Chapter 10: The Cartographic Analysis

The analysis took two weeks and the help of a retired geography professor named Ferreira who owed Nadia a significant professional favor. Ferreira was in his seventies, had spent his career reconstructing colonial-era maritime routes, and received the chart with the reverence of someone encountering something he'd stopped expecting to find. 'The projection is unusual,' he said, on the third day. 'Not Mercator — this predates Mercator's widespread adoption. It's an early plane chart but with corrections that suggest the cartographer understood the problem of representing a sphere on a flat surface.' 'That's rare for the period?' 'Very. It suggests the cartographer had access to either Portuguese or Flemish cartographic science at a high level.' He pointed to the coastal profile of the island's eastern shore. 'These profiles are drawn from observation. The depth soundings are real. And this—' He indicated a small notation in the chart's margin, almost invisible. 'This is a stellar fix. The cartographer took latitude readings. If the stellar fix is accurate, I can calculate the island's position.' The stellar fix, once decoded from its archaic notation, placed Isla Velada at a specific set of coordinates in the central Atlantic. Ferreira ran the coordinates against modern charts. The position corresponded to a seamount — an underwater geological formation that rose to within forty meters of the surface. In the sixteenth century, when sea levels had been marginally different and the seamount potentially higher, it might have been an island. A small one, low-lying, vulnerable to storm surge. 'It sank,' Nadia said. 'Or was inundated,' Ferreira said. 'The question is: when, and what happened to whoever was there?'