THERE IS a town named Atlas in Illinois, but also in Kansas, Michigan, Wisconsin, Texas, California, and Pennsylvania. Maine has an Atlas Road, and there are Atlas Avenues in Sacramento, San Jose, Malverne, New York, Lincoln, Nebraska, and Hooksett, New Hampshire. It’s such a commonly used name or word in America that if you ask for it in a bookstore, they’ll immediately say, “Rand McNally.” That has long been the best-known road atlas, even in the age of GPS, where John Brink, descendant of the Brink families of Wageningen and Terwilliger of Vianen, was once the first to decide that America’s thoroughfares had better have numbers. The U.S. government agreed, and adopted Brink’s ideas.
Nobody, not even in Holland, mentions the name of Gerard de Kremer. Even though he was the guy who came up with the atlas. Dutch Gerard was a mapmaker, a cartographer, five hundred years ago. He was one of those men behind desks who soon made it possible for daring sailors to find their way across the oceans. He bundled his maps and charts and called it an atlas.
THE WORLD knows him better as Mercator, because that’s what he came to call himself, a Latin translation of kremer or kramer, merchant. He took the example of the Greek god Atlas who carries the universe on his shoulders, and added his maps of land and water to his already existing maps of the starry sky. Not an easy job, it was not just a matter of sketching something. The art of printing had just been invented, so Gerard Mercator had to come up with something with relief in it so that he could make a print with ink, hence an engraving, or a woodcut. He became an expert at it.
A 20-ft tall Atlas stands on top of the palace on Amsterdam’s Dam Square. Right across from where ships used to dock on the Amstel river. To indicate that Amsterdam, and the Dutch Seven Provinces, considered themselves the center of the universe as well as the Earth. By then, roughly half a century after Mercator’s death, that ball on Atlas’ shoulders was increasingly being drawn like the globe.
AND THAT was the sense that the navigators of the day, and the passengers they brought with them, were taking to America. They carried an atlas with them, in particular maps made by Piet Platevoet, now known as Plancius, who drew the charts with which the Dutch East India Company dispatched Henry Hudson across the Atlantic. But Plancius never really made a name for himself in America. Mercator, the inventor of the atlas, did.
The town of Lafayette, Colorado is located on an old route that used to be virtually the only passable road from east to west if you wanted to pan for gold in California. There, in the Rockies, they decided to build a neighborhood with street names that pay tribute to those ancient navigators who opened up America. They used the names of ship types, such as schooners and clippers, or ship parts such as keel and anchor. But one street they named after a person, after the man who invented the atlas.
Mercator Avenue. A salute to Holland.
