Hunt-Lenox Globe - Publications

Publications

The earliest known article on the globe was written by B. F. de Costa for the Magazine of American History in September 1879. Gabriel Gravier reprinted the article with additional comments in the Bulletin de la société normande de géographie later that year.

However, neither article links hic sunt dracones to dragons. Da Costa writes:

In this region, near the equatorial line, is seen "Hc Svnt Dracones", or here are the Dagroians, described by Marco Polo as living in the Kingdom of "Dagroian". These people... feasted upon the dead and picked their bones (B.II. c.14, Ramusio's ed.)

In his translation of Da Costa's article, Gabriel Gravier adds that Marco Polo's Kingdom of Dagroian is in Java Minor, or Sumatra, well away from the spot indicated on the Lenox Globe.

The flat drawing of the globe which accompanied the early articles is reproduced as map 7 in Emerson D. Fite and Archibald Freeman's A Book of Old Maps Delineating American History (New York: Dover Reprints, 1969), and as figure 43 in A. E. Nordenskiöld's Facsimile-Atlas to the Early History of Cartography (New York: Dover Reprints, 1973).

A photograph of the globe itself can be found on page 81 of Ena L. Yonge's A Catalogue of Early Globes Made Prior to 1850 and Conserved in the United States (New York: American Geographical Society, 1968); however, the side with the inscription faces away from the camera.