Hot on the heels of yesterday’s Beale non-Decoder app comes something just as achingly zeitgeisty, but actually rather nice with it. OK, its uncracked historical cipher content is pretty much ‘zilch point squat’ percent, but I rather like it. So there.
On the one hand, the article (from Slate magazine) itself is little more than a short piece by Joseph Nigg to promote his nice-sounding (2013) book “Sea Monsters: A Voyage Around the World’s Most Beguiling Map”. However, given that the map in question is Olaus Magnus’ epic 1539 Carta Marina (that took 12 years to compile), and that Slate made its splendidly garish sea-monsters clickable (each one brings up Olaus’ somewhat breathless description of it), I think the page is well worth a visit.
Of them all, my personal favourite is the “ducks being hatched from the fruit of the trees” in the Orkneys, a folk tale that has a long and interesting history all of its own (for example, I’m pretty sure it came up in Andrea di Robilant’s (2011) book “Venetian Navigators: The Voyages of the Zen Brothers to the Far North”)… but really, there should be more than enough sea-monster madness going on there for anybody, perhaps even enough to inspire a whole new series of Scooby Doo Mystery Incorporated (yes, the one with Harlan Ellison). Enjoy! 🙂
Nick, sorry this is off-topic. Wanted to check yr present thinking on the month-names. Do you still think they are or probably are in Occitan?
Interesting that we see a whirlpool with monsters. Did the map maker indicate a whirl-wind ‘monster’? Or did I just get blown off course? FUN!
Song: “Sailing sailing, over the bounding main! For many a stormy wind shall blow ‘ere Jack comes home again!”
Diane: for what it’s worth, the closest match to the zodiac roundel month names seemed to be Occitan month names as written not too far from Toulon. If a better set of matches has been found since I last looked a few years back, I haven’t heard of it.
Thank you Nick.
Thanx Nick for making that elegant clickable map available to us here on your blog. You might like the discussion on B-408’s f-86r3 which discusses the “minor” god and goddess who calmed stormy waters when sailors prayed for their help: Alcyone and Ceyx. I’ll be returning to that “central” folio to see if the surrounding folios’ discussions are related. Fun and fascinating; an almost unbeatable combination, eh?
A cut crystal dish, commissioned by Francesco di Medici portrays that particular sailors dilemna. I have just taken another look at some other sailing-oriented works of cut-crystal which are in the Museo degli Argenti, Florence. I’m seeing some other sea-related pieces of crystal being displayed therein. So, I wonder if that museum also has maps and manuscripts which might be related to those various works of art.