Abraham Ortelius

Hello! My name is Abraham Ortelius. I was born on April 14th, 1527, in the busy city of Antwerp, which is in a country we now call Belgium. My family made beautiful religious statues, but a great sadness came when my father passed away around the year 1535. I was just a young boy. To help my mother and sisters, I began working as a map colorist, or an illuminator. My job was to take plain black-and-white maps and paint them with bright, beautiful colors. This work was very detailed, and I loved it. In 1547, I became an official member of the mapmakers' group, which was called the Guild of Saint Luke. I did not realize it then, but coloring in the world on paper was the very first step of a great adventure.

My fascination with maps grew stronger every year. I also developed a deep interest in history and ancient objects. This led me to start a business where I traveled all over Europe to buy and sell old maps, rare books, and antiques. During one of my trips around 1554, I met a man who would change my path forever: Gerardus Mercator. He was already a world-famous mapmaker, and I looked up to him. We quickly became good friends. He saw my passion and encouraged me, saying that I shouldn't just sell maps made by others. He believed I had the knowledge to become a geographer and create my own. That single conversation lit up a new idea in my mind and set me on a new course.

In my time, if you wanted to study geography, you had a very messy problem. Maps were made by many different people and came in all sorts of shapes and sizes. You would have to collect a confusing pile of scrolls and loose pages just to see different parts of the world. I had an idea to solve this. 'What if,' I thought, 'I could gather all the best maps of the world and put them into one single, organized book?' My plan was to collect maps from the most talented cartographers I knew, carefully resize them to be the same size, and then bind them together in a logical order. On May 20th, 1570, I published my book and called it the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, which is Latin for 'Theatre of the World'. It held 70 stunning maps and is now remembered as the world's first modern atlas. I also did something very important: I included a list of all the original mapmakers whose work I used. Giving credit to others for their creations was a new and honest thing to do back then.

As I spent years studying my huge collection of maps, I began to see something curious. I noticed that the long, curving coastline of the Americas seemed to fit neatly against the coastlines of Europe and Africa, almost like pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle. This observation sparked a bold idea in my mind. In 1596, I wrote down my thoughts. I suggested that maybe, long ago, all the continents were joined together as one enormous piece of land. I imagined they had been torn apart over time by powerful earthquakes and floods. This was one of the very first times anyone had suggested the idea that you now call continental drift.

My atlas became a great success. It was reprinted many times over the years and translated into several languages. This allowed people from many different countries to see and understand the geography of our planet in a clear, new way. In 1575, I received a great honor when I was appointed the official geographer to King Philip II of Spain. I lived to be 71 years old. Today, people remember me as the father of the modern atlas. My book helped organize our knowledge of the world, and my curious thought about the puzzle-piece continents reminds us all that there is always something new to discover if you just look closely.