The date on the earliest known authentic map of North America is 1500, note Italian cartographic historians Pierluigi Portinaro and Franco Knirsch, and the map was painted on oxhide by Juan de la Cosa, who was both a shipmate of Christopher Columbus's on his first two voyages and the owner of the admiral's original flagship Santa Maria. Illustrated with 200 color and 100 black and white reproductions, up to 18 x 12 inches, this oversized volume follows three centuries of map-making and American exploration, revealing both the continent's story of exploration, settlement, and colonial rivalry and the evolution of cartography itself as a science and an art.