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Early 17th-century ships like these reproductions of the Susan Constant (center) and Godspeed (right) |
W HEN I WAS growing up, and decades later
But my globe was so outdated that Russia was still the Soviet Union and the countries of Africa were all scrambled up with names long forgotten.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),
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.
But I have been surprised to discover in my new "Mapping the World: An Illustrated History of Cartography" that though they seem primitive today, the charts and atlases Capt. John Smith and his fellow officers had were far superior to those used by Capt. Christopher Columbus when he sailed to North America more than a century earlier.
They had to have been the greatest sailors of their time, but more to the point, they were master navigators.
As I have moved through the centuries of earliest mapping, several interesting things have popped out. The first is that advances in mapmaking were driven by those great sailors, forever pushing the boundaries of discovery. The second is that for a thousand years before about the 19th century, mapping of lands began with the coasts and proceeded inland.
On the earliest maps of North America, for example, the coastlines were accurately mapped, their features named, long before the same could
But it really had to happen that way, for mapmaking advanced only as rapidly as the information available to cartographers came in from afar. In every trip to the new world or elsewhere across the high seas there were navigators, and their duties always included collecting information to fill in what had been those blank places on the previous maps and charts.
Cartography, like other arts, has advanced one step at a time. Today, with GPS, satellite imagery and sensors, computer graphics and so many other resources, the work of the mapmaker is easily overlooked. It shouldn't be. The levels of accuracy and information sought for mapping now were beyond the wildest dreams of a Ptolemy or Mercator or any of the others who made it possible to push back and move into the new frontiers.
Yet when I spin that new globe next to my chair I look at a map of the planet that was essentially understood quite a long time ago.
The Library of Congress has a handsome modern-seeming double map of Earth prepared by Jodocus Hondius using purloined information gathered by Sir Francis Drake in his globe-girdling voyage of 1577-80. The Dutch cartographer returned to his homeland a few years after the publication of his masterpiece. Drake's map, so prized by Queen Elizabeth I, was lost in a fire long afterward but was the source for the Hondius maps.
Advances in mapping by the various competing European seafaring nations were tightly held secrets, as they could lead to untold new lands and new riches. The story of mapping in the era of the great explorations plainly parallels the history of the exploring nations.
And now I think of how simple it is for me to gather almost any conceivable map of just about any place on Earth, right here, on this small screen in front of me. And the advances continue apace so rapidly that what was startling just a year or so ago--Google Earth is an example--scarcely raises an eyebrow now.
I marvel at the computer and its long reach into a worldwide pool of resources, and I have taken great advantage of it, but when it comes to maps, there is still nothing like unfolding and holding a richly detailed paper one to find out where I want to go and how I want to get there.
PAUL SULLIVAN, a former reporter with The Free Lance-Star, is a freelance writer living in Spotsylvania County. Contact him by mail at The Free Lance-Star, 616 Amelia St., Fredericksburg, Va. 22401; or by e-mail at
Email: PBSullivan2@cs.com.
