In 1929, Bey Halil Ethem, the director of the Topkapi Palace, found a map in a bundle of disregarded materials. After passing through several hands, the map landed with German Orientalist Paul Kahle, who identified it as a partial 1513 portolan chart of the world by Ottoman cartographer Piri Reis. Though not the first map of the Americas, it gained notoriety for its supposed accuracy of the South American coastline; a claim contested by several authors. A superlative more pressing for this study is that this map is the earliest illustrated map of the Americas. Piri Reis painted mythological creatures, monkeys, snakes, and mountains on the South American continent, hinting at the early approaches to an unknown land. Through these images and the accompanying inscriptions, Piri Reis’ portrayal of the Americas personified was consistent with that of historical boundary regions. Piri Reis appropriated images commonly associated with sub-Saharan Africa and eastern Asia to South America, all of which are considered the “outer boundary” of the world in Europe’s eyes. Violence and material wealth were emphasized on behalf of the residents of the Americas, and mythological creatures seen residing in the New World arrived from Africa, Scandinavia, or China. If someone were to regard descriptions of the Americas as factual, they would infer that those living there existed at a time in the past, removed from “society” as defined by Europe. Piri Reis’ approach here parallels that of Orientalist painters in the mid-nineteenth century, tending to associate the outside “other” with material wealth, naivety, and residing in a past. In this paper, I argue that Piri Reis displayed the Americas both in and beyond the degree of Orientalism, combining both the tradition of how China, Sub-Saharan Africa, and India were depicted in antiquity with that of Asia Minor, North Africa, and Greece during the modern era. He portrayed a society as viewed by the majority in which the humans that are in the “outside” are “lesser,” or the semi-human “other.” I further posit that this approach to depicting the “outside” is consistent with trends by other Ottoman cartographers.