Is Waldseemüller’s “North America” Really Columbus’s Cuba? Investigating a Map Mystery and Other Episodes in the History of Cartography and Exploration

Abstract

I am very pleased to present our Spring 2023 issue TI , which includes three pieces that I trust our readers will find engaging and enlightening—two about cartography and one about piloting vessels. To inform our readers about what they are in store for, I will provide a preview of the pieces in order of appearance. The first piece, coauthored by Donald L. McGuirk Jr. and Gregory C. McIntosh, is entitled “Depicting Cuba, Not North America: Solving the Enigma of America on Early Maps.” Running over 60 pages long and containing more than 300 notes, this is a major piece of scholarship. Thanks to the new journal publishing format of Taylor & Francis that just started in 2023 (based on number of pieces per issue rather than page length), we are now able to publish lengthy articles like this one. (Owing to this change, I encourage authors who are producing long pieces of important scholarship to submit their work to TI .) Not only is this a long and meticulously researched article but also one that makes an important contribution to exploration history scholarship by providing an answer to a long-standing cartographic enigma. The