The Mystery Of The Piri Reis Map
One of the more curious stories that is continuously mis-represented in the alternative and ufo community is that of a portion of a 500-year-old Turkish map which, it is surmised, shows Antarctica as a tropical paradise rather than a frozen wasteland. This article appeared in the first issue of Shadows Of Your Mind magazine and was written by regular contributor Doug McKay and has been reproduced with his permission…
“Being your typical irate Scotsman I naturally have many a bug to bear. Apart from the obvious political grudges this ranges from smartphone obsessed numpties and their Instagram-filtered selfies, to those cretins who think the world is flat. Aye, that’s right, I went there. I don’t do social media, at all, and the only reason I have email is so I don’t have to buy stamps. My Nokia mobile phone is over ten years old, but it works, and that’s fine by me. So when I was asked by this magazine’s illustrious editor to “pick a fight” we discussed a couple of things. One thing jumped out at me straight away — The Piri Reis map. For those of you who have never heard of the cursed thing we’ll start with a wee history lesson.”
“In 1929, as Turkish scholars were working to convert the former Imperial Topkapi Palace, Istanbul, into a museum when they came across a section of a 16th Century Ottoman map which showed the coast of the Americas. One of the notations on the map stirred up a right old bees nest as when it was translated read “The coasts and islands on this map are taken from Columbus’s map”. Aye, 1492 and all that pish, the great slave-trading, re-discoverer of the New World, not the discoverer. We know that my spiritual ancestors, the Vikings, had already been there more than 500 years before, while the indigenous people had been there for millennia before the Europeans invaders ever thought about using them as target practice.”
“Following a pretty decent amount of research, it was discovered that in 1501 an Ottoman captain by the name of Kemal Reis had captured a fleet of ships off the Spanish coast. A sailor on one of those boats bragged he’d actually sailed with Columbus, and he had in his possession a map drawn by the man hi’self. The good captain Kemal left it to his nephew Piri in his will and in 1511, using this map and others Piri Reis began to draw a new map of the world to incorporate new Spanish and Portuguese discoveries — a bit like updating a medieval Google Earth.”
“In the creation of his great ‘mappa mundi’ the other maps he referenced were said to consist of eight charts drawn during the time of Alexander the Great, Portuguese maps of the Indian Ocean — spice trade routes no doubt — and six other unknown sources of indeterminate age. Thus the famous piece everyone references is only a portion of a much larger map. Acknowledging himself that he had no first-hand knowledge of the lands he’d just drawn, Piri Reis completed his map in 1517 and donated it to the reigning Sultan Selim, in exchange for an Admiralty by all accounts. Reis continued with his cartography, eventually releasing the Kitab-i Bahriye, or Book of the Mariner, a collection of his finest work. That’s it, lesson over back to the Topkapi. After the initial hub-bub of it’s discovery the map was largely forgotten until a throw away comment by a Captain Arlington H. Mallery of the US Navy, in 1953, suggested publicly that the map seemed to show a portion of the Antarctic coast. This was confirmed, he said, by a joint Swedish-British expedition in 1949 using early sonar devices to detect land mass under the thick ice. After reading this in 1954, a college professor in New Hampshire called Charles Hapgood began to dig a little deeper and study it with his students. For seven years.”
THE HAPGOOD EFFECT
“Before we begin with the good professors research I need to skip forward in time a bit so bear with me. At the back end of 2016 a lot of noise in certain circles was being made about certain high-ranking people visiting a certain snow and ice covered continent, and it wasn’t to study the breeding habits of the resident penguin population. Former US Secretary of State John Kerry visited on the polling day of the US Election; second man on the moon, Buzz Aldrin, had to be airlifted to New Zealand while on an organized expedition in Antarctica after supposedly tweeting about something of ‘pure evil’ then succombing to poor health; and Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church conducted some sort of mystical ritual after a rumoured meeting with Pope Francis in Cuba. Then there were rumours of the discovery of extreme ancient ruins buried under the ice and the flash-frozen mummified bodies of something of humanoid form but not entirely as we’d recognise. Put together with reports of a group of petrified scientists having to be evac’d from the middle of nowhere and engineering behemoth Lockheed Martin advertising for 1,000 jobs in Antarctica and you could see how things may have gotten out of hand! Getting on to my point though. Among all this chatter were the references made by ufologists and alternative researchers to the aforementioned map of Piri Reis and the research of Charles Hapgood. The Professor’s book Maps Of The Ancient Sea Kings had been quoted extensively in the past by such authors as Erich Von Däniken in Chariots of the Gods and the esteemed Graham Hancock in his book Fingerprints of the Gods, both of which mentioned Hapgood’s research as ‘proven’. Researchers Rand & Rose Flem Ath also looked on the research favourably in their compelling and book on Atlantis, When The Sky Fell.”
“During his prolonged research on the Piri Reis map, Hapgood and his students spent a long time developing unnecessarily complex mathematical equations, trying to force the longitude and latitude coordinates of the southern portion of the map in an attempt to accurately pinpoint the coast of Queen Maud Land and the surrounding environs. In the process of writing his 1966 book Maps Of The Ancient Sea Kings, Hapgood even wrote to the US Air Force for an evaluation of his Antarctic claims to which they responded “The claim that the lower part of the map portrays the Princess Martha Coast of Queen Maud Land, Antarctica is reasonable.” Reasonable?! They went on to say “We find that this is the most logical, and in all probability, the correct interpretation of the map.” So there you have it, it looks like Antarctica therefore it must be Antarctica. And if you take a look at a typical view of the globe and focus on the coast of Antarctica you can sort of see why Captain Mallery made that comment, and why he believed it could represent the coastline under the ice.”
“If Hapgood hadn’t put so much stock in that one idea — that no one else had suggested up to that point — he could have spent those seven years honig his crustal displacement theory. Then again, he wouldn’t have had a book to promote either. The other problem I have with this is that the area Capt. Mallery was talking about lies directly south of Africa, rather than South America, so you have to wonder at the disappearance of the great expanse of wide turbulent ocean that lies between the three continents. Surely there’d be a chain of islands as a rough estimation of Antarctic Peninsula as well, no?”
EXAMINING THE MAP
“As expected when using various sources the scales of certain areas are completely to pot, although the Iberian Peninsula and west coast of Africa seem to be pretty accurate, as accurate as 15th and 16th century Western European maps were anyway. I’d go in to the history of the different kinds of maps of the period here, but it bored me to tears if I’m honest, so I won’t. If you are interested feel free to look up the science behind portolan charts and other maps full of rhumbs and compass roses covered in sea beasties and ‘Terra Australis Incognito’. Anyway let’s start looking at the work of Piri Reis…”
“The upper left portion of the map is the part drawn by Christopher Columbus, and is supposed to be representative of the Caribbean islands. Except it’s not. The scale and position of the islands is totally skewed. What is interesting though, and reflects the thinking of the time, is that they do bear a similarity to the islands described by Marco Polo to his future biographer Rustichello da Pisa when they were both cell buddies in a Genoese prison. The big red island which some people think represents Hispaniola (today Haiti and the Dominican Republic) may actually be the island of Cipango, prominent on many maps of the 15th and 16th century. When the world was thought be a lot smaller (but not flat) it was believed the east coast of Cathay (China) and Asia lay just across the Atlantic, as did the Spice Islands which was the original reason for Columbus’ voyage. So by that reckoning this means Cipango is…wait for it… Japan! Don’t believe me, eh? Check the globe drawn by Martin Berheim, a German mariner, and also featured the mythical isle of Saint Brendan, but because it was drawn before Columbus returned, the American continent is missing entirely!”
“Returning to that part of the Piri Reis map again the whole Yucatan Peninsula and Central America seem totally out of whack too. That’s because Columbus thought Cuba was part of the Asian mainland and it is labelled as such. In total there are 116 other place names in Europe, Africa, South America and various islands all of which are in the Turkish language which brings up the further point of Hapgood’s theory which is, if these maps were based on pre-Egyptian charts why aren’t the place names written in their original tongue as they were unknown to Admiral Reis by his own admission?”
“As we go further down the map we approach the familiar territorial outline of South America reaching right round Brazil, where the River Amazon is marked, twice, but that’s no bother, I’ll let the Admiral off that one. Below what looks like a dog dancing with a monkey, we also have a mountain range in the middle of the continent with a big ginger giant sat a top with what could be a flaming torch. Charles Hapgood and his students puzzled over this, concluding it was the Andes due to previous claims that one of the creatures to the right of the red-headed eejit was a llama as the only natural habitat of the llama is in those eastern peaks. When was the last time you saw a llama with spots, horns and tusks? Eh? Nor me. It looks more like a deer. Not only that but a notation on the map reads “In the mountains of this territory were creatures like this, and the humans came out on the seacoast…” The east coast of Brazil is a long, long way from the Andes, that’s all I’m saying. Up to that point in history, outside of the local populace, and the best part of a decade before Magellan’s circumnavigation expedition, the Andes may have only been known to the Chinese seafarers. Their Treasure Fleet expeditions of the 1420’s led by Admiral Zheng We, are described by Gavin Menzies in his book 1421: The Year China Discovered The World”
“Right then, continue round the nose of Brazil and head down past where Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paolo sit today and we arrive at what looks like Rio De La Plata, the border between Uruguay and Argentina. It’s here where Hapgood went totally leftfield and decided that South America joined up with the Antarctic coastline. His further justification was that the islands towards the right hand corner of the map are the Falklands Islands (or Malvinas depending on your nationality) and he might have a point, even though those islands weren’t officially discovered until 1592, therefore any land to the south of that, according to Hapgood, must be Antarctica… see what he did there?”
“There were many mappa mundi’s floating around at the time of Piri Reis and some of the most famous surviving examples can be found online including the works of Battista Agnese, a Genoese cartographer who produced an atlas of the world which you can view by clicking here. Then there was the Gerardus Mercator map whose accurate method of projecting a globe on to a flat chart formed the basis of the maps that we use today. There was also the mental Oronteus Finaeus map published in 1531 which is remarkable for it’s alleged similarity to a map of Antarctica today (even though it’s really Australia) and the Planisferio de Caneiro map of 1506 which portrays a more realistic illustration of the Caribbean and the northern coast of South America and can be seen here.”
“In the middle ages it was a common belief that there was a southern continent below the Americas and Africa due to the old flood myths and legend of Atlantis. However what seems increasingly bizarre is that as an author of a book on crustal displacement theory on Earth, one of Hapgood’s arguments was that Antarctica was originally Atlantis and had floated down to it’s current position at the pole. This has been parroted more than once by ‘celebrity’ researchers on a certain online subscription channel. And it was mapped by aliens. But that’s a story I have neither the time or inclination to give credence to here.”
“If you download the issue from www.shadowsmagazine.co.uk you’ll see a panel where we’ll demonstrate some other key points on the map that prove that not only is the land mass NOT Antarctica but that the explanation is anything but exotic. Here goes. Ready? Piri Reis simply ran out of room on his gazelle hide and had to turn it sideways to fit on the rest of the map. Aye, really! It’s Occam’s Razor. It’s the only way he could finish a more complete representation of the known world and ‘rediscovers’ the 900 miles of Argentine coastline that Charles Hapgood and his hoodwinked students conveniently ignored during their eighty four month research in futility.”
“Does the map drawn by Piri Reis and presented to the Ottoman Sultan Selim portray an ice-free Antarctica? I have to say the answer is categorically no, no and thrice more, no! The most accurate charts of the New World in those days were those drawn up by the Spanish and Portuguese after Columbus realised he’d never made it to Asia after all, and until Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation expedition in 1520 no one had really mapped down as far south as Tierra Del Fuego. So, why would any researcher worth his/her salt continually claim Admiral Reis had unique access to ancient satellite imagery or alien maps? Because basically that is utter and absolute pish.”
So there you have it… an argument against the existence of Antarctica on the Piri Reis map written by a disgruntled Scotsman. What do you think?
