Mappæ Mundi
The Arctic
the Rupes Nigra, a black magnetic rock at the pole.
- Map
- Septentrionalium Terrarum descriptio
- Mapmaker
- Gerard & Rumold Mercator
- Date
- 1595
- Held by
- David Rumsey Map Collection / Wikimedia Commons
Format
The full-resolution scan, color-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and explore.
Size
$29.00
The story
The first map devoted to the Arctic, and almost entirely wrong in the most interesting way. Mercator drew the pole as a black magnetic rock surrounded by four islands split by four rivers that drew the ocean inward — a theory inherited from a lost fourteenth-century travel account. Frisland sits in the north Atlantic, an island that was never there. Published the year after his death, by his son.
About this reproduction
- A faithful reproduction of a public-domain map held by David Rumsey Map Collection / Wikimedia Commons — the work is centuries out of copyright.
- Printed to order on archival cotton-rag or textured laid stock, pigment inks rated 100+ years.
- Color-managed to the source scan; we correct nothing and invent nothing.
- Ships in 5–10 business days, rolled in a heavy-wall tube (framed and linen-backed pieces ship flat-packed).
- If it arrives less than perfect, we reprint or refund — your choice.
Why our maps cost more than a poster: we print from the highest-resolution scans in existence, at sizes where the engraving itself becomes visible — the sea monsters, the tiny place-names, the burin lines — on stock made to outlive its owner.
