PIRI REIS AND THE HAPGOOD HYPOTHESIS

Hapgood was not the only one - nor the first - to have been puzzled by portolano maps. Years before, the Norwegian scholar Nordenskjold - the leading authority on them - had shown that all portolanos appear to be based on a single prototype - that had vanished. But, says Hapgood, Nordenskjold did not check the mathematical foundation and so postulated that the lost prototype was a product of classical Greece or Phoenicia, whereas Hapgood's researchers concluded that the Greek geographers, from whom Piri Reis had taken certain basic data, had to have used still other maps as sources because the data on the Greeks' maps was drawn with a precision that predated Greece's own development - about 200 B. C. - of plane geometry and trigonometry. And without knowledge of geometry and trigonometry, they said, no one could have produced such accurate maps.

DULCERT PORTOLANO MAP

The matter of accuracy, in fact, is debatable. (See pages 22-23.) But according to Hapgood, his examination of one portolano - the Dulcert Portolano of 1339, drawn 153 years before Columbus - is conclusive proof that the Portolanos, at least, are "scientific products." Although this portolano covers an area measuring 3,000 miles by 1,000 miles, 50 localities in the area are pin-pointed with less than one degree of error in longitude and latitude, as reprojected by Hapgood.