New Found Lands: Maps in the History of Exploration

by Peter Whitfield

First Published in 1998. An exploration narrative can be a tale of adventure and endurance, a technical account of navigation and seamanship, or a political history of the overseas empires that were built up in the wake of the explorers.

In New Found Lands, Peter Whitfield takes a different approach. By focusing on the maps that the explorers themselves used, Whitfield reveals how the both the explorers and their patrons understood their expanding world and their place in it, what they were seeking and how they thought they could achieve it, and how they integrated new knowledge into their evolving world view.

The maps in New Found Lands present the geographical ideas of the time, making plain the power that came with increasing technical and geographical knowledge. They also serve as evocative and poignant reminders of the limited knowledge of these explorers. For up until very recent times, as these maps show, there have been areas of the world remaining to be explored and "new found lands" to discover.

This lavishly illustrated book progresses chronologically, starting with the explorers of the ancient world, covering the East, the New World, the Pacific, Australia and the Modern Era. It will enrich our understanding of the voyages of discovery undertaken over the past 2000 years and will delight any map or history lover. Also inlcludes 150 color and black and white maps.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Geography, Maps

200 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1998

Reviews

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book would have been good enough had it merely contained old maps and a discussion of the strange and uncertain progress of cartography over the centuries [1], but it ended up being even better than expected, largely because the author managed to address some important themes about exploration and the tension between the way that knowledge is passed down to others through becoming parts of maps and the larger body of geographic knowledge on the part of scholarly and bookish people who do not explore and the way that the knowledge is gained through painful and difficult exploration, almost always by people with mixed motives of money and glory as well as a desire to further knowledge and preserve secrets from others. These mixed motives, and the fact that some places did not have obvious profit potential and were therefore not on a high priority to explore, were all aspects of cartography that were thoughtfully presented by the author.

The book, as might be expected, is divided between text and books, and contains a lot of old books, divided both chronologically and regionally. Starting with exploration in ancient history, the authors then look at the lure of the East, specifically China, as being decisive in encouraging Europeans to travel, because while China was known, the way around the other side of the world was an unknown. The next three chapters look at the exploration of the new world, of the Pacific Islands and Australia, and the exploration of continents, particularly Africa, up to 1900, before containing a post-script on the contemporary quest for exploring mountains and even occasionally other planets. In about 200 pages the author makes it clear that mankind operates with a variety of motives when it comes to exploring, and that the limitations of our technology and of our logistical capacity makes a big difference in what we are able to do. Few explorers have been free of personal motives that colored the desire to explore, and aspects of patriotism have been important as well, as the desire to set one's flag on a piece of new found land and claim it for one's country is a lure that has affected exploration since time immemorial.

A few aspects of the maps are worthy of comment. Some cartographers carried on errors a long time, and the problem of longitude long bedeviled cartographers when it came to getting a good sense of relative location. Other areas, particularly island groups in the Pacific, long eluded explorers because the size of the ocean and the way that mariners dealt with it meant that certain routes were simply not taken, and the islands to be found there were just not seen by the travelers on that massive ocean. It is remarkable how long, for example, Oceania remained largely unexplored given the fact that Spanish and Portuguese sailors were exploring the area starting in the early 16th century. It is also remarkable than an inability to correctly estimate the circumference of the globe kept quests like the Northeast and Northwest Passages, which will likely depend on ice-free oceans, going long after they were simply impractical, to the death and harm to many sailors. The fact that some early maps, in the early 15th century, were more accurate than later maps for centuries, underscores the fact that there was truth that was lost as well as truth gained through the passage of time, a lesson we all ought to consider lest we be overwhelmed by a feeling of chronological snobbery.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...

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[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

How exploration and wars of conquest were reflected in the evolution of maps over the centuries.