What’s So Bad About the Badlands? - Don't Know Much About Geography - page 66

1640s Jan Blaeu's Atlas Major is published in twelve volumes. By this time the Dutch East India
Company has monopolized trade with the East and created a huge seagoing empire based in Ams-
terdam. Although the Dutch attempted to keep much of the information gained by Dutch captains
secret, a trade in maps and atlases soon boomed. Most of what Dutch sailors had discovered in sail-
ing to the East was incorporated into Blaeu's collection and was soon available throughout Europe.
1645 Dutch navigator Abel Tasman (circa 1603-59) circumnavigates Australia and discovers New
Zealand.
1652 Cape Colony in South Africa is founded by the Dutch.
1665 At age twenty-three, Isaac Newton (1642-1727) works out the general principles of his uni-
versal laws of gravitation.
1668 The British East India Company, founded in 1600, obtains control of Bombay and eventually
controls all of India and the Himalayan areas, as well as dominating trade with China. A company
that was a government unto itself, the British East India practically ruled these places until well into
the nineteenth century, when the British Crown took possession and they became Imperial colonies.
1670 French explorer René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle (1643-87) descends the Ohio River think-
ing it will flow into the Pacific. He reaches the Mississippi River instead and over the course of two
hard years follows it to the sea. Claiming the vast territory of the Mississippi basin for France, he
names it Louisiana in honor of the French king. In 1684, he attempted to find the Mississippi from
the Gulf of Mexico but was unable to locate the mouth of the river. After two years of searching in
vain, La Salle's men mutinied and murdered him.
1675 Greenwich Observatory, intended to improve navigation by providing more accurate inform-
ation about the position of stars and planets, is founded and becomes the world's leading scientific
center.
1687 Principia Mathematica by Sir Isaac Newton is published. In this masterwork, Newton sought
to explain all physical phenomena by a few generalized laws.
1696 Completion of Planisphere Terrestre , one of the first scientifically compiled world maps, at
the Paris Observatory.
1698-99 English astronomer Edmund Halley (1656-1742) maps magnetic variation in the Atlantic
Ocean, significant because of the effect of these variations on ships' compasses. Halley also pre-
dicted the regular return of the comet that has been named after him.
1736-44 The French Academy mounts ambitious expeditions to Lapland and Peru in an attempt to
prove that the earth is flattened at the poles, as predicted by Newton. Both parties suffer extreme
hardships. The Lapland expedition was first to accomplish the feat; the expedition to Peru took
nearly ten years and returned to learn that the other expedition had successfully accomplished its
mission many years earlier.