Maritime Maps through Time: Navigating history’s great voyages

The text below is the excerpt of the book Historic Maritime Maps (ISBN: 9781683251002), written by Donald Wigal, published by Parkstone International.

Maps, even those dating from centuries ago, influence our daily lives. They are one of the things that are part of our daily environment. Throughout history, besides its utilitarian function, every single map symbolises the period of time in which it was created. We are often reminded of the romance of antique maritime maps as we see them displayed in museums, or reproductions of them framed on the walls of private houses or institutions.

In a Vermeer painting a map may be seen telling a story-within-a-story. In plays and films maps typically set the period. In fiction they may be called on to remind the reader of a world beyond the story’s setting. In Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, for example:

Had you followed Captain Ahab down into his cabin… you would have seen him go to a locker in the transom, and bringing out a large wrinkled roll of yellowish sea charts, spread them before him on his screwed-down table. Then seating himself before it, you would have seen him intently study the various lines and shading which there met his eye; and with slow but steady pencil trace additional courses over spaces that before were blank. At intervals, he would refer to piles of old logbooks beside him, wherein were set down the seasons and places in which, on various former voyages of various ships, Sperm Whales had been captured or seen.

A map indicates not only the location of places, it can also help us see the world as did the people of its day. Each map is therefore a priceless snapshot in the on-going album of human kind. This is especially true with antique maps, by which we can see the world through the eyes of our forebears.

While the map-maker’s vision might later prove to be inadequate, maybe even incorrect, the unique truth it expresses tells a story that might not be revealed in any other way.

It may well be said that each map-maker effectively traveled in his mind vicariously not only to the envisioned places but also to the future. Each was sure, along with the aging Pimen in the play Boris Godunov, that

A day will come when some laborious monk will bring to light my zealous, nameless toil, kindle, as I, his lamp, and from the parchment shaking the dust of ages, will transcribe my chronicles.

One such laborious monk was the fifteenth-century mapmaker Fra Mauro. He was certainly responsible for bringing to light the work of several other mapmakers. By doing so he helped make the transition from the Dark Ages to the beginning of the modern era (c. 1450).

Mauro was part of the generation that was at work during the very focus of these significant times, over thirty years before the famous voyage of Christopher Columbus to the New World in 1492…

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