56 : The Atlantic 



way: first, we shall name certain ways of making maps and of look- 

 ing at things, tricks of thought and unfounded beliefs that obscure 

 the value and importance of the Atlantic; second, we shall present a 

 new way of looking at the world and a new division of hemispheres 

 that make plain to the observer why the Atlantic is so important; 

 third, we shall list the functions of the oceans and show how well 

 the Atlantic performs these functions. A function, of course, is some- 

 thing an ocean does or performs, and here we mean not only what 

 the ocean does in nature but also what it does for man. What the 

 Atlantic does, and has done, for us is its meaning to us. 



The reason why so many of us fail to recognize the importance of 

 the Atlantic at once is that most of us have grown up in — and even 

 been trained into — certain artificial ways of looking at the world. 

 The ways of looking at the world are embodied in maps — the kind 

 of maps that glare down at us from schoolroom walls and even from 

 the halls of colleges and that appear too frequently in all but the 

 most modern atlases. 



The first misfortune in the use of maps is the too common depend- 

 ence upon the Mercator projection. The Mercator projection is one 

 of the oldest and most widely used and misused methods of trying 

 to reduce a round globular world to conform with a flat sheet of 

 paper or the page of a book. The Mercator projection is the one that 

 makes the round world fully occupy a long flat quadrangular area. It 

 draws the meridians of longitude as though they were parallel to 

 each other though they should actually converge and cross each other 

 at two points — the North and South Poles. Thus as we move away 

 from the equator either north or south distances and areas become 

 progressively distorted in an east and west direction and the Poles, 

 which are points and really have no east-and-west extension at all, 

 are stretched out until they are made equivalent to the equator. Join 

 the east and west ends of a world Mercator map and you will see 

 that our globe has been reduced to a cylinder. This Mercator map 

 has certain technical uses for navigators: it is useful for areas near 

 the equator; even in higher latitudes it is useful for limited areas. 

 However, when it is used, as it so often is, as an introductory or gen- 

 eral picture of our world, the result is misunderstanding and con- 

 fusion. It is almost an ideal device for misrepresenting the relation- 

 ships between the oceans and continents of the world. 



One of the commonest alternatives to the Mercator map is also to 

 be regarded as a major misfortune. This is the map that shows the 

 globe as two round flat circles touching each other only at the equa- 



