Tag Archives: maps

August 29, 2011

New England Takes Shape

By daseger

While looking for an early map to illustrate the Gulf of Maine for my last post, it became increasingly clear to me how important Cape Cod was to early modern navigators and cartographers. It’s such a distinctive landmass, jutting, or curving, out into what was originally known as the “Western Ocean”; it’s no wonder the Pilgrims landed first on its tip, in present-day Provincetown. The more maps I looked at, the more it appeared to me that the Cape was absolutely central to the cartographic creation of New England as a region, though this might just be my eastern (or southern) bias. I assembled a chronological succession of early maps from the digital collections at the Fordham University Library, the Osher Map Library at the University of Southern Maine, and the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library to illustrate my point.

One of the earliest maps of the eastern coast of North America was drawn by the Italian cartographer Giralamo Ruscelli in 1561. Ruscelli’s Tierra Nueva is based on the discoveries of the French-sponsored explorers Giovanni di Verrazzano and Jacques Cartier, consequently the place-names are in French and Latin and the depiction of New England (called Nurumberg and later “Norumbega”) is extremely minimized and conjectural. There’s a small curved peninsula on the right-hand side of the map but as the island of “Terra Nova” (New World—Newfoundland) is just off of it, I doubt it is Cape Cod. For reference (you can zoom in on the map at the BPL), the place labelled “Angoulesme” at center right is roughly equivalent to New York City.

Norumbega in the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of Abraham Ortelius, 1570

Jumping forward several decades, New England begins to assume a recognizable shape, and gets its name, on the 1624 map of Captain John Smith, based on his explorations of a decade before. This map was first published just after Smith’s return to England, and was very influential in the Pilgrims’ planning. Here you see a very realistic Cape Cod (named “Cape James” for the King) and lots of English place-names, some of which stuck, most of which did not. “Cape Anna” did become Cape Ann, though Salem (or Beverly, I can’t tell) replaced Bristol and my home town of York did not retain its designation of “Boston”.

As there was constant competition for colonial territory in North America, French and Dutch maps also depict New England and its waters in detail. Dutch cartography was the most advanced in Europe in the seventeenth century, and Dutch mapmakers issued a succession of “Nova Anglia, Novum Belgium et Virginia” maps from the 1630s, including that of William Blaeu below. Despite its distinct orientation, Cape Cod (or Codd) is immediately recognizable, and it is equally prominent in two late seventeenth-century English maps. The last map below, published by John Seller in 1679, is entitled A Chart of the Sea Coasts of New England, New Jarsey, Virginia, Maryland & Carolina from Cape Hatteras to Cape Cod. European cartographers clearly had a grasp on southern New England by this time, but northern New England, most especially Maine, remained elusive.

In the eighteenth century, everything intensified: competition for empire, mapmaking technology, and settlement, consequently we see quite sophisticated political and navigational maps, like the detailed charts of the Atlantic coastline by the Swiss-born cartographer Joseph Frederick DesBarres, produced for his 4-volume atlas American Neptune (1777-1781). The marine galleries at the Peabody Essex Museum feature a blown-up version of the DesBarres charts, revealing their intricate detail much more effectively than is possible here.

By contrast, London publisher Carington Bowles’ “pocket map”, also issued in the Revolutionary era, emphasizes the Inhabited parts of New England (Library of Congress).

From Ruscelli to Russell. After the Revolution, New England endures as an assemblage of states rather than colonies. The John Russell map of 1795 illustrates the “Northern or New England” states of America, and the District of Maine, just prior to the boundary settlement between America and Great Britain.

And finally, a completely different view of the Cape, from a century later and the golden age of “bird’s eye” maps: looking southward from Boston.

2 Comments | tags: Antiques, maps, New England | posted in History

August 27, 2011

Calm before the Storm

By daseger

Despite the all-Irene coverage in the media, it was bright and sunny here in Salem yesterday, all calm before the storm. I took a bike ride around the city, and it was business as usual. I did not see a mass exodus of boats from the harbor, though one of my favorite annual events, the Antique & Classic Boat Festival at Hawthorne Cove Marina, was canceled along with lots of other weekend activities. The coming storm does look huge and destructive, but late summer hurricanes are generally not that much of a threat to the North Shore, as the entire Gulf of Maine is protected from southern storms (as opposed to nor‘easters) by the presence of Cape Cod. Even the New England Hurricane of 1938, the standard by which all other hurricanes are judged here, left the coast north of Boston relatively unscathed compared to the devastation in southern and western New England. Here is a late eighteenth-century Italian view of a very protected northern New England coast, from Grace Galleries:

Antonio Zatta, Atlante Novissimo, 1778

And here are some very random images of the last Friday in August in Salem, beginning with my garden. The white “David” phlox has been hanging on forever, but I expect the storm will bring it down a bit.

Boats in and out of the water at the Hawthorne Cove Marina, off Derby Street.

The arrival of the Salem Ferry from Boston. The Ferry’s Sunday schedule is canceled.

The beach at Juniper Point in the Willows.

I love this little shop, which has been the site of a succession of short-lived businesses. We’ve been waiting for this “amazing pizza” all summer!

The audience in the garden at the Salem Athenaeum, awaiting a production by Rebel Shakespeare. “The Tempest” was advertised, but we got “The Taming of the Shrew” instead, which was just fine. The players.

1 Comment | tags: Local Events, maps, Shakespeare, weather | posted in Salem

July 10, 2011

Map Rooms

By daseger

The phrase “Map Room” conjures up images of the headquarters of a strategic military command or a rare book library, but map bedrooms run in my family for at least several generations, from Great-Great Uncle Morris’s dark map-lined bedroom off the kitchen in the old Cape house of my mother’s family to the present-day bedrooms in my parents’ house in York Harbor and that of my brother and his partner in Rhinebeck, New York. I have dormer bedrooms on the third floor that are perfect candidates for a map room but have yet to get around to it: as a distant observer of the creation of these map rooms, I know that in both cases it was not an easy process!

First up is the York Harbor map room which is a second-floor corner bedroom wallpapered with maps by my mother and then carefully restored by my stepmother several decades later. My mother used standard National Geographic maps, yellow nautical charts with New England coastlines, and “historical” maps of Great Britain which she purchased by sending over her request and a blank check.

Now for my brother’s map room, another second-floor bedroom which has an interesting sloping ceiling, kind of the reverse of dormers. He too used National Geographic maps, along with city maps, State Department maps, and French and Italian road maps from the 1950s and 1960s. According to him there are tons of considerations you must take into account when making your map room: the size and shape of the map, whether it has a border, content, and process. He applied three coats of polyurethane after his placement was completed, sanding in between.

If you don’t want to bother with all that, you can just buy map wallpaper or decals, or blow up one map for a single wall as opposed to a whole room. You often see such examples in shelter magazines, like this room in a recent House Beautiful:

Attractive but obviously not as impressive as a custom map room. And now from the present and the attainable to the inaccessible past and future, a few fantastic map rooms: the sixteenth-century map room of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome and New York photographer Lori Nix‘s futuristic diorama of a map room gone feral.