Mercator's letter to Ortelius
Greetings to Master Ortelius, the best of friends.
Your letter afforded me great pleasure, first because you have obtained what you have wanted for a long time about China, secondly because of the dispatch about the new English voyage, on which you had previously sent me a report through Rumold [Mercator]. I am persuaded that there can be no reason for so carefully concealing the course followed during this voyage, nor for putting out differing accounts of the route taken and the areas visited, other than that they must have found very wealthy regions never yet discovered by Europeans, not even by those who have sailed the Ocean on the Indies voyages. That huge treasure in silver and precious stones which they pretend they secured through plunder is, in any case, an argument for me to suspect this....I think that that fleet cannot have returned by any route except one via the north and west of Asia, for that strait which encloses the northern parts of America to within only a few degrees on a great circle westward from Greenland...is obstructed by many rocks. So it does not seem likely that Drake would have tried it, especially if he came back from Asia so loaded down with treasure....
Duisburg, 12 December 1580
Ever yours
Gerard Mercator
[Addressed] To Master Abraham Ortelius, Cosmographer Royale, at Antwerp.
Gerardus Mercator, 1512-1594: Flemish cartographer whose maps and globes exhibited the best scientific knowledge of his time. Mercator, best known for his map projection, also invented the term "atlas" for a collection of maps. This letter, addressed to Abraham Ortel (also called Ortelius, 1527-1608) another Flemish cartographer, refers to the 1577-1580 circumnavigation of the Earth by the English admiral Sir Francis Drake.
Kraus, Hans Peter. Sir Francis Drake -- A Pictorial Biography. New York: H.P. Kraus, 1970, pp. 86, 88.
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