Day 115 - 2nd Sea Day to Senegal

The Age of Discovery's expeditions down African shores en route to India, Indonesia and beyond were largely motivated by the desire to bolster trade and grow empires. Geographers and cartographers accompanied explorers on the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, charting the coast for future journeys.
But theirs were not the first maps of the great continent. Long before, the Greco-Roman geographer Ptolemy (c. 100-c.170) created one of history's earliest renderings, albeit from strictly a Mediterranean perspective. In Geography, Ptolemy's Africa (named
"Libya" on his map) comprised only Northern Africa, depicted as a horizontal and amorphous oblong stretching west from Egypt to the Strait of Gibraltar.
Hundreds of years later, expeditions discovered just how far south the coast of Africa went. Most notably, Sebastian Münster (1488-1552) compiled descriptions and sketches from various journeys to create the earliest known "full" map of Africa, published in 1554 but still a crude representation. Thirty years later, armed like those before him with data collected from coastal voyages, Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598) authored the first atlas of the world, featuring a more complete vision of sub-Saharan Africa.
By 1856, J. Andriveau-Goujon (1832-1897) had captured the contours of Africa's shoreline more precisely, but the continent's unexplored interior remained largely blank. His incomplete map seems to have motivated history's great British explorers-David Livingstone (1813-1873), Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890), Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904)-tO assemble their expedition teams in the name of Queen Victoria. By 1880, Andriveau-Goujon published another map, this one detailing their finds.Leia mais