Comparative Cartography
/A Succinct Example of the Core Methodology of Traditional Map History
Another thing cut from the book ms for length …. I’m not lacking for examples. This is from the chapter explaining the history of traditional map history, which is to say the mainstream of the field of “the history of cartography” as practiced in the nineteenth and twentieth century, as opposed to the internal map histories of academic cartographers and the substantive map histories of historical geographers.
Henry Phillips Jr. (1838–95) was a businessman and numismatist from Philadelphia who became an officer in the American Philosophical Society (Smyth 1900). In browsing the APS’s library he encountered two maps that he felt moved to describe and to assess (Phillips 1880). His brief, three-page statement encapsulated the tenets of traditional map history: maps are reproductions of the earth’s surface; the history of map making is the history of the progressive growth of geographical knowledge; the task of the traditional map historian is therefore to assess the quality of early maps in order to situate them within the overall narrative of map history. The methodology that Phillips used was that used by dedicated map historians to examine and evaluate early maps: “comparative cartography.” Phillips’ succinct essay provides a great example of this fundamental practice.
The goal of comparative cartography is to establish the quality of an early map by comparing its contents, in absolute terms, to modern geography and, in relative terms, to the content of other early maps. The map historian can then situate the map in its proper place within the progressive development of geographical knowledge. This methodology is a naïve or intuitive extrapolation from the commitment to maps as statements of geographical fact. Intuitive: Phillips was not really a map student, yet he implemented it as if the study of maps was his primary avocation. Naive: few dedicated map historians bothered to codify the practice.
Absolute Comparison
The first was the map of the new world published in editions of Sebastian Münster’s version of Ptolemy’s Geography and of his own Cosmographia between 1540 and 1575:
Sebastian Münster, Novae Insulae XXVI. Nova Tabula, from his edition of Ptolemy’s Geography (Basel, 1545). This is state 2 of the map (Burden 1996, no. 12); Phillips (1880) described the variant in the American Philosophical Society’s copy of the German-language edition of Münster’s Cosmographia (Basel, 1563). Woodcut, 26 × 35 cm. Courtesy of the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine (Smith Collection); click on image for high resolution.
Phillips found this map to be “so quaint, so singularly inaccurate, yet with all its faults so suggestive that a description cannot fail to be of interest to all who care to retrace the early history of our country.” His evaluation was implicitly against a modern map, in terms not only of the outline of features but also of the toponyms (if present) and their positions:
The peninsula now known as Florida is quite correctly drawn, although it does not bear any name, but a region of country corresponding with the south-western parts of North Carolina, the north-western and northern portions of Georgia, the upper portions of Alabama and Mississippi, and the lower parts of Tennessee, receives the appellation of Terra florida.
Phillips proposed various equivalencies between the map’s unnamed or poorly executed features and modern geography: “To the west” and “some distance” away from what he supposed by its location to be the Mississippi, “is a large but nameless river taking its rise in a range of mountains which run from east to west. This may be the Rio Grande del Norte, the Texan boundary line.”
Error in lands remote from European activity is a sign of ignorance, a lack of knowledge that will be filled eventually (as implied by the “yet” in the following):
The configuration of Mexico is but poorly preserved, and the Pacific coast is dotted with random indentations of rivers and bays. Lower California does not appear, nor yet the Gulf which separates it from Mexico. (emphasis added)
To this passage, Phillips appended a footnote to suggest that the spread of new information had evidently been slow: “According to Humboldt, Lower California had been recognized as a peninsula as early as 1539–41.”
Errors in otherwise known areas must be the result of confusion. Here, Phillips asserted that the “Sea of Verrazano”—the incursion of the ocean across North America almost to the eastern seaboard, derived from the observations of Giovanni da Verrazano in 1524—probably derived from confusion over information gleaned from native informants:
A very large body of water, a continuation of that which forms the boundary of the Northern Continent, in shape and position not unlike to Hudson’s Bay, stretches far down to within a short distance from the sea-coast, no great way off from the present site of New York city, New York. Probably this was placed upon the map in conformity with Indian reports of vast interior bodies of water, confusing the Great Lakes of the Northwest, with Hudson’s Bay.
It should perhaps be made clear that even when Phillips thought the map was produced, in 1550, European knowledge of the Americas was still scanty, and certainly they had no knowledge of Hudson’s Bay and the Great Lakes. Nonetheless, Phillips’ untoward expectations were not out of line with other map historians. Maps should be correct:
The Isthmus of Central America is delineated as somewhat larger than it really is. South America is very incorrectly drawn, being too “squat” in appearance. A large river empties on its northern shores into the ocean, and on the land, at the easternmost projection of the Continent there stands a hut constructed of boughs, leaves and branches, from one of which latter a human leg is pendant. Lest there should be any doubt in the mind of the reader as to what all this meant, the word Canibali is printed upon this region to show the nature of its inhabitants. The bay of Rio Janeiro, although nameless, is shown, but appears to penetrate much farther into the main land than it really does.
Curiously, Phillips does not identify the “large river” in South America, just north of the cannibals, with the Amazon.
Relative Comparison
The second map was Münster’s world map from Johann Huttich and Simon Grynäus’ Novus Orbis regionum (Basle, 1532), although Phillips followed the common strategy of narrowing his focus to consider only the depiction of America:
Sebastian Münster, Typus cosmographicus vniversalis, from the 1555 edition of Johann Huttich and Simon Grynäus’ Novus Orbis regionum (Shirley 2001, no. 67). Phillips (1880) described only this work’s delineation of the Americas. Woodcut, 35.5 × 54.5 cm. Courtesy of the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine (Osher Collection); click on image for high resolution.
At this still early stage of the study of early maps, it was not known that the map was by Münster, but Phillips nonetheless thought it aesthetically similar to Münster’s map of the Americas. The crudity of the world map’s depiction of the Americas—crude even for 1532 when the map was made, and certainly crude by 1555, when Phillips thought it had been produced—perhaps prevented him from attributing the entire work to Münster. In addition to describing the map’s poor geographical depiction in absolute terms, Phillips also evaluated it relative to a later map known through a facsimile:
The inaccuracy of this map is really surprising, when we consider the facilities then already in existence for verification. A Spanish mappa mundi and hydrographic chart published in 1573 (Lelewel. I. p. cxxxvi), [n1] presents the North American coast not badly delineated from Newfoundland down, although exhibiting some uncertainty. The Peninsula of Florida appears under that name, and Lower California is separated from Mexico by a body of water, and Mexico and Central America are quite correctly drawn. Yucatan is shown as a peninsula, and in its proper position. The conformation of the Gulf of Mexico is reasonably accurate. South America is justly drawn, although the portion below the Straits of Magellan is only partially exhibited. The Canibales still are attributed to the northern part of Brazil. The Amazon river appears under that name.
As with Münster’s contorted map of the Americas, Phillips concluded that the world map was definitely poor for its time.
This methodology of comparative cartography was the methodology employed by traditional map historians in the study of the content of early maps. There would of course be methodological complexities, as in the study of toponyms and in the dating of maps. Nonetheless, comparative cartography provided the core ritual of examination. (Yes, a hint of Foucault; more in the book!)
Notes
n1. Phillips mistranslated the original reference, to “Orbis terrarum a hydrographo hispano 1573 in plano delineatus” (The earth delineated in a plane [map] by a Spanish mariner 1572), which was a reduced copy by Joachim Lelewel (1852–57, 1: after cxxxvi) of a much larger original. Lelewel described the entire manuscript atlas (§263, i.e., 1: ci–cvi) and identified it (§173, i.e., 2: 114n252) as having been the property of Józef Sierakowski, a diplomat and historian, who had intended to donate it to a Polish library, although Lelewel did not know whether he had actually done so before his death in 1831. Lelewel used a tracing he had made some time previously to reproduce the map. Had Sierakowski indeed donated the atlas to the Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk (Society of the Friends of Science) in Warsaw, it probably ended up either in the Polish national library, which was destroyed in 1944, or in a Russian collection. My thanks to Steven Seegel for his assistance.
References
Burden, Philip D. 1996. The Mapping of North America: A List of Printed Maps, 1511–1670. Rickmansworth, Herts.: Raleigh Publications.
Lelewel, Joachim. 1852–57. Géographie du moyen-âge. 5 vols. Brussels: Pilliet.
Phillips, Henry, Jr. 1880. “An Account of Two Maps of America Published Respectively in the Years 1550 and 1555.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 19, no. 107: 10–12. Reprinted as Acta Cartographica 7 (1970): 327–31. This essay is also readily available via Google Books.
Shirley, Rodney W. 2001. The Mapping of the World: Early Printed World Maps, 1472–1700. 2nd ed. Riverside, Conn.: Early World Press.
Smyth, Albert H. 1900. “Henry Phillips, Jr.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society Memorial Volume 1: 26–35.
