Trivia Or The Essence?

'So Geographers in Afric-Maps

With savage Pictures fill thier gaps

And o'er unhabitable Downs

Place Elephants for want of Towns'

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), On Poetry: A Rhapsody (1733)

After the cult of science took hold from about 1700, and the last corners of the globe were ‘discovered’, so increasingly restrictive assumptions have been made about the purpose and nature of maps. They have been regarded as having everything to do with accurate knowledge of the physical world and precise measurement of the earth’s surface, and nothing to do with anything else.

One of the earliest people to hold such views and ridicule what others have since scorned as ‘mere decoration’ on maps was Jonathan Swift, the creator of ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ (in which Gulliver’s maps were very scientific), and his views have gone echoing down the centuries.

When Swift wrote his verse he presumably had in mind a map like the one shown here. It was published in Amsterdam by William Blaeu, the founder of the leading Dutch map publishing firm during the golden age of Dutch cartography, when Amsterdam dominated the European map market. It was largely thanks to the work of Portuguese mariners, since 1450, that Blaeu was able to show the coastline of Guinea in some detail.

The hinterland, though, was then virtually unexplored. While regrettable from the purely cartographical standpoint, it gave Blaeu space to elaborate on the aspects of Guinea; its exotic animals, its ivory and Dutch control of its slave trade. Amidst the bays and headlands there are such slaving and trading centres as the Dutch Fort Nassau and the rival Portuguese fort of Sao Jorge de Elmina. Elephants, lions, monkeys, baboons and alligators, which were, after all, actually to be seen there, are depicted in the inland areas. The seas are shown dominated by Dutch ships; two young black cherubs carry an ivory tusk while two adults adorn the map’s title. Accompanying them are more baboons, directly reflecting the Dutch view of the natives that underpinned the slave trade.

The map demonstrates the older view that maps could be as much about the world’s differing peoples, flora, fauna, religions, legends and history as about the accurate depiction of coastlines, rivers and towns. Of course, the limitations of scale meant that the cartographer had to be selective, but a nod had to be made in the direction of broader culture. If there was not room in the map itself, cultural features were included in the borders or at the very least, would adorn the title or scale bar. Medieval world maps had the same encyclopaedic objectives and to this day tourist maps continue the tradition.

Mapping A Civilization

At first glance few pictures can be further removed from ‘the truth’ than the frontispiece to the manuscript known as the Fejervary Screenfold, one of the few Aztec manuscripts to have survived the destruction that followed the capture of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) by Cortes in 1521. Yet the frontispiece, which was originally owned and probably created by priests of Toltec faith, maps the empire and civilization of the Aztecs.

It is divided into four segments or lobes, with intervening diagonals radiating from a centre in which stands the fire god Xiuhtecutli. Flanking a tree in each of the segments are the remaining eight Aztec gods who, with the fire god, represent nine of the thirteen moons into which the Aztec year of 260 days was divided.

The four sets of smaller symbols or glyphs placed one above the other in some of the intersections represent the 20 days of each moon, which collectively correspond to the span of a human pregnancy. In the intersections are symbols culminating at the top in stylized maize, a reference to the Aztec belief that man was created in the image of maize. The circles on the birds flying above the maize symbolizes years. The picture therefore represents the Aztecs’ framework of time and belief.

At the same time the map depicts their surroundings. The four segments may represent the four sections into which Tenochtitlan was divided. They certainly represent the four provinces which the Aztecs divided their empire, each surrounded by its own sacred river and dominated by its particular gods, with east at the top and the physical geography distorted to fit within the pattern.

Most of the earliest, maps are now believed to be spiritual representations, or ‘fossilized prayers’, like the Fejervary Screenfold and the more familiar thirteenth century European world maps, such as the Hereford Mappamundi and the Psalter map.  In all of them physical geography is more or less distorted in order to accommodate the map’s principle purpose; to provide a framework within which the creators’ view of human existence, faith, history and knowledge can be expressed in pictures.

The world is variously shown as dominated or held by, or even as the body of, God or the gods. There are allusions, particularly in the Hereford Mappamundi which is surmounted by an illustration of the Last Judgement, to the passage of time and the transience of human existence. If the Aztec world is centred on Tenochtitlan, after AD 1100 the Christian world is increasingly shown as being centred on Jerusalem.

To this day, adherents of a variety of religions and sects feel the urge to ‘map’ their beliefs and world views.

Fantasy And Misunderstanding

The map inscribed with the legend ‘Here Be Dragons’, yet there is no such thing.

Dorothy L. Sayers coined the phrase for her detective story ‘The Dragon’s Mouth’, and invented the map too. It was said to be in a Ptolemy, edited by Sebastian Munster of Basle in the sixteenth century, symbolizing the ‘Marvels of the East’. These were usually depicted on medieval maps as a fringe of monstrous beings decorating the continent of Africa. For many centuries such fantasies and misconceptions haunted the world map and enthralled European armchair travellers.

Cartographic errors also played a role in plans for exploration and discovery. When the Geography of Claudius Ptolemy, written in about AD 150, was revived in Europe in the fifteenth century, the work was regarded as a model of scientific method and was revised in the light of contemporary knowledge.  One major error, however, was not corrected but exaggerated – Ptolemy’s world map showing the continent of Eurasia. The Chinese discoveries of Marco Polo, the thirteenth century Venetian traveller, now had to be added to Ptolemy’s eastern Asia.

As a result of this and other corrections, Christopher Columbus calculated that the distance from the Canary Islands westward to Cipango (Japan) was 2400 miles (3860 km), whereas the true distance in 28 degrees North was 10,600 miles (17,060 km). His figures plotted on a modern map put Japan in the Virgin Islands of the West Indies and Cathay (China) on the west coast of Mexico.

As European discoveries advanced, the New World of America became the home of some of the fantasies which had abounded in the continents of Africa and Asia. Myths were not abandoned but transplanted. In South America the Spaniards’ quest for gold was fed by tales of a kingdom of ‘El Dorado’, meaning the ‘gilded one’.

Sir Walter Raleigh sailed in 1595 to discover for England this El Dorado, believed to lie somewhere between the Amazon and the Orinoco rivers. He returned with a report of the ‘large and beautiful empire of Guiana’ and drew a map of it showing the large lake of Manoa and, at its western end, the city of Manoa, called by the Spaniards El Dorado. Raleigh also described tribes with their heads in their breasts, the anthropophagi, and Amazonian warrior women. These were duly depicted when Jodocus Hondius made an engraved version of Raleigh’s map for publication in Amsterdam in 1599.

In Gulliver’s Travels, which was first published in 1726; Jonathan Swift satirized the geographical errors which had become established features of maps. Thus, in 1703, Gulliver discovers the bulbous peninsula of Brobdingnag on the coast of California, which for many years had been shown on maps as an island rather than the peninsula that it really is. Yet these fictions were regarded as reality in their time and provided the bases for very real historical events.

If Columbus had known the truth, he would not have set sail in 1492 to discover the western passage from Europe to Asia. If Raleigh had known the truth he would not have undertaken the last, disastrous voyage to South America in search of the gold of El Dorado that led to his execution on Tower Hill in 1618.

Cartographic fantasies often have a grain of truth in them, but even when they have lacked it, they merit more than modern ridicule.

A Tissue Of Lies

Maps are one of the greatest illusions known to man and yet we instinctively put our faith in them.

Disregarding the evidence of our own eyes, we assume, when using maps, that they are a substitute for reality. But there is no way in which they can be in all respects. Not even the biggest maps can reproduce absolutely everything about the area they depict while the most precisely surveyed map, created using the latest technology, cannot capture all aspects of the globe's roundness on a flat surface.

Far from being objective portrayals of the world around us, maps have often served to lend credibility to aspirations, theories, and, quite frequently, misunderstandings. Indeed some maps have been more or less pure fantasy, even if they use cartographic conventions, while others have largely or completely ignored the visible world in order to depict features - physical, social, political and religious - that cannot be seen. Sometimes, particularly for security reasons, map-makers will intentionally suppress or distort information.

The cost of making maps has also exerted a negative influence, leading sometimes to outdated or even incorrect information being reproduced over the centuries or to depictions of groups of features which have never existed together at the same time, creating phoney images of what appears to the uninitiated to be 'reality'. The fact is that map-makers have no alternative but to choose what they want us to see and how we are to see it. Mere social convention often unconsciously dictates what they insert and how we react. Some maps reflect the objectives of their makers by playing down the narrowly geographical features in favour of cultural ones.

Ideology has influenced the selection and through the centuries the content of maps has been manipulated to add authority to every cause from militant Christianity to advertising. In order to add clarity to the selected message, whether it is geographical or more broadly cultural, the map-maker will mix pictures and symbols, disregard natural colour, alter the true relationship of places and distances between them and play false with relative size.

Yet to map is a total illusion. However ill-surveyed, untrue or fanciful, it contains some elements of reality and mirrors its creator's views and cultural background in a way that frequently transcends the simple representation of the physical world. In this way, so-called 'inaccurate' or 'crude' old maps can be of immense importance to students of history because they can reveal the mentalities of past societies, civilizations and even individuals, such as Elizabeth I's great minister, Lord Burghley.

Because of its very artificiality, a well-constructed, purpose-linked modern map will also be far greater assistance to the contemporary user than any simple duplication of reality, whether they're in search of specific answers to important spatial questions or just trying to solve problems with spatial element to them.

{EAV_BLOG_VER:0225bcef0b7ff5ac}