In 1577, the Flemish cartographer Gerhard Mercator wrote a letter to his friend, the English scientist, occultist and royal advisor John Dee. In that letter, Mercator described the geography of the North Pole as first reported in the 14th century by a Franciscan friar from Oxford, who travelled the North Atlantic region on behalf of the King of England. An account of his travels were published in a travelogue titled Inventio Fortunata (or “Fortunate Discoveries”), a book that has been lost for more than 500 years. However, a summary of this book was published in another travelogue called the Itinerarium by a Brabantian traveller from the city of 's-Hertogenbosch named Jacobus Cnoyen. It was in Itinerarium where Mercator read about the astonishing claims made by the unknown author of the Inventio Fortunata.
According to the account relayed by Jacobus Cnoyen, the North Pole was a sea surrounded by four large islands with high plateaus and mountains. The islands were divided by massive rivers flowing inward forming a large whirlpool. At the center of this whirlpool stood a vast black rock, 33 miles in circumference. This rock was believed to be magnetic and the source of the mysterious attraction that pull all compass needles towards the north.
In the midst of the four countries is a Whirlpool into which there empty these four Indrawing Seas which divide the North. And the water rushes round and descends into the earth just as if one were pouring it through a filter funnel. It is 4 degrees wide on every side of the Pole, that is to say eight degrees altogether. Except that right under the Pole there lies a bare rock in the midst of the Sea. Its circumference is almost 33 French miles, and it is all of magnetic stone. And is as high as the clouds, so the Priest said, who had received the astrolabe from this Minorite in exchange for a Testament. And the Minorite himself had heard that one can see all round it from the Sea, and that it is black and glistening. And nothing grows thereon, for there is not so much as a handful of soil on it.
At the time, the notion that the Arctic was divided into four great lands encircling a central black magnetic rock was widely accepted. The concept of a vast whirlpool in the far north also appears in many early legends and texts, often linked to the fabled Lofoten Maelstrom off the coast of Norway. Explorers such as John Davis and Martin Frobisher both refer to an inflowing current which they clearly believed to be the great polar rivers feeding the Arctic maelstrom.
When Mercator published his world atlas in 1595—a ground-breaking work and the first collection of geographical maps to be called an Atlas—he included this black magnetic feature on his map of the North Pole, labelling it Rupes Nigra et Altissima, or “Black and Very High Cliff.”
Mercator also claimed that one of the four polar islands was inhabited by pygmies standing four feet tall, another detail drawn from the old English voyages described in the Inventio Fortunata. It is possible that the author of the Inventio was in fact referring to the indigenous inhabitants of Lapland, who are of relatively short stature.
Two years later, the Dutch explorer Willem Barentsz set out in search of a Northeast Passage. He discovered Spitsbergen and rounded the northern tip of Nova Zembla, an extraordinary achievement that reshaped contemporary understanding of the Arctic. These newly charted lands lay deep within the latitudes where Mercator had previously placed his four Arctic continents, forcing a reconsideration of the region’s geography.
In 1606, Jodocus Hondius, a pupil of Mercator, published an influential revision of the Arctic map, redrawing the four polar islands to accommodate the Dutch discoveries at Spitsbergen and Nova Zembla. Attempting to reconcile recent exploration with a century of established cosmographical tradition, Hondius removed part of the island marked Pygmei and replaced it with Nieulant, Willoughby’s Land, and MacFin—alternate names for Spitsbergen. The result was a map that attempted to hold two incompatible realities at once: the inherited four-island model championed by Mercator, and a newly revealed Arctic grounded in direct observation.
In the decades that followed, other cartographers adopted similar compromises. Gradually, however, empirical geography prevailed. By around 1636, all trace of Mercator’s four polar lands, the Rupes Nigra, and the Arctic maelstrom had disappeared from maps of the region.
References:
# The North Pole, Land of Pygmies and Giant Magnets. Big Think
# 1606 Mercator Hondius Map of the Arctic. Geographicus
# A Letter Dated 1577 from Mercator to John Dee. E. G. R. Taylor
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