A delightful example of the current understanding of the world at the end of the sixteenth century. This over a 420-year-old map shows the world in oval projection,

From Giovanni Magini's Geographiae Universaetum Tum Veteris Tum Novae. Cologne: Peter Keschedt, 1597. (Shirley: 203). Girolamo Porro took Ortelius' popular oval projection and reduced it to octavo size for Magini's geography. This is the Venetian edition that came out a year before the more common Cologne version published a year later. The world is surrounded by six winds, and the geography of the map is quite up-to-date. The great, hypothetical southern continent is shown along the bottom of the map, thought to have existed to balance the world, and the equally mythical islands around the north pole are also indicated - Terra Incognita and Terra Australis. Porro shows a northwest and a northeast passage, both ending in a 'strait of Anian' separating North America from Asia. 

This is a genuine antique map published in 1596 and not a modern copy or reprint.