How strange beasts and myths found their way onto early maps.
By Jeffrey S. Murray
Old Maps, especially those produced in the 16th and 17th centuries when cartography was coming of age, are often filled with delightful images of the natural world. For modern-day viewers, some appear incredibly fanciful because interspersed with fairly realistic depictions of wildlife are sea monsters, dragons, gigantic beavers and other imagined creatures. While they may appear to be mere eccentricities from the past, they actually provide a unique window into the perceptions of early cartographers and Europe's dawning understanding of "new" continents.
Cartographers who mapped the New World were faced with huge areas of terra incognita, and had to fill the blank spaces and communicate an impression of the landscape. "The less familiar the country, the more blank spaces there were to be filled and the greater the need to convey its characteristic features by means of drawings," wrote the late Leo Bagrow, one of Europe's most respected scholars of early maps, in his History of Cartography. Their solution was to fill in the gaps in their masterpieces with drawings of plants and animals, going beyond strict mapmaking to provide a more rounded portrait of the terrain.
Few cartographers saw first-hand the regions they were mapping, or its flora and fauna: only the more fortunate had access to dried skins or, on rare occasion, to a live animal. They had to rely mostly on written travelogues and second-hand accounts, which explains their many errors. Their erratic sense of scale -- beavers were often portrayed as large as bears -- makes the drawings seem like unstudied afterthoughts. Details were uncertain: hence an opossum might appear with its pouch up around its shoulders rather than between its hips. Nor could they always place their animals in the proper setting: alligators appeared in the wilds of Lake Superior. They had insufficient information to map the species' distribution: the illustrations were probably meant more as symbols to mark a species' presence. The symbolic effect is strengthened by the static, unlifelike posture of many of the animals.
Europe's early mapmakers thought nothing of using other people's information and ornamentation and passing it off as their own. Since copyright protection usually lasted no longer than 10 years, it was easier for publishers to copy than to create new images. Further, early cartographers were first of all businessmen who had to keep their costs down and their sales up: new designs could be a financial risk in a business with slim profit margins. So, while they tried to incorporate the newest geographical discoveries, they were less likely to experiment with the ornamentation.
Even the famous British mapmaker Herman Moll is known to have copied many of his designs. His 1715 vignette of a beaver colony hard at work building a dam was copied from a piece first published by the Frenchman Nicolas de Fer some 17 years earlier. Then Moll himself was plagiarized when his beaver scene was copied over and over again for more than half a century, well after people realized that beavers did not have the human attributes shown in the drawing
Cartographers over-used some species and ignored others, showing a marked preference for larger mammals, followed by a few birds and reptiles. To look at some of the maps, one might think the North American forest was populated only by deer, bear, beaver, muskrat and fox. Wilma George, formerly a zoologist at Oxford, argues that this is because these animals were the ones most often noted in explorers' journals, and further, that "the abundant large animals provided a more striking contrast with home than insects and snails which must, however, have been much in evidence."
But George's argument fails to explain why some species of large animals were hardly ever drawn on maps. The North American bison, for example, never became a cartographer's favourite despite its abundance and uniqueness to the region. Could it be that mapmakers were merely interested in showing species that had an obvious economic importance to Europe? Bison had no value to Europeans until the early 19th century, when mapmakers no longer drew wildlife. Even when bison do make an appearance, as in Johann Baptist Homann's 1697 map of the Mississippi, the animal appears more like a docile milk cow than a wild beast of the Plains.
By the early 17th century, terra incognita was shrinking and cartographers had to make room on their maps for masses of new geographical information. They gradually moved their depictions of nature into outer, decorative borders. And they began using symbols to portray abstract themes, such as the changing of the seasons, and the classical Greek belief that all matter is composed of four elements--earth, fire, water and air. To illustrate such abstract subjects, cartographers turned to classical mythology for visual metaphors. It is not unusual to find Bacchus, god of wine, representing one of the seasons by his involvement in grape collecting or wine making, both autumn activities in Europe; or to find Neptune, god of the seas, sitting in a chariot made of seashells and representing one of the four elements.
By this time Europeans had come to associate certain animals with specific regions, so that wildlife became part of the iconography of the continents. Europe was always portrayed as a young woman in regal attire, bearing a sceptre, crown or globe, and accompanied by a horse or bull. Asia, in turban and flowing robes, was usually attended by a camel or elephant; while America's maiden wore a feather headdress and was accompanied by an alligator. This was the most elaborate and highly decorative period of map ornamentation, and invoked the elegance of classical Rome along the borders of maps.
For all the fanciful images used, however, many of the illustrations convey a landscape very similar to that of Europe, emphasizing trees and animals, such as deer and bear, that were common in Europe. Such maps would have created a comforting impression of familiarity, rather than strangeness and hostility, for potential investors and settlers. Since these images of foreign lands were framed within a European engraving style, and generally contained no hint of a native presence. terra incognita appears as virgin territory waiting to be partitioned and filled. Many geographers now believe the cartographers sought unconsciously to create such an impression, to make the New World more inviting for development. "Such maps are ethnocentric images, and part of the apparatus of cultural colonialism" writes geographer Brian Harley, "... [essentially] a licence for the appropriation of the territory depicted:"
The borders of Champlain's 1612 map of New France show a panorama of Canada's wealth: beaver, fox, deer and other animals hint at the potential of the fur trade, while the abundant sea life, forests and fruits hold out the promise of other rich resources. His map is an attempt -- whether he meant it consciously or not -- to garnish support for future expeditions and investment. "The map makes a political statement," points out map collector Joe Armstrong. "It is not the work of a bureaucrat but of a skillful psychologist, promoter and politician." No matter how they are interpreted, there is no denying that the maps produced during Europe's great age of exploration are magnificent: a unique blend of science and art that has seldom been equalled. However, you will rarely see these masterpieces in museums and galleries, because art historians write them off as unimportant and scientists see them only as quaint relics. But, if given half a chance, early maps can be very revealing about the world in which they were created.
