Early 17th-century ships like these reproductions of the Susan Constant (center) and Godspeed (right) at Jamestown Settlement could be sailed to new lands because of great strides in marine mapping. CREDIT Visit the Photo Place

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Going global: Maps point the way

Early mapmakers opened up the world for seafarers. By Paul Sullivan

Date published: 5/20/2006

W HEN I WAS growing up, and decades later when my boys were growing up, there was always a globe in the house.

But my globe was so outdated that Russia was still the Soviet Union and the countries of Africa were all scrambled up with names long forgotten.

A few years back, I stuck that old globe in someone else's yard sale and could scarcely believe it found a second life in another family's home.

Last Christmas, a dear friend gave me a National Geographic atlas of the history of mapping, and last week I spotted a great buy on globes at Kmart. Having dropped enough heavy hints at Christmas to sink one of those early sailing ships (to no avail), I bought one and took it home.

And so the world turns: Now I have an actual up-to-date globe beside my reading chair, just as dad did. The more things change, the more they do, indeed, remain the same.

And now I, like my dad and his before him, can wander afar without going anywhere, and read and marvel at those early seafarers and how they found their way.

Last month, I spent a few hours at Jamestown Settlement in an effort to learn more about the lives of those first English settlers to Virginia.

Their lives were hard enough to test the most resilient, but it was their long, tedious and dangerous voyage to Virginia that most intrigued me. A would-be ordinary seaman aboard the replica Discovery--smallest of the three vessels that made that Jamestown landing--left us slack-jawed at just how difficult it was to make that journey in the first years of the 17th century.

As I listened to his litany of horrors of life below decks, another part of my mind was traveling with that tiny square-rigger's officers, trying to imagine how their flotilla of three found its way to the James River. That in itself was nothing short of miraculous, given the simple state of the art of navigation at that time.

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Date published: 5/20/2006