Fra Mauro Quotes

Even to this day, the Fra Mauro map was considered one of the finest pieces of medieval cartography in existence.

The technological audacity of the Apollo program, with it's largely symbolic payload, was also sinking into the trivialisation that Guy Debord had identified the decade before as the underside of media spectacle. When Commander Alan Shepard strapped a six iron to a lunar excavation tool and whacked two golf balls across the Fra Mauro Highlands, he became, for a spell, nothing more than a tourist, that agent of commodification whose freedom of movement, as Debord had written, is "nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.

Apollo 13 was launched on 11 April 1970. It was to become the third manned spacecraft to land on the Moon, with a mission to explore formations near the 80 km (50 mile) wide Fra Mauro crater. The flight was commanded by James A. Lovell with John L. ‘Jack’ Swigert as Command Module pilot and Fred W. Haise as Lunar Module pilot. There was a small problem on takeoff when an engine shut down two minutes early during the second stage boost. But four other engines burned longer to compensate, and the craft reached orbit successfully. Then, on 14 April 1970, nearly sixty hours into the mission, the astronauts were 321,860 km (199,995 miles) from Earth when they heard a loud bang.

Fra Mauro, it was called. It had been created in 1450 a.d. by a Camaldolese monk of the same name, who had designed it in his small cartography studio in the Monastery of St. Michael, in that glittering, floating city of Venice. Fra Mauro had researched his map by interviewing merchants traveling through the area from afar, which allowed him to depict the known world of the time with far greater accuracy than those cartographers who had come before him. Even to this day, the Fra Mauro map was considered one of the finest pieces of medieval cartography in existence.

The Fra Mauro map was also unique in that it was drawn opposite to most other world maps—it oriented the south at the top of its design, rather than the north.

Ranulf Higden, a Benedictine monk who mapped the world about 1350, claimed that Africa contained one-eyed people who used their feet to cover their heads. A geographer in the next century announced that the continent held people with one leg, three faces, and the heads of lions. In 1459, an Italian monk, Fra Mauro, declared Africa the home of the roc, a bird so large that it could carry an elephant through the air.

I detected at once a chain of sensibility being forged across the entire world by individuals who had been transformed by a mutual esteem engendered among all of them. It went on an on, this linking of minds and hearts, this creation of a pool of tolerance.

Every man who has ever lived became a contributor to the evolution of the earth, since his observations were a part of its growth. The world was thus a place entirely constructed from thought, ever changing, constantly renewing itself through the process of mankind's pondering its reality for themselves.

What begins as a quest for an object that at first seems intangible (the horn of a unicorn, for example) usually turns out to have a more prosaic origin (such as that of a whale's tooth). Perhaps it is true of all knowledge: when it is placed in the hands of a craftsman after a long and devious journey from a far country, its patina of mystery is soon scraped away to reveal an object of more sedate hue.