Honest ignorance
Maggie's Farm linked to this brief history of world maps. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the series is not how knowledge expanded with the advent of sailing ships and navigational instruments, but the degree to which each mapmaker honestly confronted the boundaries of his knowledge. There is a strong tendency to fill in the territory beyond the edge of human knowledge with "what must be there." For a long time, even after mapmakers were forced to confront the existence of the New World, they insisted on portraying it as a long, narrow island. Explorers had brought back the news that the new continent was quite narrow at the isthmus of Panama, and old habits of mind imposed the belief for quite some time that the whole landmass was almost that narrow. Only quite late in the series do we see a map that allows the known territory to bleed away into a neutral unknown in the distance rather than to make completely unfounded guesses about what might be found there.
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6 comments:
It's not only the mapmakers. An iteration of Virginia's (IIRC) charter sets its western boundary as the shore of the Pacific ocean. That's consistent with a view that the whole of North America was long and narrow.
Of course that could be an outcome of mapmakers' published beliefs.
Eric Hines
"As for Libya, we know it to be washed on all sides by the sea, except where it is attached to Asia. This discovery was first made by Necos, the Egyptian king, who on desisting from the canal which he had begun between the Nile and the Arabian gulf [i.e., the Red Sea], sent to sea a number of ships manned by Phoenicians, with orders to make for the Pillars of Hercules, and return to Egypt through them, and by the Mediterranean. The Phoenicians took their departure from Egypt by way of the Erythraean sea, and so sailed into the southern ocean. When autumn came, they went ashore, wherever they might happen to be, and having sown a tract of land with corn, waited until the grain was fit to cut. Having reaped it, they again set sail; and thus it came to pass that two whole years went by, and it was not till the third year that they doubled the Pillars of Hercules, and made good their voyage home. On their return, they declared - I for my part do not believe them, but perhaps others may - that in sailing round Libya they had the sun upon their right hand. In this way was the extent of Libya first discovered."
-Herodotus, c. 430 BC.
Could the Phoenicians have sailed around the continent of Africa in two years? It doesn't seem implausible. The sun on their right hand? Depending on the time of day, that would be true on both the southbound and northbound legs.
Eric Hines
You get a lot of information by sailing around land masses, but it leaves questions unanswered by solid fact that are then filled in by the mind's unacknowledged conjectures. There's a lot of "Oh, it must be" and "Oh, it couldn't be," when a better attitude would be "What if" or "Let's see."
PS, but how fascinating if they really circumnavigated Africa way back then!
" ... but the degree to which each mapmaker honestly confronted the boundaries of his knowledge."
An honesty that I'd like to see in our ruling class.
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