ABSTRACT
The very idea that the islands of the Indies could number in the many thousands inspired wonder, but also elicited doubt, even among mapmakers eager to make use of them. Over the course of the sixteenth century, the focus shifted to their precise locations, the commodities available on each, and the nature of the inhabitants. To trace the fate of the numbers is therefore to trace a change in the priorities that guided the representation of the islands of the Indies. It is also to discover a surprising tendency to keep the change at arm’s length, to hold on to a traditional vision of the islands in a way that did not answer to the dictates of modern cartographic rationalization. This chapter distinguishes between the work of those who sought to dispel lingering myths surrounding islands rich in gold and spices, and texts that drew from and continued to nourish an established imaginary about distant tropical isles. It questions received narratives of increasing geographical and cartographical accuracy, and argues that late-medieval notions of the Indies continued to shape the European imagination well into the sixteenth century.
