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ABSTRACTS OF PAPERS TO BE DELIVERED AT Recent ethnographically informed research has begun to counter the traditional “Great Men” histories and overly simplified narratives of colonial expansion that have dominated studies of early European – Polynesian cross-cultural encounters. Yet the sub-cultural divisions of the European side of the early encounters are yet to be fully explored. Important social and cultural divisions separated ships’ officers and scientists from the seamen and marines with whom they traveled. While these divisions have been recognized for some time by maritime historians, there has been little assessment of their implications for understanding early European - Polynesian encounters. Officers and common sailors perceived different opportunities in their interaction with Polynesians, and attempted to shape their encounters with native populations in different ways. Evidence of this differentiated experience is to be found in the journals of European captains, from Bougainville to Bligh. They reveal the officers’ concerns with their crews’ enculturation and their attempts to control the men’s exchanges with the islanders. Effectively, the early contact period witnessed the evolution of a new social group with a distinctive sub-culture: seamen of the South Pacific. First contacts in the Pacific cannot be fully understood without recognizing the social heterogeneity of the European crews, and the importance of a new group of boundary crossers: men whose place was neither fully in the European nor the Polynesian world.
The Reverend Thomas Wakefield: Thomas Wakefield (1836-1901) served as a Methodist missionary in Kenya for twenty-seven years (1861-1888), a most remarkable feat in itself. “Bwana
Wakfili” was not as famous as David Livingstone or Ludwig Krapf, but in the English geographical establishment, he was highly regarded as an explorer and collector of geographical data. He was awarded a Murchison Grant by the
R.G.S. in 1882, and was named a Fellow of the society in 1889. During his years in East Africa, Wakefield counted Sir John Kirk (longtime English Consul in Zanzibar), Sir Henry Bartle
Frere, Sir James Augustus Grant (John Speke’s companion on the Nile), Keith Johnston, Jr., and E.G. Ravenstein as his friends, and he provided important aid to explorer Joseph Thomson when he made his journey to Masailand and Kilimanjaro in 1883. When the African Exploration Fund was established by the Royal Geographical Society in the late 1870s, its representative, James Grant, asked Wakefield to lead one of its planned forays into the interior. Because of his concern for the welfare of his mission at Ribe (near Mombasa), Wakefield declined the commission. Further, Wakefield made four trips from Ribe into unknown parts of eastern Kenya inhabited by intransigent Galla tribesmen, and each was the subject of an article published by the Royal Geographical Society in its journals. Wakefield is best known for his method of gathering geographical data from members of native trading caravans, which resulted in compiling his “unique”
A Map Showing the Routes of Some Native Caravans from the Coast to the Interior of Eastern
Africa… (1870). During his “recreations,” he avidly collected botanical specimens for Kew Gardens in England, or he translated the bible into local native languages, particularly Kiswahili. This paper gives special attention to the map of native caravan routes, which was prepared and drafted by cartographer Keith Johnston, Jr. How E.G. Ravenstein utilized Wakefield’s geographical notes to produce his famous map of East Africa will also be discussed. Choosing the images to go with a new The new Companion emerged out of a collaboration between The Newberry Library and Oxford University Press, with most of the images drawn from the library' holdings. This evening we shall look at some of these images, and think about what they mean for the theme of exploration. Discovering Maps The experience of over forty years spent working with early maps - first as a dealer and then as a librarian - will be drawn upon in considering different meanings of the word 'discovery'. For example, some maps of note were 'discovered' in the course of normal trading activities, while others had been in their library resting-places for centuries. Progressions in Imagery: This paper explores the changing cartographic imagery of Amerindians during the Age of Discovery. Studying the maps created during the early European exploration and colonization of the Americas provides an opportunity to chart the progression of knowledge about the indigenous people encountered. As Europeans explored the New World, they used maps to validate both their accurate and unfounded beliefs about Indians. They also used cartographic imagery to record their changing understanding of these peoples and the land. Identifying and studying the changing imagery and its placement on the cartography of the New World provides an alternative approach to traditional historic studies. A Utopian Mirage: In October 1875 German Lutheran missionaries set out from South Australia, driving horses, cattle and sheep northwest toward the Finke River in remote Central Australia. They hoped conversion to Christianity and settlement in self-sufficient farming communities could save “uncorrupted” Aborigines from extinction. Beset by heat and drought, the 18-month trek of 800 miles tested endurance. An advance party climbed a hill overlooking the 200-square-mile Mission lease in July 1876 and decided to stay. With both natural resources and heathens apparently abundant there, a missionary utopia seemed within grasp. “He Who Pays the Piper Calls the Tune”: While everyone readily accepts that sponsors of exploratory expeditions gave specific instructions to their leaders about where to go and what to look for, few of us think about how sponsors shaped the
written record of that exploration. Yet in almost every instance, expedition leaders were required to keep a daily journal of their activities and to submit such journals to the sponsor upon the journey’s end. Because these records often became the basis of public book-length narratives of an expedition, which in turn gave shape to how the public was conditioned to view new lands and peoples, the sponsor’s instructions about journal-keeping played a surprisingly influential role in how a society came to look upon unfamiliar places. John Dee and the Mystical Imperialism of Elizabethan England John Dee, the noted Elizabethan scholar and magus, had a profound effect on those Elizabethan Americans (A. L.
Rowse). This paper attempts to investigate Dee’s importance in the overall imagining of the English explorers of the mid to late sixteenth century. “Hic est vera forma
moderna:” Henricus Martellus Germanus was a cartographer, assumed to be German, active in Florence in the last quarter of the 15th century and closely associated with Francesco
Rosselli. He produced several editions of Ptolemy, a large wall map now at Yale University, and five editions of Christopher Buondelmonti’s Book of Islands of the Archipelago. Buondelmonti’s work, which dates from 1420, was an illustrated catalog of the islands of the Aegean Sea.
Martellus, in successive versions of the book, rewrote the descriptions and added islands from the rest of the world, as well as sea charts and tabulae modernae from recent editions of Ptolemy. He also included a world map that showed, among other features, the progress of the Portuguese down the west African coast. The paper will analyze some of the changes in successive editions and relate them to the state of cartography on the eve of Columbus’s voyage. Modelling early nautical charts with empirical map projections Two distinct models of nautical chart preceded, in Europe, the adoption of the Mercator projection as a navigational tool: the portolan chart, used in the Mediterranean, Black Sea and coastal European waters probably from the 13th century on, and the Atlantic chart, which evolved from the first as a result of the introduction of the navigational astronomy, and was used for more than two centuries until the Mercator model was fully adopted in the 18th century. Little is known about the origin of the portolan chart and the techniques used in its construction. From the various theories suggested in the literature, seem to prevail those asserting that it was developed by Genovese and Majorcan pilots during the 13th century and that its construction was based on the magnetic directions and estimated distances observed by the pilots at sea. On the contrary, it is well established that the Atlantic nautical charts developed by the Portuguese in the last quarter of the 15th century were constructed on the basis of observed latitudes, magnetic directions and estimated distances obtained at sea, which were transferred directly onto the plane as if the Earth were flat. This is clearly documented in written historical sources, notwithstanding the theory of the so-called “plattes carrées” has managed to survive until our days and continue to be cited in some literature. Exploration and description of Chateau Bay, Labrador, 1000-1830 A.D. Chateau Bay, with its well known basaltic pillars perched high above the ocean, is a site of historic importance. Possibly first seen by the Vikings (ca 1000 A.D.), the landmark was certainly known to Breton fishermen and Basque whalers in the 16th century. Cartier was directed by the Court of St. Malo (1533) to seek it and steer past it in his first voyage. "Chasteaux" appeared on maps of Mercator (from 1569) and Ortelius (from 1570). Fortification at some elevated vantage point was recommended by the Bristol entrepreneur Anthony Parkhurst, in order to protect English fishermen in the harbor below. After a lull of two centuries, a preliminary hydrographic survey was made by Lieut. David Rogers, of the Royal Artillery (1760), and a more detailed survey prepared by Capt. James Cook, R.N. (1764). On the mainland nearby, a fort was finally built (1766), following the recommendation of the Governor, Sir Hugh Palliser, but it lasted for 20 years only. Then the columns were observed and briefly compared with those of The Giant's Causeway, Ireland and Fingal's Cave, Scotland, by Lieut. Edward Chappell, R.N. (1818). But, by this time, Chateau Bay was well known to European traders. Nine years later the two basaltic islands at the entrance to the bay were examined by Capt. Charles Campbell, a Scottish veteran of the Peninsular War. His was one of the first detailed descriptions (1829) of columnar basalt in the Americas. The three spurts of activity (1000- 1010?, 1530 -1580, 1760-1830) had been prompted by dreams of imperialism and wealth, but impeded by "poor press" in Europe and hoards of voracious mosquitoes along the Labrador coast, as well as inclement weather and prevalent lawlessness (piracy and theft) in the Strait of Belle Isle. The Little-Known Vesconte Maggiolo MS World Map of 1504 The little-known Vesconte Maggiolo manuscript world map of 1504, housed in the Biblioteca Federiciana in
Fano, Italy, provides important clues for determining the dates of other manuscript world maps of the early sixteenth century and for a better understanding of the transmission of information among the makers of these early maps. A Re-Examination of the
Antilia Question A large, rectangular island looms out in the Atlantic on a series of fifteenth-century maps - the mysterious
Antilia, sometimes also known as the "Isle of the Seven Cities". At times, it is accompanied by a second isle of similar shape, an isle with the fearful name of
Satanazes. These diminutive cartographic entities have generated no small share of academic debate: are they the whim of an early cartographer? Are they representations based on the reports of medieval navigators venturing out into the western reaches of the Atlantic? Are they evidence of a pre-Columbian European landfall in America? “Thou by thine Art dost so Anatomize”: William Petty, Surgeon-General and later Surveyor-General to the Cromwellian Army in Ireland, was a pioneer in the fields of medicine, cartography, and political economy. For Petty, each of these fields was linked by a common methodology: that of the still-youthful field of anatomy. Petty was not the first to link anatomy to cartography, Sir John Davies having commended the anatomical character of John Speed’s maps of Ireland in 1611. Ruysch, Waldseemüller, and the Mapping of America: 1507-2007 2007 marks the 500th anniversary of three maps significant to the early history of the mapping of the Americas: the Johannes Ruysch world map and the Martin Waldseemüller globe gores and wall maps. For nearly 400 years, the Ruysch map was believed to be the first printed map to depict the Americas; the Waldseemüller maps, when they became known to the modern world, superseded Ruysch's map by only months. The Waldseemüller maps are the first maps to use the name America and the first to depict the Western Hemisphere. All three maps have problematic printing histories, are based on questionable sources, and scholars cannot agree on how to date their various states. This paper will take a new, comparative look at these significant yet controversial maps within the context of current scholarship. Arthur Schott: A Civilian Surveyor on the U.S.-Mexico Boundary The United States Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, known for its exploration of the trans-Mississippi West, surveyed and mapped the boundary between the United States and Mexico in the years 1849 to 1857. Major William H. Emory and the Topographical Engineers he commanded have long been recognized for their accomplishments in the survey. Yet civilian employees of the U.S. Boundary Commission far outnumbered the soldier-engineers, and they have remained obscure. This paper will investigate the work of civilian surveyor Arthur Schott. He is best known as an artist who illustrated the Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey and he is also noticed for his natural history collections and scientific essays in the Report, but he remains little known for his principal assignment on the U.S. Boundary Commission, the survey and mapping of the boundary. Schott made important contributions to the surveys and maps as well as the final Report. Arthur Schott’s career on the U.S. Boundary Commission in both field and office will shed light on the role of civilians in the U.S.-Mexico boundary survey. Enlightenment Maps and the “Noble Savage” While a good deal has been written by scholars and others about images and statements referencing the peoples of the New World and their cultures, especially cannibalism, on the European cartography of discovery, exploration, and conquest of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, comparatively little has been said with regard to the references to the transformed-Indian-into-“noble savage” on the Enlightenment maps of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Firstly, this paper will discuss this evolution of the Indian from savage to noble savage on the maps of the Americas through the 1700’s. At the same time, it will consider some comparable allusions on maps of Africa to sub-Saharan natives and their cultures as well as ancient peoples such as Germans, Celts, Britons, Slavs, and others on the Enlightenment cartography of historic Europe. Finally, this visual definition of the noble savage will be aligned with the theoretical characterization of the philosophers of the Age to better comprehend the understanding of these distant peoples held not only by the intellectual elites of the Enlightenment, but also by those of the general public who were still often illiterate but nevertheless viewed the maps of distant places. In the process, this presentation too will underscore again the value of cartographic sources to historical research and to the enrichment of our discernment of past socio-cultural, political-economic, and intellectual developments. Discovering maps and texts anew: the world before Empire The presentation will be about the recent history of discovery and cartography as it applies to the early modern European expansion in the world, reflecting upon contemporaries’ views and the maps and charts they drew and our subsequent historical, literary and cultural constructions borne of national and other pre-conceptions and theories. The discussion will also explore the need to understand the texts and maps anew. The commonly held views, for example, that texts and mapping tended inexorably to prevision the ultimate establishment of Empire (although some did) or that the manuscript always was ‘old technology’ and had been made for ultimate production as a printed book, map or atlas is explored. |
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