The mapmaker

About this book

***I am by no means the first to be convinced that no sharp line can be drawn separating fiction from history. The Mapmaker is a novel, ant yet real history is an integral part of every page.*** Andrea Blanco, the mapmaker of this story, actually lived, as did Fra Mauro, Bartholomeu di Perestrello, Prince Henry of Portugal, a Norse ship-master called Ballarte, a Venetian alley captain named Alvise de Cadamosto, the geographer Jahuda Cresques, and many others who appear in the succeeding pages. ***Some fifty years before the epic voyage of Christopher Columbus, Andrea Bianco drew one of the first maps of the world.*** Upon it appear several islands with a amazing resemblance to **Cuba, Jamaica**, one the **Bahamas**, and **at least the southern part of Florida**. The Bianco, map in turn, seems to have been patterned after the ''Nautical Chart of 1424,'' the original of which is now in the James Ford Bell Collection at the University of Minnesota.***--Partial EXCERPT from Author's Preface, dated Nov. 2, 1956***

Themes & subjects

About the author

Frank G. Slaughter

25 February 1908 – 17 May 2001

Frank Gill Slaughter was born in Washington DC, and was moved with his family to a farm near Oxford, North Carolina. In 1925 he received a degree from Trinity College and went on to study medicine at Johns Hopkins University. In 1935, while working as a physician in Jacksonville FL, he began writing fiction. In 1941 his first novel, *That None Should Die*, was published. He went on to write almost 30 novels, drawing on his experience as a doctor and his interest in history and the Bible. Frank Gill Slaughter , pen-name Frank G. Slaughter, pseudonym C.V. Terry, was an American novelist and physician whose books sold more than 60 million copies. His novels drew on his own experience as a do…