Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
rest in the bleakest, least hospitable bit of the desert—you could even draw a parallel with
the endless relocations of native people as Europeans advanced across the globe.
Perhapstheseoldmapsseemtohavemorepersonalitybecausethey'recreditedtoactual
personalities. Modern maps have, essentially, no origin at all: they simply emerge—fully
formed, as if from the mind of Zeus—onto computer screens and chain bookstore re-
mainder tables. They are maps
of
something—Tuscany or Antarctica or Philadelphia—but
not maps
by
anyone. At best, a connoisseur can glance at an atlas and derive its corporate
parentage—Goode's, Hammond, Oxford University Press—from the fonts and color
scheme,butwestillknownothing,imaginenothingaboutthehandsthatpreparedit.Today,
we might suppose (correctly, to a degree) that
no
hands really prepared it—that, instead
of careful men with green eyeshades airbrushing artboard and scratching acetate overlays
with crow-quill pens, the map was immaculately conceived of a GIS database.
By contrast, the maps at this fair are
by
someone. The name of the mapmaker appears in
the largest type on every placard and first in every catalog listing: Pieter Goos, Nicolas de
Fer, Thomas Kitchin. I've never heard of any of these people; they all sound to me like the
fake names on Jason Bourne's passports. But the right name on a map—Speed or Ortelius
or Mercator—allows a seller to bump up its price substantially. This is the auteur theory of
cartography. It draws on the memory of a time when mapmakers left fingerprints all over
theirmaps,anditrequirestheexpertisetotellthecraftsmenfromthetrueartists.Nomatter
how important they were in their field, none of these mapmakers ever became a household
name(exceptperhapsforGerardus“Hey,ladies,how'dyouliketocomeupandtakealook
at my projection?” Mercator), but in this room they are the Old Masters: the map collect-
ors' da Vinci and Rembrandt and van Gogh.
The early mapmakers deserve every bit of this attention. Today we're so surrounded by
high-quality maps that we have the tendency to take them for granted. Well, of course this
is what my hometown looks like! See, here it is on Google Earth. Maybe we can remem-
ber or imagine a time when there was no aerial imagery or airborne radar or GPS, but
250 years ago, before John Harrison invented the marine chronometer, there wasn't even
a reliable way for sailors to measure their own longitude. Think about that for a moment:
the best technology on Earth couldn't tell you how far east or west you were at any given
moment. That's a wee bit of an obstacle when it comes to drawing reliable maps. When
Ptolemy mapped the known world in the second century, he had to rely on oral histories
and a series of rough mathematical guesses to gauge east-west distances. As a result, he
drastically elongated the Mediterranean, making it half again as wide as it is in reality. A
millennium passed without any improvement on his method, and so
Columbus relied
on
Ptolemy'sfuzzymathtocalculatethelengthofhisproposedvoyagetoIndia.Hewasabout
tenthousandmilesoff,andwasveryluckytherewasahugeunknowncontinentinhisway,
or he would never have been heard from again.
