• Waiting for Ile Saint Jean to appear: The Sixteenth Century

    Ile Saint Jean, correctly positioned in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, becomes a fairly certain feature in world mapping only in the 1630s. The maps that were being produced before that time were far more interested in creating a picture of the whole world, not a needle in a haystack of interest only to fishermen, and these came to be called mappamundi.   The Origins of the Mappamundi Mappamundi or maps of the known world, began to appear in ancient times such as this one, from the Sixth Century BCE, on a baked clay tablet from the Late Babylonian period and now in the British Museum. The known world at that time…