Unnamed	Plate carrée	Gnomonic	Stereographic
Conformal?	no	no	no	YES
Equivalent?	no	no	no	no
Equal deformation N-S and E-W?	YES	no	YES	YES
Straight lines = great circles?	Vertical and horizontal	Vertical only	YES	Through origin only
Axes of coordinates in real magnitude?	YES	YES	no	no
Maximum scope?	Less than one hemisphere	Whole world	Less than one hemisphere	Usually one hemisphere

Table 2: Comparison of properties of the UP with other cartographic projections.

—History
    
The first author (and the only one up to now) to describe the concept behind the UP was the Spanish aeronautical engineer José Antonio Hurtado García in a paper published in 2006 and entitled “La ‘longitud del occidente’ y la ‘latitud del equinoccial’: un sistema de coordenadas geográficas, ortogonal, inédito.”[33] Hurtado defends the controversial theory that whenever Christopher Columbus wrote ‘distancia a la equinoccial’ he did not mean ‘latitude’, as believed by all historians, but the angle that has been called here ‘obliquity.’ This would explain the bizarre values of ‘distancia a la equinoccial’ reported by Columbus for Cuba and Hispaniola, which have puzzled scholars up to now.[34]
    
Hurtado also hinted that Juan de la Cosa made use of the ‘distancia a la equinoccial’ in his map taking as reference for longitude the meridian of Hierro, in the Canaries. However, Hurtado acknowledged that the relative positions of the lands shown in the 1500 map did not fit his theory and blamed it on a mistake or a manipulation by Columbus.
    
In the following chapter it will be shown that Hurtado’s intuition may in fact be right: the Atlantic basin of the map of Juan de la Cosa looks as if it had been built using an equirectangular grid of longitude and obliquity (i.e. an Unnamed Projection), albeit taking as reference not the meridian of Hierro, but another eight degrees to the west.

6. Comparison with the La Cosa map
    
A real image of the Atlantic basin has been plotted in Unnamed Projection, using the point LAT0 = 0º, LON0 = 26ºW as the center of projection, and the result has been superimposed over La Cosa map. In addition, the discrepancies in latitude and longitude of a set of control points have been computed numerically and can be found in Annex 1. The results are discussed below, first region by region, and then in a global overview.