A Story To Tell: Seeing Through the Minds of Two Admirals

Throughout history, people have determined their borders by creating maps. However, the history of mapmaking also shows that maps have been created not only for marking the physical borders and locations of our world but also for telling the stories of human experiences within those locations. This study focuses on two mapmakers—Piri Reis, a little known Turkish mapmaker and explorer, and Christopher Columbus—who depicted their own versions of the Americas in their time—in an attempt to understand their imaginative minds and how they depicted the newly discovered Americas, through a visual rhetorical analysis of how physical space is reflected in the Piri Reis Map of 1513. The visual representations in the map are examined in relation to the cultural context and written records of human experiences to explore how Reis and Columbus managed to cross metaphorical borders and how this map stands as a historical contact zone.