Novus Orbis: Images of the New World
part 3
|
|
||
|
Wright published “A Chart of the World on Mercator’s
Projection” in 1600 based on his projection of a
globe engraved by the English globe maker Emery Molyneux
in 1592. It was the first map to use Wright’s improvements
on Mercator’s projection. This map, sometimes called
the “Wright-Molyneux Map,” also was published
in The Principall Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques
and Discoveries of the English Nation (London, 1598-1600),
compiled by Richard Hakluyt. Considered a sixteenth-century
cartographic landmark, the Wright-Molyneux Map is alluded
to in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, when Maria
says teasingly of Malvolio: “He does smile his face
into more lynes, than is in the new Mappe, with the augmentation
of the Indies.”
Unlike many contemporary maps and charts that represented
the often fantastic speculations of their makers, Wright’s
“Chart of the World” offers a minimum of detail
and leaves areas blank wherever geographic information
was lacking. These undefined areas are especially evident
along Wright’s coastlines. Wright’s map is also
one of the earliest maps to use the name “Virginia.”
|
|
||
|
From May 1607 to the fall of 1609, Captain John Smith
was a leader of the Jamestown colony, the first permanent
English settlement in North America. Smith explored
the area zealously and described Virginia in vivid detail
in letters and reports. His map was published as a separate
publication in 1612 and appeared in numerous histories
of the seventeenth century, including his own Generall
Historie of Virginia. Ten different states of the
map are known of which this is the ninth state. Historian
Coolie Verner has called this map “the most important
map to appear in print during the period of early settlement
and the one map of Virginia that has had the greatest
influence upon mapmaking for a longer period of time.”
The map is oriented with north to the right, a common
practice of the day. It labels many of the landmarks
of tidewater Virginia including Jamestown, Chesapeack
Bay, Cape Charles, Cape Henry and five rivers that feed
into the Bay: Powhatan (James), Chickahomania, Patawomech
(Potomac), Patuxent, and Sasquehanough (Susquehanna).
 |
||
|
In his published description of the Virginia colony,
Farrer writes:
from the head of James River above the falls . . . will
be found like rivers issuing into a south sea or a west
sea, on the other side of those hills, as there is on
this side, where they run from west down to the east sea
after a course of one hundred and fifty miles.
 |
||
|
London-born John Farrer was a member of the Royal Council
of the Virginia Company. An active investor in and promoter
of the colony of Virginia, he supported the establishment
of the silkworm industry in the colony. Farrer named his
daughter after the colony “so that speaking unto
her, looking upon her, or hearing others call her by name,
he might think upon both at once.” Virginia Farrer
continued her father’s efforts to introduce the silk
culture into Virginia. She also was the compiler of the
later versions of her father’s map.
Farrer’s map depicts an astonishingly narrow North
American continent in which the Pacific Ocean appears
just beyond the Appalachian Mountains. The legend on the
map notes that a ten-day march westward from the head
of the James River will bring the traveler to rivers that
run into the “Indian Seas.” Another remarkable
feature of the Farrer map is the Northwest Passage, which
is formed by a river to the north that connects the Hudson
River to the “Sea of China and the Indies.”
Farrer’s map labels many place names in Virginia
and Maryland for the first time.
The map shown here is a fourth state (c.1652) in which
Falls in the title is changed to read Hills.
In this version of the map a narrow isthmus blocks the
Northwest Passage. Virginia Farrer compiled this version
of the map.
 |
|
|
Nicolas Sanson was the outstanding French cartographer
of the mid- to late-seventeenth century and is considered
the founder of the French school of cartography. “Amérique
Septentrionale” was first published in 1650. The
French used this map in their explorations of the interior
of North America.
“Amérique Septentrionale” is the first
map to show all five Great Lakes. The most notable feature
of this map is its representation of California as an
island. Although sixteenth-century maps had typically
shown lower California as a peninsula, around 1620 a newly-found
chart and reports from Spanish missionaries and explorers
led many cartographers to represent California as an island.
The region continued to appear as an island on maps of
America through the early eighteenth century (see Moll’s
“Map of North America to ye Newest and most Exact
observations” [link to Moll map]). Finally, in 1747,
King Ferdinand of Spain issued a royal decree that California
was not an island.
The 1669 version of “Amérique Septentrionale”
shown here differs from the original 1650 map in its detail
of the Gulf of California and its labeling of oceans.