Redrawing the World

There is an island so small and forgotten it is often left off today’s atlases altogether but once Rhun was writ large on naval maps, for this fragrant isle of nutmeg was the most desired place on earth.

Such fabulous wealth could come from controlling the spice trade that the volcanic island, a speck in the Banda Sea of eastern Indonesia, was considered a fair exchange for another strategic island on the opposite side of the globe: Manhattan.

Old World maps held many blanks and seas drifting off over unknown horizons, revealing as much about the perspective of the cartographer as the lay of the land. A twelfth-century Muslim chart, Tabula Rogeriana, depicted with some accuracy the entirety of Eurasia and the crown of Africa set in a striated indigo sea. As masters of early trade, Arabs had the most complete picture of the known world. A full shape of the African continent appears for the first time in 1489 Italian cartography, the knowledge fresh from Portuguese spice seekers rounding the Cape of Good Hope, and soon after the Americas joined as the Old World and New World discovered each other. An illustrated Thai map from the 1776 Traiphum shows the south at the top, with Thailand’s jagged shores below cloud-like spice islands, the destination for a European ship and a Chinese junk shown battling through swirling waters. So much of this discovery, and redrawing of maps, was done in the name of spice.