An Early, Popular, Pictorial Statement of the Romance of Old Maps

Last week, I ran across a fun little thing from 1921—more on the then-new popularity of early maps for decorative purposes and, along with it, an interest in map history. It offers a naive view of map history, one filtered through the lens of the antiquarian marketplace, several years before dealers began to publish narratives of map history to entice and educate potential customers and expand their business. (For Karrow 2015, the first such work would be Louis Holman’s Old Maps and Their Makers [1925].)

The Map of Silk by Coulton Waugh

This pictorial map is from Women’s Wear, a trade journal for the rag trade, published in 1921. The organizers of a forthcoming exhibition on the history of silk had commissioned a pictorial map from the textile designer, cartoonist, painter, and commercial artist Coulton Waugh (1896–1973). Stephen Hornsby discussed Waugh as a pioneer of the genre of pictorial maps in the USA, which is where I encountered the map (Hornsby 2017, 14). This map of silk was one of Waugh’s first. Thinking about illustrating the map (as a modern equivalent of an “Afric map” with “elephants for want of towns”), I went looking for images and information. Waugh’s papers are now in the special collections department at Syracuse University, which has placed online images of the map of silk and of Waugh’s similar map of cotton from his clippings file.

Waugh’s work is very much of its time. Racist stereotypes abound. People, animals, and places are drawn in a faux naivete, a childishness that sought to emulate the childish iconography of early maps. There are windheads and “Parts Unknown”; a large compass rose-cum-title; the sea is as full of critters as the land, and the whole is covered in icons of non-modern travel and transportation.

Hornsby gave a precise reference to the journal—Women’s Wear 22, no. 30 (5 February 1921): 11 (full image at end of th epage)—so I looked it up to see it in context, care of Proquest, and found not only the map, but a short piece explaining it. Hornsby quotes from this, but it really is worth presenting in full:

Silk’s Romantic Realty [sic] Vies with Ancient Mapmaker’s Wierd [sic] Imagery

Central Exhibit at International Silk Show [n1] Traces Paths by Which This Fabric and Fibre Found its Way From Ancient China to Other Parts of World.

By M. D. C. Crawford. [n2]

Here is a map of the Roads of Silk, done in the spirit of romance and gaiety. The old mapmaker and the new fibre.

There was a time when the art of mapmaking was a highly imaginative occupation, and the draftsmen considered less the actual fact of continental outlines, positions of rivers and mountains than the general superstitions and weird tales that comprised at that time the science of geography.

The world was an island surrounded by the sea of darkness, at the outer fringe of which dwelt all the hobgoblins, demons and furies that the imagination could conjure up.

But a history without maps is an unintelligible jumble of names, and from Strabo’s time down to the last official map, changes that represent the applied science of the age have been recorded on maps and charts. However quaint the inaccuracies of the old maps may be, they show not only a progressive knowledge of fact, but an artistry that has been but little appreciated. We might with profit, in our more accurate maps of today, retain some of the gaiety, interest and splendid draftsmanship of the old calligraphers.

The roads of silk were the paths of romance, and yet to show them in our maps of today seems a slight concession to the gaiety and elegance of this fibre. But a map we must have. No historical exhibition of silk could be complete without some record of how fabric and fibre found its way from China to other parts of the world.

Under the direction of Stewart Culin [n3], who has been an enthusiastic student of all matters connected with silk, and also an ardent admirer of old maps, Coulton Waugh made a map of silk, and made it in the finest spirit of old maps. This map in color, rich in gold leaf, will be the central exhibit at the historic exhibition at the International Silk Show, and the black and white illustration above but lamely reflects the interest and beauty of the original.

One can have a mini field day with this text. The references to “Roads of Silk” plainly alludes to the Silk Road, the famous overland trade route from China through Central Asia to Persia and Turkey. The Silk Road is indicated on the map [n4], but it is neither labeled nor explained. Marine routes—the routes controlled and used in the present by Western merchants for hauling raw and finished silk around the world—are all labeled; the sting is taken out of the global-imperial economic project by having the sea routes in Asian waters sailed by junks, although Arab dhows might have been more appropriate, but the lie is revealed with the indication, off the Cape of Good Hope, of Vasco da Gama “open[ing] the sea route to India.” All the other labels are in the passive voice (“Here silk is brought to America”) or otherwise anonymized (“Here silk comes to Japan”). The only individual to be named and given agency is the the European explorer and founder of modern Western global trade networks.

Running throughout is a sense of historical change in mapping over time that seems relatively common in the post-World War I era: specifically, the progressive replacement of imagination and myth through experience and science with geographical fact. (Wright 1947 would later codify this sense of change, evident in his doctoral dissertation published in 1925, under the term, geosophy.) The simultaneous growth of interest in early maps as decorative elements adds a further dimension to this process, that of the declining art of maps and their ever more scientific nature. As Crawford wrote, the “old mapmaker” acquired “new fibre” (in the sense of substance, moral fiber, resolution, and firmness). The development of mapping from the ancients (“Strabo”) to the modern era of cartographic sophistication (“official maps”) was not expressed as “art to science” before World War I. Crawford’s essay stands as an early expression of the concept, as something in the air that would later be elaborated and explained by map scholars.

Hornsby (2017, 4–5) identified the influence of the highly decorative printed maps of the early modern era as an influence on the creation of pictorial maps, and further (46–50) noted how such maps were actively marketed as decorative works to be displayed. A major component of the popular maps that Hornsby reproduced from the 1920s and 1930s, and not only in his category of instructive maps, were analytical maps of the past, like Waugh’s map of silk, that purported to mimic early maps. Many depicted particular moments and places in the US or the US-global past, such as Waugh’s full-color 1922 map of the New York city region in 1609 when Henry Hudson entered the now eponymous river. A further point of connection, is that the rise of pictorial mapping was interwoven with the rise in the antiquarian map trade.

I must admit that the number of books and essays by Crawford and Culin from the 1920s and 1930s, listed in WorldCat, about the “philosophy of dress” and the history of clothing as an imperial/global phenomenon is thoroughly intriguing and could quite distract me if I were not already obsessed with maps and their history!

Should someone have the energy, and eventual access, there’s likely a nice little project in Crawford’s and Culin’s papers in Brooklyn about maps, history, and textiles. Who knows: perhaps Waugh’s silk map, with all its gold thread, still survives!

n1. International Silk Exposition, 1921. Catalog is Crawford (1921).

n2. Morris De Camp Crawford (1882–1949). “Research editor” for Women’s Wear. Worked extensively with Culin; his collections are at Brooklyn Museum of Art. According to the Brooklyn Museum, Crawford wrote The Heritage of Cotton (1924) and The History of Silk (1925), but I find only an obscure 1923 work in WorldCat.

n3. [Robert] Stewart Culin (1858–1929) was an ethnographer and curator with the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (1890–1903) and then with the Brooklyn Museum (of Art) in 1903–28. The Brooklyn Museum’s finding aid to Culin’s papers is full of interesting details: Culin worked closely with Crawford.

n4. There is also an overland route from China through Assam into South Asia, which does not, I think, represent a real trade corridor; my understanding of China-India trade was that it was either marine or an offshoot from the Silk Road passing back through the Khyber Pass into South Asia. I might well be wrong on this, though.

References

Crawford, M. D. C. 1921. Modern Silks: The First International Silk Exposition at the Grand Central Palace. New York: Joseph A. Judd Pub. Co.

———. 1923. The History of Silk and its Development: From 3500 B.C. to the Present Time, 1923 A.D. Cincinnati: John Shillito Co.

Holman, Louis A. 1925. Old Maps and Their Makers Considered from the Historical and Decorative Standpoints: A Survey of a Huge Subject in a Small Space. Boston: Charles E. Goodspeed & Co. Further editions appeared in 1926 and 1930.

Hornsby, Stephen J. 2017. Picturing America: The Golden Age of Pictorial Maps. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Karrow, Robert W., Jr. 2015. “Map Collecting in Canada and the United States.” In Cartography in the Twentieth Century, edited by Mark Monmonier, 245–48. Vol. 6 of The History of Cartography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wright, J. K. 1925. The Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades: A Study in the History of Medieval Science and Tradition in Western Europe. New York: American Geographical Society.

———. 1947. “Terrae Incognitae: The Place of the Imagination in Geography.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 37: 1–15. Reprinted in J. K. Wright, Human Nature in Geography: Fourteen Papers, 1925–1965 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 68–88.

The entire page from Women’s World: