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

This map “was discovered by B.Halil Etem Eldem, Director of National Museums in 1929, when the Palace of Topkapu was being turned into a museum of antiquities” (Akcura, 1966, p. 27). According to drawings in this map, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the North shores of America had been discovered at that time. The notes by Reis at the edge of this map reveal really important information, both about the places in this map (culturally, geographically), and Reis’s sources that he applied while he was working on his map. One of the most important facts about this map is that Reis explains that he used Columbus’s map (which is lost today) to draw the shores of Americas (see Appendix A, note V). Reis’s explanations in his book Kitab-i Bahriye show the fact that while he was working on this map, he had a copy of Columbus’s map; however there is no explanation about how he came to have Columbus’s map. On this issue, Afetinan (1954) presents three possibilities by using Reis’s explanations in Kitab-i Bahriye: First, there is a chance that Reis had this map while he was travelling on the shores of Spain with his uncle Kemal Reis; second, he might have gotten this map from a Spanish sailor who had been taken capture by Reis’s uncle; and the last possibility is that Reis took possession of Columbus’s map while they were fighting against Spain.⁵The Reis map is a great tool providing meanings for representations of different cultures supported by visual and textual elements.