On the voyage home, Columbus and Monson grew even closer. The two often dined together, discussing mapmaking, the period’s equivalent of deep-sea fishing, and the relative importance of Greek philosophy. Columbus asked Monson to proofread an account of his second trip, which he submitted to various newspapers in Europe. Monson advised him to gloss over a few of the hardships of the colonies, specifically the difficulties of living without access to medical technicians. On March 26, the Marigalante anchored in Lisbon to pick up supplies before continuing on to Spain. Monson chose to leave the ship rather than accompany Columbus on the last leg of the journey. Records indicate the two never reunited. Monson traveled home to France on horseback, arriving just in time to see his father die.
After burying his father, Monson started publishing his maps. As Columbus’s secondary cartographer, and with the primary cartographer still abroad, Monson’s maps were in high demand, considered by shipmen and collectors to be the most accurate trans-Atlantic maps on the market. Monson made enough money selling maps to purchase a farm large enough to support himself, his wife, and his two living brothers. He also bought a coach and stabled four horses.
For two years, Monson lived well. Then his maps reached Spain. Columbus was appalled. Every single map (except one, the very first topographical map of Sable Island, then called Fagunda) had huge flaws; mistakes so large Columbus believed they had to have been made intentionally. Existing islands were left off the maps. Open stretches of ocean were decorated with nonexistent archipelagos. Shorelines were distorted. Columbus immediately denounced the maps and sent word to his royal patrons, the Spanish King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, as well as King Charles VIII of France, explaining that Monson’s maps were riddled with falsities—“errors,” Columbus insisted, “which have no other explanation than to have been intentionally made. I have shared many meals with Monson and reviewed his drawings and notes extensively. What I saw then were accurate depictions. What he has now produced don’t reflect the notes I examined. His published maps are distortions.”a Monson was discredited, his work was thrown out, and for his affront to the good name of French cartography, King Charles exiled him. Monson didn’t appear in court to hear his short trial, but he must’ve gotten word of the verdict, because he was never seen again in France. De Poisson’s biography ends with Monson’s disappearance. For centuries, that was the last word on Antoine Monson.
Although de Poisson’s text reads like a rigorously researched account, there’s a very real possibility that he was wrong. According to public record, no one named Antoine Monson was born or lived in France during the Exploratory Age. It is simple, however, to find the birth records of an Antoinette Monson.
In 1921, a Harvard-educated historian named Simon Charles published a response to de Poisson’s work, a detailed counter-biography of Monson called History’s Most Hated Cartographer: The New Biography of Antoine/Antoinette Monson.b Charles explains in the introduction to his book that he decided to do his own search for Monson’s birth records and “discovered the secret identity of Antoine Monson—‘history’s most hated cartographer.’ ”c
According to Charles, Antoinette’s upbringing differed dramatically from de Poisson’s description of Antoine’s simple farmer’s life. Charles wrote that Antoinette’s parents died a few years after she was born. Her uncle, a French lord named Philippe Monson, and his wife Charlotte, the daughter of a duke, raised Antoinette alongside their three sons. Charlotte had always wanted a daughter and favored Antoinette over her own children. Philippe, while closer with his sons, also had a soft spot for Antoinette and agreed to buy her a title so that she could marry their youngest son, Aimé. The marriage was a good one for Antoinette. She and her cousin had been close since childhood. Aimé never got along with his studious older brothers; he preferred to play with Antoinette. The two of them frequently ran away from their tutors to swim at a nearby lake. They preferred card games to reading, and when they got older they made up little word puzzles, trying to outwit each other. According to letters between Philippe and Charlotte, which Charles relied on heavily for his account of Antoinette’s childhood, Aimé and Antoinette’s relationship might’ve remained platonic even after their marriage, when Antoinette was sixteen and Aimé was eighteen. Charles believes Aimé was gay and Philippe was aware of his youngest son’s preferences and allowed him to marry Antoinette, despite her common birth, to spare himself the indignity of dealing with the social ramifications of a son who refused to copulate with a wife.
Recently married, and with the new title of “Lady,” Antoinette was allowed to appear at Charles VIII’s court. She became a fixture there: her bright smile, loud laugh, and red cheeks (she probably suffered from acne rosacea) were so recognizable that when she spent two years out of society, in bed with tuberculosis (from which she eventually recovered), her absence was noted in the Queen’s own diary. Antoinette’s bedridden years coincide almost exactly with the dates of Columbus’s second voyage.
Charles’s account of Antoinette’s years with Columbus mirrors de Poisson’s biography, with some cross-dressing thrown in. Charles believed that Antoinette disguised herself as a boy and named herself Luke Wadsworth — he discounts the poisoning tale — because she was desperate to live like a man. Charles thought her “gender frustrations,” in his words, later prompted her to create the false maps.
Despite the allowances she had in her personal life, due to her permissive guardian and the scarlet fever — induced sterility that kept her from bearing children, Antoinette was emotionally dissatisfied and craved power.d When she returned from her ocean-crossing and gender-crossing adventure, and had to put dresses on and go about as a lady again, she was so frustrated by polite society that she started producing her maps with rampant falsities as a way to get revenge on the society she resented. She tricked the explorers and map collectors, firstly to be cruel, and secondly to frustrate them as they did her.e
Charles and de Poisson’s biographies were largely forgotten by academia. Only a few responses popped up over the years. As an undergraduate at the University of Paris in Sorbonne, a young Simone de Beauvoir wrote a scathing feminist critique of Charles’s theories of Antoinette’s “gender frustration.”
In 1989, a group of PhD students from Berkeley College’s history department published a paper on Monson in the Journal of American History, describing the Charles and de Poisson versions of Monson’s biography. They came up with a new theory, that de Poisson’s Monson died when he returned to Nuremberg after Columbus’s voyage and his wife, poor and starving, had to finish and publish his maps herself to survive. The falsities on the maps, in their estimation, came from her lack of knowledge, not any intentional attempt to mislead the public. They criticized Charles for not acknowledging the fact that the births of lower class farmers, like de Poisson’s Monson, were sometimes not recorded by the state. Also, when men were exiled, sometimes their birth certificates, and those of their family, were burned. Either of those customs could account for Antoine’s lack of documentation.
The mystery of Monson’s identity might never be solved. De Poisson’s lowborn man who swindled his way onto Columbus’s ship is as likely to be real as Charles’s cross-dressing aristocrat. “The mystery is more interesting than any answer to the mystery,” the Situationist Ivan Chtcheglov wrote in his private, unpublished diary on the subject of both Monson and life in general.f Chtcheglov became interested in Monson during the five years he spent incarcerated at a mental hospital in Paris, following his attempt to blow up the Eiffel Tower because the lights shone into his apartment at night, making it difficult for him to sleep. The mental hospital’s library, stocked with cast-offs from the Université de Paris, included a copy of Charles’s New Biography. Chtcheglov smuggled the book out of the hospital when he was released, then tracked down a copy of de Poisson’s biography through his friends at the university.