The First Circumnavigators

The Trip Around the Globe

For our project, we found geomapping to be an interesting way in viewing the travel logs written by Magellan and the crew. Through this map, we can see the route that Magellan took on his voyage and the locations the journals were written in. When clicked you can see the entries made at the certain locations, and view similarities in language, weather, information, or other interesting details.

While making the map, not all locations were named or accurately described by the authors of the documents we analyzed. Latitude was typically and frequently used throughout the documents, longitude was rarely used. When transforming our markup into the map, we had to sometimes use some latitude measurments and input in our own longitude based on context given to us through the text to get as close to the actual location as we could.

In addition to using context for most of the locations, we should note that the locations simply might not be completely accurate at all considering the differences in their maps against ours that we have today. The maps they used were clearly not as accurate (as seen below), and some were warped, so even the crew members using their inaccurate maps as a basis for longitude and latitude could place their exact locations in a different spot than we have ours mapped.

http://www.biogeocreations.com/news/2015/4/11/maps-show-what-world-looked-like-in-1500s

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