technology revealed the underlying surface. These accurate maps were later copied by Piri, via numerous intermediate copies, which introduced errors, inaccuracies and uncertainties. To von Däniken, moreover, the supposed elongation of South America was a result not of the combination of four separate maps at different scales, but of the map’s origin in satellite photography.
The placenames written on the southern landmass demonstrate what that Piri drew took into account the commonly held belief in a southern continent, accepted since Classical Greek geographers first suggested that it ought to exist, and reports from Portuguese explorers voyaging along the east coast of South America, some of whom may even have reached the Antarctic Peninsula. Even so, the shape of the southern land he drew in no way resembles the coast of Antarctica, ice-free or otherwise. The sole point of comparison is that both lie to the south of the Atlantic Ocean and have a generally east-west coastline. An illustration of the power of the belief in an unknown southern continent is shown by the justification for depicting one given by Gerhard Kremer (Gerhardus Mercator, 1512-1594). On his map of the world published in 1569, he wrote that if the earth were to remain in equilibrium, the land masses of the northern hemisphere must be balanced “under the Antarctic Pole [by] a continent so great that with the southern parts of Asia, and the new India or America, [it] should be a weight equal to the other lands.” Deriving as it did from Classical geographers. This viewpoint explains why so many sixteenth-century cartographers were confident enough to show a southern landmass, even without evidence for its existence from mariners.
All in all, the Piri Re’is map of 1513 is easily explained. It shows no unknown lands, least of all Antarctica, and contained errors (such as Columbus’s belief that Cuba was an Asian peninsula) that ought not to have been present if it derived from extremely accurate ancient originals. It also conforms to the prevalent geographical theories of the early sixteenth century, including ideas about the necessity of balancing landmasses in the north with others in the south to prevent the earth from tipping over (just as Hapgood hypothesised with his crustal displacement theory). Nevertheless, the map was a remarkable achievement, testimony to the skills of Piri as a cartographer and the only surviving representative of the maps made by Columbus during his first two voyages of discovery. As with so much in the fringe, it is only made mysterious by the wilful ignoring of evidence that explains its methods of composition (most importantly, the legends written by the mapmaker himself) and by making exaggerated claims about its accuracy while its manifest inaccuracy is overlooked.