Tag: exploration

Two Map Books from the Bodleian

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Images of two books showing their jacket covers: Kris Butler's Drink Maps in Victorian Britain (left) and Debbie Hall's Adventures in Maps (right).

Some coverage of two map books published earlier this year by Bodleian Library. First, Atlas Obscura interviews Kris Butler, whose Drink Maps in Victorian Britain looks at how the temperance movement used maps to fight excessive alcohol consumption. They were, apparently, directly inspired by John Snow’s cholera map. From the interview:

Drink maps were specific to targeting the U.K. magistrates, to try to get these lawmakers to stop granting licenses. So it had a really specific legislative, regulatory goal. […] In one case [in 1882, in the borough of Over Darwen in Lancashire, England], after looking at a drink map, the magistrates decided to close half of the places to buy alcohol. Their rationale was, even if we close half of these, you still don’t have to walk more than two minutes to buy another beer, which I just think is the most beautiful rationale I’ve ever read. It was challenged, and it held up on appeal.

Meanwhile, the Bodleian’s own Map Room Blog (no relation) points to Debbie Hall’s Adventures in Maps, a book about maps and travel and exploration. From the book listing: “The twenty intriguing journeys and routes featured in this book range from distances of a few miles to great adventures across land, sea, air and space. Some describe the route that a traveller followed, some are the results of exploration and others were made to show future travellers the way to go, accompanied by useful and sometimes very beautiful maps.” I reviewed Debbie Hall’s Treasures from the Map Room (also no relation) in 2016.

Adventures in Maps by Debbie Hall: Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop
Drink Maps in Victorian Britain by Kris Butler: Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop

See also: Map Books of 2024.

A History of the Harvard University Institute of Geographical Exploration

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

“The Harvard University Institute of Geographical Exploration was one of the first and most well-wrought private institutions in aerial photography in the first half of the 20th century. Its short institutional life at Harvard was replete with materials, stories and scandal, and its pieces remain scattered today throughout the Harvard Archives and Libraries system and beyond.” Ana Luiza Nicolae tracks down what records, photos and other materials can still be found on the Harvard campus that once belonged to Alexander H. Rice’s HUIGE, which was not closely affiliated with Harvard’s geography department but was shut down at roughly the same time.

La Pérouse’s Expeditions

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Library of Congress scan of Buache de Neuville's map of the northern Pacific Ocean, 1785.
Jean-Nicolas Buache de Neuville, “Carte de l’Océan où sont tracées les différentes routes des navigateurs au tour du monde,” 1785. Map in 3 sheets. Library of Congress.

The Library of Congress’s Carissa Pastuch has a blog post about the Pacific Ocean expeditions of Jean-François de Galaup La Pérouse, and the maps that resulted from them—including the above map by Buache de Neuville, made in 1785 so that Louis XVI could follow La Pérouse’s progress.

Upcoming Conference: Mapping the Pacific

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Taking place on 25 and 26 August 2021 in Sydney, Australia, Mapping the Pacific will be a hybrid (in-person and streamed) conference that will explore “the traditional wayfinding knowledge of the Pacific community, European exploration and the mapping of the Pacific from the early modern era through to the 19th century.” Registration is not yet open.

Update 17 Nov 2021: Conference postponed to March 2022.

Mapping the Pacific Coast in the Age of Exploration: An Exhibition

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Opening today at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History: The Kingdom of California: Mapping the Pacific Coast in the Age of Exploration, an exhibition of 16th- to 19th-century maps and books from the museums own rare book collection, the Map and Atlas Museum of La Jolla and the Santa Barbara Mission Archive-Library. The Santa Maria Times notes the inclusion of maps showing California as an island as well as 19th-century coastal charts. Admission included with museum admission, runs until 2 January 2019. [WMS]

A History of Canada in Ten Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The odd thing about A History of Canada in Ten Maps, the new book by Adam Shoalts out today from Allen Lane, is that it’s almost entirely uncontaminated by maps. It’s not just because the electronic review copy I received (via Netgalley) contained no images of the maps being referred to in the text: I expect that will be rectified in the published version; if nothing else I was able to find an online version of each map (a gallery follows below). It’s that in the text itself the maps are quite literally an afterthought.

It turns out that A History of Canada in Ten Maps isn’t really a book about maps, or mapmaking, but exploration. For Shoalts, the maps are the evidentiary traces of the stories he really wants to tell. In nine of the ten cases, those are stories of Canada’s exploration; in the tenth, a key battle of the War of 1812. Combined, those stories form a mosaic tale of nation-building, one that supports the kind of national mythmaking that the previous government in Canada was particularly fond of.

Continue reading “A History of Canada in Ten Maps” →

The Last Unmapped Places

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Lois Parshley’s essay on the last unmapped, mysterious places—Greenlandic fjords, the slums of Haiti, the ocean’s depths, black holes in space—is a long read worth reading. Originally published last month as “Here Be Dragons: Finding the Blank Spaces in a Well-Mapped World” in the Virginia Quarterly Review, it’s been reprinted by the Guardian, in an edited, tighter version, as “Faultlines, Black Holes and Glaciers: Mapping Uncharted Territories.”