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Historians have wondered how, as early as the beginning of the 16th century, Turkish seaman Piri Reis made an exquisite map — a cartographic marvel — of the world as known to him, writes B.N. Goswamy "No one now living has seen a map like this. I have composed and constructed it using about twenty maps and mappaemundi; these are the maps which were composed in the time of Alexander of the Two Horns, and which show the inhabited portions of the earth. The Arabs call these maps ja’fariya." — Piri Reis’s note on the map drawn and painted by him in AH 919 (AD 1513)
When I chanced upon an article on Piri Reis in the Hadeeth ad-Dar, that fine journal which the premier cultural body of Kuwait, the Dar al-Athar al-Islamiyyah, brings out, I was utterly fascinated. I confess I knew nothing till then, nothing at all, about this intrepid man, this Turkish seaman who served his Sultan for nearly 70 years only to be beheaded for having lost a crucial battle on the waters. But the article by Prof Faisal al-Kanderi was very informative, and it told me enough to rouse my curiosity further. I read first about the much-celebrated work that Piri Reis wrote, the Kitab-i Bahriye or the Book of the Seas, a voluminous seaman’s handbook as it were, but felt drawn far more to the references to the exquisite map that he made in 1513 of the world as known to him. As I was to find out, when I started tracking Piri Reis’s work further, quite a story hangs by that map. The map, as it has survived, is a fragment, drawn on gazelle skin, and was discovered purely by chance by some historians in 1929, centuries after it was made, in the harem section of the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. Soon after it was found, however, it became a subject of animated discussion among geographers, scientists, and pseudo-historians. For it was so accurate in parts, and so intelligently drawn; and everyone wondered how, as early as the beginning of the 16th century, this cartographic marvel—a work of art in its own right— could have been produced. What the whole map looked like— presumably it included the ‘Seven Seas’—one might never know, but even from the present segment, which shows the Atlantic with the adjacent coasts of Europe, Africa and the New World, one can see how acute Piri Reis’s observation was, and how well he understood the need to make navigational charts intelligible. Clearly, the map, which is filled with copious notes in Piri’s hand, cannot be compared with modern maps. It is not made on the horizontal/vertical grid; it uses instead an older method, and belongs to the ‘portolan’ type in which series of circles are used with lines radiating from them. The intention clearly is to guide navigators from port to port rather than to help them find an exact position. But, with all this, the almost precise manner in which the outlines of land masses, including what seems to be the sub-glacial topography of Greenland and Antarctica, appear on it, takes one completely by surprise. So extraordinary is some of the detail that pseudo-historians of the variety of Erich von Daniken (he of the Chariots of the Gods) have come up with the theory that the map must have been the work of men from some other cultures and spaces unknown to us. Geographers in the west keep emphasising how much Piri Reis owed to the information garnered by Columbus. The US Navy was once called in to analyse the data contained in the map. Some have striven to suggest that the map is a hoax. A long, and as yet unsettled, debate about the sources upon which Piri Reis drew has gone on for years. The map has become a cause celebre. In the midst of all this, however, one almost forgets the man behind it. Piri Reis led a crowded life. He sailed a great deal even if mostly in the waters of the Mediterranean, the Red and the Arabian Seas, and the Persian Gulf; nephew of another great seaman, Kemal Reis, and a man of his times, he must have kept constant notes from his childhood of harbours entered, compass bearings, reefs, shallows and hidden rocks; he rose to the position of an admiral in the great navy of the Sultan of Turkey and fought great battles on his behalf. But, working from within this tumultuous ambit, he was all the time piecing together information from old maps, studying what are often called ‘enemy maps’, garnering knowledge from a slave who had sailed with Columbus to the New World, availing himself of every fragment that he could lay hands on. All for ‘composing and constructing’ a map —finely crafted, delicately drawn—the like of which had not existed before. Remembering his own uncle, also an admiral, who died a few years earlier being lost at sea, Piri Reis once addressed his reader thus: "Good friend! I want you/to remember us in your prayers. /And remember Kemal Reis, our master/May his soul be content!" To remember Piri Reis, "who had perfect knowledge of the sea", with the same respect would be as appropriate. |
