Fig 4 - uploaded by Emma Perkins
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The two sides of the medal created by Michael Mercator (c.1589) to commemorate Francis Drake's circumnavigation of the world a decade earlier (1577-1580). The western hemisphere is on the left and the eastern hemisphere is on the right. Drake's route across both hemispheres is marked by a line of dots sometimes accompanied by the figure of a ship. (Reproduced with kind permission from the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, MEC0004.)
Source publication
Throughout the early modern period, the intellectual and symbolic value of globes ensured these objects enjoyed a broad cultural appeal. Consequently, their design was subject to a wide range of social, commercial and intellectual pressures. The ways in which the intellectual and cultural concerns of seventeenth-century England became manifest in t...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... absence. 47 Molyneux had published his globe, with the English voyages marked, immediately after Cavendish's circumnavigation. 48 The same iconography was employed for commemorative medals struck in England by Michael Mercator in c.1589, showing Drake's circumnavigation, each side depicting a hemisphere of the earth and the respective route taken (Fig. 4). By explicitly acknowledging the accomplishments of Drake and Cavendish alone, the Whipple globe's makers associate geographical knowledge principally with the two English explorers. This is juxtaposed with the contribution of other nations: for example, a tiny section of coastline depicted just above the cartouche in the Indian Ocean, ...
