Tag: Location: North America

Passage par terre a la Californie decouverte par le R.P. Eusebe- François Kino, Jesuite depuis 1698 jusqu’a 1701 ou l’on voit encore les Nouvelles Missions des PP. de la Compag.e de Jesus

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This map records a historic event that took place a few years before it was published. The background is that once upon a time, the very earliest mapmakers described California as part of the North American continent, part of the mainland. And then in 1625, a mapmaker by the name of Briggs[1] decided that it was really an island[2], and he was so famous that succeeding mapmakers followed his example and described California on their maps also as an island. It wasn’t until Father Kino[3] decided to try out how you got to this so-called “island” and he began walking west and he continued walking west, and he continued walking west, until he got to the Pacific Ocean without having gotten his feet wet in the meantime. All of a sudden, people realized that the island notion was a mistake the whole time and California was, in fact, part of the North American mainland. Of course some people think that there may come a day with earthquake activity that California might someday, again, be seen as an island. We will see!

[1] “Henry Briggs (bap. 1561-1631) was an English mathematician. He is best known for his pioneering work on logarithms and his 1625 map depicting California as an island, the first English map to do so.” https://www.raremaps.com/mapmaker/1190/Henry_Briggs Accessed 16 Mar. 2021.
[2] “In 1622 [Briggs] published a small tract on the Northwest Passage to the South Seas, through the Continent of Virginia and Hudson Bay. The tract is notorious today as the origin of the cartographic myth of the Island of California. In it Briggs stated he had seen a map that had been brought from Holland that showed the Island of California.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Briggs_(mathematician) Accessed 16 Mar. 2021.
[3] “Eusebio Francisco Kino (10 August 1645 – 15 March 1711), often referred to as Father Kino, was a Tyrolean Jesuit, missionary, geographer, explorer, cartographer and astronomer born in the Territory of the Bishopric of Trent, then part of the Holy Roman Empire.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusebio_Kino Accessed 16 Mar. 2021.

 

 

For more details, view the catalog record: https://library.villanova.edu/Find/Record/1700139

Tierra Nueva

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This map is entitled “Tierra Nueva” which is a rendering by Ruscelli of the east coast of the North American continent. Again, it’s very hard to match what you see here with what might be found on a current modern-day map. In the lower left-hand corner, Florida appears – not clear what Florida’s real shape is, but it’s at least indicated. And then there is a potpourri[1] of different islands, or would-be islands, up in the vicinity of Massachusetts and Rhode Island and Maine. There’s a lot of speculation that there were water passages in and around and behind what one sees on the coast. Much of that was speculative. One fun thing about this map is that it shows the prototypic version of the island of Manhattan. Well, it’s not shown as an island. It is shown as a peninsula with the label “Angouleme,”[2] but that, as reflected on later maps, is what the mapmakers of the day thought of what, at the time, was considered an island- I mean, a part of the mainland, but obviously is an island, the most built-upon island, perhaps, in the world.

[1] Potpourri can be defined as “a miscellaneous collection” or “medley.” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/potpourri Accessed 7 Mar. 2021.

[2] “On January 17, 1524, Giovanni da Verrazano, (1485-1528) in command of La Dauphine, became the first European to enter New York Harbor, during a voyage sponsored by King Francis I of France. […] Francis I (1494-1547, King of France 1515-1547) was the son of Charles of Orleans. Prior to Francis’ ascension to the throne, he had been known as Francis of Angouleme. In the King’s honor, Verrazano named the harbor ‘Angouleme’ and reported to Francis: I ‘Called [the harbor] Angouleme from the principality which thou attainedst in lesser fortune…’” http://www.newyorkmapsociety.org/FSAngouleme.html Accessed 9 Mar. 2021.

 

 

For more details, view the catalog record: https://library.villanova.edu/Find/Record/1678261

Descrittione dell’isola et terra di santa croce, overo : mondo nuovo

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This map is a map by Thomaso Porcacchi of the New World – “Mondo Nuovo.” As you can see, it is part of a larger page, a page that would have been in a book of maps, and he was famous for a collection of what he basically called his collection “Islands of the World.” Well, he included continents in that category as well. So, here we have North America, and North America is in a distorted shape that one would have some trouble recognizing today, but there it is.

There’s a little blob in the middle representing Florida. One can go up the coast all the way to Labrador. On the western side, we see California- Baja California, and it is attached to the North American continent. As is the case with several later maps, California gets disconnected from the North American continent, but the early-most mapmakers got it right, and there it is.

 

 

For more details, view the catalog record: https://library.villanova.edu/Find/Record/1691633

La Florida / Peruviae Auriferae Regionis Typus / Guastecan

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This map is actually a collection of three maps that formed a part of the famous atlas that Abraham Ortelius, a Flemish mapmaker, made in the 16th Century. It actually includes three sections: one a part of the connecting tissue between the two continents of North and South America; one showing Florida; and one showing the Peruvian coast. Ortelius was one of the most decent mapmakers and collectors of maps. When he published his atlas, unlike many others who simply stole the ideas or the maps from someone else and attributed them to themselves, Ortelius always gave credit to the actual mapmaker. I particularly like the Peruvian coast, and, if you look at that, you’ll see the mountain ranges, of course the mountainous western coast of South America is famous. And this map would have been very useful to the Spanish as they continued their exploration and conquest of the South America and Central American portions of the Western Hemisphere. It’s also illustrated with some wonderful ships at sea, and communities that probably did not have anything very substantial in them are represented by little castles and somewhat larger structures than are real at various points in the mountainous Peruvian coast.

 

 

For more details, view the catalog record: https://library.villanova.edu/Find/Record/1691629

A map of Pennsylvania exhibiting not only the improved parts of that Province, but also its extensive frontiers

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This very large and wonderful map is a map of Pennsylvania that was made in approximately 1770, before our Declaration of Independence and before our Constitution, but the colony of Pennsylvania was well established at that point, and the surveyor-mapmaker, Scull, in this case, has done an extraordinary job in rendering the colony in its then-glory. There is so much here that one could spend an hour-and-a-half just pointing to this part or that part, but some of the things that stand out are that it is really a snapshot. It is a freeze-frame of what Pennsylvania looked like at the time. In the lower right-hand corner, in the area where the red patch appears, that’s the street plan of Philadelphia. One sees all manner of locations, streams, uh, historic spots, etc. And then as one moves more to the center and to the left, not surprisingly, the amount of detail starts to disappear. In the very left-hand-most part where the two rivers that form the Ohio come together at what is now Pittsburgh, one sees the indication that that was the location of Fort Pitt, formerly Fort Duquesne – of course “Duquesne” was the name when the French dominated that section. Pitt when the British later took that part over. There’s vast empty spaces on the left-hand side of the map because, to a large degree, colonists, explorers just hadn’t gotten that far, hadn’t gotten to find all the wonderful detail that one might find today.

Unfortunately, the map of the colony is not complete because we don’t see Lake Erie in the upper left-hand corner. But, again, if we go back over to the right, up in the northeastern part of Pennsylvania, we see reference to the Pocono Mountains. We see reference to the “Endless Mountains” up toward Wyalusing. There is a reference here to the “Great Swamp.” And, of course, as one goes back down south toward Philadelphia tracing the route of the Delaware River, one gets back into the part of the world that we are familiar with here in southeastern Pennsylvania. There is a reference here to Radnor, and, of course, we are here in Radnor Township. There’s a reference to Lower Merion, and there are a number of historic spots that are picked up by this methodical and wonderful mapmaker. One could spend, literally, hours and hours enjoying all of the many facets that are backed up by Mr. Scull. A wonderful map. An extraordinary map.

 

 

For more details, view the catalog record: https://library.villanova.edu/Find/Record/1691581

Novi orbis pars borealis, America scilicet complectens Floridam, Baccalaon, Canadam, terram Corterialem, Virginiam, Norombecam, pluresque alias provincias

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This is a map entitled “Novi Orbis Pars Borealis America” by a mapmaker by the name of Matthias Quad. It was done in or about 1600 and was, like so many maps of the day, an effort to understand what the North American continent was all about using very, very limited information. Despite these limits, Quad was working with some important feedback and information from some of the great explorers of the day. They included Jacques Cartier, Sebastian Cabot, Giovanni Verrazano, and Sir Walter Raleigh, among others. The depiction of North America is, of course, very squashed and, to the modern eye, not at all realistic. But it is quite comprehensive, including that portion of the map that is today the United States and that portion of the map which is today Canada, identified almost throughout as “Francia Nova.”

Perhaps the most interesting and curious feature of the map is the long strip of sea that goes from East all the way to West. Here, the mapmaker was speculating. There was a great deal of hope on the part of many in Europe that there would, in fact, be a passageway – a so-called “Northwest Passage” – that would go transversely across the North American continent, providing an opportunity for European ships to reach the Orient directly without having to go all the way down around the bottom of South America and travel up along and across the sometimes-violent Pacific Ocean. So, in this particular case the wish became the fact, and Quad depicts a Northwest Passage that, in fact, did not exist. I think it’s interesting that in today’s modern times, with the enhanced ability of ships to traverse the Arctic region, ships are once again imagining regular commercial traffic through the icy waters of the Artic and, perhaps today, there is some version of a Northwest Passage that is actually shaping up.[1] [1] “Until 2009, the Arctic pack ice prevented regular marine shipping throughout most of the year. Arctic sea ice decline has rendered the waterways more navigable for ice navigation.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Passage Accessed 24 Mar. 2021.

 

 

For more details, view the catalog record: https://library.villanova.edu/Find/Record/1935558

Linguistic Stocks of American Indians North of Mexico

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This is a map depicting the linguistic stocks of American Indians north of Mexico. It is based on the exploration and work of a famous explorer of the 19th Century, John Wesley Powell, who had many explorations, of course, particularly in the west, and this map is some record of where the several Indians were located in the North American continent before some, unfortunately, were probably already being pushed to one side by the arrival of the colonists and the expansion that was going on already in the early 19th Century. But you see the areas that were occupied by people speaking a language called Muskhogeon, then there is Iroquoian – the great Iroquois Nation, of course, both in the Mid-Atlantic area and also up in the Pennsylvania, New York, and Great Lakes vicinity. And off to the west are still more smaller areas reflecting what was spoken in those areas as well. This map, therefore, tells a story. It tells a story of who were the peoples, the Indigenous peoples of the Americas in the early-to-mid 1800s.

 

 

For more details, view the catalog record: https://library.villanova.edu/Find/Record/1935561

America Septentrionalis

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This is a map by Tobias Lotter. Lotter created this map in about 1760 and it depicts virtually all of North America and the Caribbean. However, one of its most distinguishing features is that there is all blank space above what is called “Nova Mexico” and west of what is called “Canada” or “Nova Francia.” So, in this particular case, Lotter decided not to speculate and consciously simply left the upper left-hand portion of the map un-filled in altogether. Like so many of the maps of the period, it has a glorious cartouche in the upper left-hand corner, and Lotter pays due respect, something that mapmakers never- or frequently failed to do, to a mapmaker by the name of De L’Isle, whose geographic work, cartographic work, preceded that of Lotter, and Lotter clearly made considerable use of it.

[1] “Cartouche, in architecture, ornamentation in scroll form, applied especially to elaborate frames around tablets or coats of arms. By extension, the word is applied to any oval shape or even to a decorative shield, whether scroll-like in appearance or not.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/art/cartouche Accessed 9 Mar. 2021.

 

 

For more details, view the catalog record: https://library.villanova.edu/Find/Record/1935559