This map is not really so much a map as it is three views from space of our beautiful and somewhat endangered planet. In each of the views – and they’re side-by-side – there is a slight turning of the globe so that one sees a different part. This map or this spectacular view of the Earth from three different vantage points was produced by a company called Raven Maps. Raven Maps in the last twenty years or so has made some of the most sumptuous, colorful, and beautifully-rendered maps. This one, again, not really a map, but three views of the Earth is a beneficiary, of course, of the fact that we now have the ability to look back at our planet from space and see it through entirely new eyes.
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Title: One world
Contributors: Allan Cartography (Firm), Raven Maps & Images, Stuart Allan, Karin Kunkel
This item is not so much a “map” as it is a view from space at our “ocean planet,” as it refers. Floating off to the left is a somewhat-diminished picture of the Moon. Again, this is an image that has been made possible by the remarkable exploration that we’ve been able to make of near space and our ability now to turn the cameras in our satellites back on ourselves so we can see this extraordinary planet that we live on. Clouds swirl. Green spaces predominate here and brown spaces there. One sees where the mountains are. One sees even what looks like a cyclone just off the western coast of Mexico. It really causes one to reflect on the fact that there we are, lost in a black void, a lonely blue planet travelling through the Solar System.
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Title: The planet Earth : a digital portrait of our ocean planet
Contributors: Spaceshots Inc., Laboratory for Atmospheres (Goddard Space Flight Center)
This map reflects the track of a ship, and actually an entire squadron, but the ship was called the Centurion and it was commanded by a Commodore George Anson. This voyage probably goes down as one of the most horrific in the history of exploration and voyaging. Commodore Anson started out with a squadron of seven ships and 1,800 sailors. Three years later when they finally returned to England, fully 90% of those 1,800 had died and there were only approximately 180 crew members left. When the voyage was undertaken, the British and the Spanish were in the midst of a war, and their ships preyed on one another. Part of Anson’s job was to disrupt Spanish shipping and, perhaps, capture some of the galleons – the ships that carried the great gold and silver hoards that Spain was bringing back to its country. And Anson had that as one of his goals.
But the track on this map shows is the actual pathway of the Centurion and it’s marvelous for several reasons, one of which is the portion of the track that goes up on the western side of South America, and, if you look closely, you’ll see that that track jiggles a little bit about halfway up the coast, just about where the Juan Fernandez Island is located, and Anson got close to that island- wanted to get it, but had no way of knowing, in those days, exactly how far east or west he was. Thinking he was in the wrong direction, he headed east and all of a sudden found himself about to bump into the coast of Chile. Realizing his mistake, he turned around and finally found the Juan Fernandez Al- Island, and of course later on, much later on after many adventures he did cross the Pacific and finally returned to England, having captured one of the big prizes, in fact the biggest prize that a British ship had ever found and was acclaimed a hero on his return back to Great Britain.
This map is a curious and, to some degree, insightful rendering of how the Earth works. It was prepared by Athanasius Kircher, who made it his business to try to understand ocean currents, try to understand hydrological activity, try to understand volcanic activity. And so, his maps are full of representations and some speculation about how the waters of the world connect to each other, how the volcanoes are arrayed, and so on. Very interested in those features and some of his theories, which had long underground passageways connecting one body of water with another, were interesting in their speculative character – not many of them proved to be true, but he was at least asking the questions that later scientists, hydrologists, and oceanographers were to explore.
This map is a marvelous effort to capture what the whole world looked like. It is after the much larger and very famous map[1] by Gerard Mercator, and among its many wonderful features are its effort, again, to portray what the New World looks like. It had been known for roughly seventy years, but the explorers of the world were still trying to make sense of it. You’ll see at the very very bottom, a large continuous landmass that seems to go on forever. It’s one of the many terras incognitae[2] that you will find on older maps, and that large landmass was posited by mapmakers, in part, because there was so much landmass on the northern side of the equator and there was at least some theorizing that without a large landmass on the bottom, the globe was in danger of tipping over, so it was speculated that, of course there had to be a large landmass – and there it is, whether it really is- existed or not. Another interesting feature of this map is the medallion showing Jesus in the upper left-hand corner. Some people think that this medallion was placed there strategically because, while there was a hope there would be a Northwest Passage above and around the North American continent, they weren’t quite sure. And so at least one theory here is that Jesus and his medallion were strategically put at that location, so the mapmaker did not have to make a definitive choice.
[1] See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_1569_world_map Accessed 23 Mar. 2021.
[2] “When Roman mapmakers drew a land area that no one had yet explored, they often labeled it “Terra Incognita”—that is, “Unknown Territory”—and the term continued to be used for centuries afterward.” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/terra%20incognita Accessed 30 Mar. 2021.
