Interpreting Antique Maps

I did a little more digging around the web on Jeffrey S. Murray, author of Terra Nostra 1550 – 1950: The Stories Behind Canada’s Maps (see earlier post.) Mr. Murray, a senior archivist at Library and Archives Canada (LAC), has contributed to the LAC’s cartographic holdings for over twenty years. He is responsible for many specialized guides, public exhibitions, and magazine articles.

I was fortunate enough to run across Murray’s tidy online tutorial, “Looking at Old Maps: The World Through the Eyes of Early Mapmakers” at LAC. While the tutorial might seem fairly rudimentary to some, to a beginner antique map junkie like myself, it offers some explanations and ideas for interpreting the interesting (and sometimes, at first sight, bizarre) graphics that appear on many 16th and 17th century New World maps.

In many antique maps, there is a realistic portrayal of wildlife and First Nations peoples juxtaposed against illustrations of sea monsters and Greek and Roman mythology. The symbology used, Murray postulates, actually says a lot about cartographers during an age where maps probably acted as clever marketing tools that promised fame and fortune to early merchant-adventurers, guided military commanders, legitimized a politician’s dominion and helped early settlers build communities.

There were a lot of “terra incognita” (latin for “unknown lands”) and cartographers were faced with the dilemma of filling in these blank spaces in their maps. Cartographers were often going on notes of explorers, (relatively few cartographers actually went on expeditions) so:

The solution of the mapmakers was to fill the gaps in their masterpieces with drawings of plants, animals and Indigenous peoples, going beyond strict mapmaking to provide an impression of the region’s geography.

Meanwhile, cartographers tended to overuse the images of some animals while ignoring others, often getting the comparative scale and portrayal of much wildlife incorrect. 

Murray provides a few great (and sometimes humourous) examples. A quick download of a MrSID browser plug-in provides exceptional detail of some antique map scans.

[tags]Cartographic History, Cartographic Terminology, Map Terms, Antique Maps, Antique Map Tutorials[/tags]