• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

NEW FOUND LANDS NJE~V JF(Q)lU[NJD) JLA NJD)§ MAPS IN THE HISTORY OF EXPLORATION PETER WHITFIELD ~ l Routledge ~ ~ Taylor & Fnmds Croup NEW YORK Half-title: The Cape of Good Hope, by Seller, 1675. The most famous maritime landmark in the world, later the base for British expansion into Southern Africa. The British Library Maps C.8.b. 13, f.25. Title page: Waldseemiiller's World Map, 1507. Schloss Wolfegg © Peter Whitfield 1998 Published in the United States of America and Canada in 1998 by Routledge 711 ThirdAvenue, New York, NY 10017, USA First published in 1998 by The British Library Routledge is an imprint ofthe Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Whitfield, Peter, Dr. New found lands: maps in the history of exploration I Peter Whitfield. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-92026-4 (alk. paper) 1. Discoveries in geography. 2. Cartography-History. I. Title. 081.W47 1998 97-47767 910'.9-dc21 CIP Typeset by Bexhill Phototypesetters ISBN 13: 978-0-415-92026-1 (hbk) CONTENTS Preface page vi 1 EXPLORATION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD page 1 2 THE LURE OF THE EAST, 1250-1550 page 22 3 THE NEW WORLD, 1490-1630 page 53 4 THE PACIFIC AND AUSTRALIA, 1520-1800 page 90 5 THE CONTINENTS EXPLORED, 1500-1900 page 127 Postscript EXPLORATION IN THE MODERN WORLD page 185 Bibliographical Note page 197 Index page 198 JP> lR.lE lF A <ClE LEGENDS ARE REQUIRED TO BE beautiful rather than true. The history of exploration is full of legends which, while they are not untrue, contain only a part of the truth. They are legends of men challenging the unknown, displaying heroism and endurance, or meeting death in arctic seas and burning deserts. These stories present the human dimension of exploration, but they are not the whole truth, for the story of the physical journey is only the beginning. In reality European exp­ loration, during what we may call its classic period between 1500 and 1900, is the story of the growth of knowledge, geographical knowledge that was recorded, centralized and used as never before. But discovery is a relative and misleading term, and perhaps the most persistent and subtle legend is that exploration and discovery are synonymous, whereas the lands or routes discovered were of course inhabited or known for centuries before Europeans arrived. 'Newly-discovered' routes across the Sahara, or through the Rockies invariably represented knowledge simply borrowed from native peoples. The discoverer of a certain land, or the route to it, may have been simply the first to record his discovery and incorporate it within the body of European knowledge. In order to do this he had obviously to find his way home again, therefore the first duty of an explorer was to survive; but the rivers and mountains which challenged his powers of endurance were already home to indige­ nous peoples, therefore the term Encounter is a more accurate one than Discovery. Sometimes native knowledge was absolutely vital to the Europeans as they explored unknown territory. This was the case with the Aztec woman known as Dona Marina who served Cortes in the role of interpreter, or Sacagawea who was Lewis and Clark's ambassador to the Indians. The vital difference between the protagonists in these historic encounters was that knowledge once acquired by Europeans was recorded in map form and became part of a conscious world geography. Men in Seville, Amsterdam or London had access to knowledge of Mexico, India, Canada or Brazil, while the native peoples knew only their own immediate environment. The Europeans' true discovery was that all this knowledge could be merged into an accurate map of the world, which in turn became a vital tool of political power. The breakthrough which enabled them to achieve this synthesis was their mastery of the sea, for the great navigators linked the oceans and the continents in a way that was unprecedented in world history, and they arrived in their new-found lands as the possessors of unique skills and revolutionary knowledge. Historically, this explosion of knowledge must be seen in the context of the intellectual revolution which we call the Renaissance, but the immediate motives of the explorers were overwhelmingly worldly - rapacious, mercenary, military and imperial. The purely intellectual impact of the new discoveries was less than we might imagine: we search in vain for evidence that philosophers, artists, poets or theologians were quick to understand the importance of what was happening. Not until the later sixteenth century do writers such as Cam6es, Diaz, Montaigne and Marlowe reflect on a new world and the European ascendancy over it. The history of exploration can be told in several ways: it can be told as a narrative of adventure and endurance, concentrating on the human drama in the exploratory journeys; there is the technical history of navigation, or that of the complex commercial networks which brought the world's goods to Europe; there is the political history of the overseas empires which the European powers built up in the wake of the explorers; each one of these is an enormous field of study. This book concentrates on [vi} PREFACE the intellectual context of exploration: how did explorers and their patrons understand their expand­ ing world and their place in it? What were they really seeking, and how did they believe they could achieve it? How did they balance the known and the unknown in their minds? Historical maps are vitally important in answering these questions, and this book attempts to display the geographical ideas of the explorers themselves, through the maps which they used or the new maps which they made. Many excellent books on exploration have been written using modern maps to trace the voy­ ages and journeys, but this can be unsatisfactory for several reasons. First, modern maps obviously show a modern view of the world, clear, precise and complete, not the explorer's own view with its blank spaces and uncertainties. Second, we often do not know the exact routes of the early explorers, and the paths so clearly traced on the map may be misleading. And third, contemporary maps often show features which contemporaries believed were there - legendary cities, islands or straits - whose supposed existence was crucial to the explorers' whole course of action. Thus the maps of a given historical period serve as a revealing index to contemporary knowledge, belief and motivation. This book briefly describes more than two hundred explorers and their achievements; but this number could easily be doubled or trebled, and a true account of any one of these journeys could fill a book in its own right. In the historiography of exploration the landmarks have been firmly estab­ lished over many years, from the first printed editions of Marco Polo, the letters of Columbus and Cortes, the narratives collected by Ramusio and Hakluyt, the official records of Tasman or Cook, through to the personal accounts of later figures such as Livingstone or Nansen: all these enable us to reconstruct the historical events which lay behind the emerging world map. It is a striking fact that some of the most important explorers - Marco Polo, Columbus, Magellan - have left us no direct legacy of maps, and the historian must therefore examine the contemporary map record in order to trace the footprints or the seaways of the explorers. This book is a highly compressed account, but I have tried always to set these journeys within their wider cultural context, for the geographical quest had always a motive and an aftermath, and it is impossible to avoid the larger perspectives opened by the study of exploration. The narrative of who first landed on a certain coast, or first passed through a certain strait, is only a beginning, not an end. We must ask why they were there, who sent them, what did they believe they had found, and above all, what was the impact of their journey? In short, I have tried to discern the spirit in which the European explorers set out on each new quest, and my central conclusion is that that spirit has evolved to reflect the various phases of European culture during the last five centuries. The European overseas adventure began as an aggressive search for wealth enforced by military power and rational­ ized as a crusade. This phase was succeeded by one in which the forging of trade networks was paramount, often leading to colonization; and finally by a phase of recognizably scientific exploration. The legacy of this process, for better or worse, has been to spread European culture, and especially European economic systems, throughout the world. By the year 1900, European power, direct or indirect, was dominant over eighty-five per cent of the earth's surface. Only the afterglow of this exploration culture now remains in the romantic search for escape and for wilderness, in which exploration has become a subjective, aesthetic experience. The knowledge which the early navigators sought was hard-edged, mercenary and political in its application, and perhaps the greatest fallacy in writing the history of exploration would be to read back our post-romantic quest for the unknown into the lives of the ambitious expedition commanders of sixteenth-century Spain or England. Yet these ruthless, practical navigators and fighters brought about a revolution in knowledge. Did the motivation of the explorer really matter? What part did any individual really play in what was a global process? If da Gama had not sailed for India in 1497, or Magellan for the Pacific in 1519, another man would soon have done so, for exploration, perhaps like technology in our own time, had acquired a momentum of its own that was impersonal and unstoppable.

Load more

  30

Copy Link