A Gift to Canada Speed's 1662 Map of the Americas

Library and Archives Canada recently tweeted this:

In 1967, the British government gave a number of rare books to the National Library of Canada. This copy of a 1662 edition of John Speed’s A Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World was among the items: https://t.co/uHDILRoWAC pic.twitter.com/WkGplkxXaS

— LibraryArchiveCanada (@LibraryArchives) July 3, 2018

It's a link to a fascinating map of the Americas from 1662. The link in the tweet above brings you to an image of the map which can be zoomed in on, to a point. The image is here:

 The map is fascinating. The known regions are packed with detail and there are place names that strike the modern viewer as strange. For example, Bermuda is listed as "now called the Summer Isles" and the south-west United States is listed as "New Granada".

The map also has such geographic oddities, such as the island of California, the connection between Greenland and the mainland of the continent, and the strange shape of Hudson's Bay, to name a few. The map also has, what seems to me, to be a strange omission. Though the map notes the location of "Canada" there is no mention of "New France". Perhaps that name was not commonly used, but there's nothing to even indicate that Canada was a French possession.

The map itself has some beautiful detail. The top of the border has miniature plans of important cities such as Mexico and Cartagena.

 









The sides of the map are bordered by miniatures of native peoples of the various places shown on the map. See, for example, this Greenlander and Virginian.

Doing a bit of digging, I came across this website that provides a bit more information on this map. It seems that even though this map (and others in the Atlas) is attributed to Speed, as the cartographer, this is apparently actually a Dutch map that Speed simply "anglicized". Indeed, the style of including miniatures in the border is a Dutch invention known as "cartes à figures". This copying may explain why many of the miniature city plans at the top of the map are not of English colonies, despite this map appearing in an English atlas.

The map is quite beautiful and interesting. I'm not sure if the national archives would allow the public to view it, but it's an important piece of history that shows a snapshot of Canada from around 350 years ago. It's a marvelous piece. Oh, and it has sea monsters!

Exceedingly Rare Aztec Map

Thanks to National Geographic, I came across this story about a map that is as much archaeology as it is geography.

The map is called the Codex Quetzalecatzin, was recently acquired by the U.S. Library of congress and is one of fewer than 100 Mezoamerican maps that predate the year 1600. In other words, it's an extremely rare, Aztec map from sometime between 1570 and 1595. 

Image of the Codex Quetzalecatzin frm the U.S. Library of Congress

The map shows the family tree and land holdings of an Aztec family and "...covers an area that runs from just north of Mexico City to just below Puebla, roughly 100 miles away to the southeast". 

It contains both Aztec imagery as well as clear Spanish influences, not least the Spanish writing on the map. It appears to represent some of the earliest contact between the indigenous people of Mexico and Europeans. 

From looking at it, what strikes me is that it barely looks like a map at all. It looks more like a drawing of a landscape, or what we may call a "view", than a map. To the layperson like me, it also seems to have a strange scale and it is not immediately clear that it represents such a vast area. 

It is beautiful though, with vibrant colours and images such as this snippet: 

The U.S. Library of Congress has at least one other map like the Codex Quetzalecatzin. It's called the The Oztoticpac lands map, and though it has no doubt been the subject of extensive study, I cannot find very much about it online.

This one is even older than the Codex Quetzalecatzin and dates to around 1540. It's described as a "litigation map", relating to a property dispute. Some detail on it from The Library of Congress reads:

 The Oztoticpac Lands Map is an Aztec pictorial document with Nahuatl writing drawn for a court case surrounding the Oztoticpac estate within the city of Texcoco around 1540. The document, written on amatl paper, involves the land ownership of the Aztec ruler Chichimecatecotl, who was executed by Spanish officials in 1539. It is not clear from surviving information who won the case. Most of the document consists of black-and-red line drawings showing fields, houses, palaces, trees, and measured plots of land. In the lower left, twenty trees that have been grafted with European fruit stock in a local orchard are shown. These include apples, quinces, pears, grapes, and pomegranates.

Here's an image with a better look:

There are some fascinating details on this map, some of which probably require a better historical and cultural knowledge to understand, but which to the layperson, are interesting and fun to look at.

For example, the map contains images of various plants. The quote above explains what they are, but some of the images are so curious. For example, in the image of the plant below, whose disembodied hands are those, and why are they there at all? Whose disembodied heads are these and, what's this man doing all alone on this plot of land? These seem to be more than just decorative, and when considering that this map was used in a court case, one has to imagine that they are meant to reflect a certain ownership of a particular area shown on the map.

One reason I love antique maps is because they represent a snapshot of what a place was like at a specific moment in time. These maps do that, and then some. There are not just about what places looked like, but they tell us about who lived there and how they lived. This is more than you would get from your average antique map. It's why, as I wrote above, that maps like this fall into the category of archaeology. They help us understand how people who are long gone structured their lives and societies. They're windows into history and a pleasure to look at.

Add it to the Wishlist: 1714 Map of North America

I enjoy looking at websites that showcase antiquarian maps and follow accounts of that type, as well as map vendors on Twitter. As a result, I often come across maps that I think would be so wonderful to have in my collection if only I could find or afford them.

Since maps like that make me mappy, I thought my mappy place would be a great place to keep a running wish-list and explain what it is about certain maps that I love.

Today's wishlist map is this beauty of North America from 1714 that I found on mapmania:

There's so much great stuff going on in this map, but first, here's the little I could learn about it, thanks to this always great source, there's a good deal of information available. This map comes from an atlas meant to show recent and new long voyages of European discovery in different parts of the world. The language on the map is French, but the publisher, Pierre Van der Aa, is Dutch and was working in Leiden. Apparently, many of the other maps in the Atlas are similarly beautiful, featuring elaborate cartouches with titles.

I want to point out a few things about this map that I love and that piques my interest in it.

First, I love that it's incomplete. The map is virtually blank to the west of the Mississippi and north of what would today probably be Texas. The Arctic is unexplored, it appears that Greenland is attached to the North American mainland and California may or may not be an island.

Greenland 

Is California connected to anything?

I also love how political boundaries are drawn on this map. European spheres of influence dominate. There is Canada/New France, which extends to the Southern United States and as far west as the Mississippi. Pre-Seven Years War, New England is hemmed in by the Appalachians, with the French on the other side, and there appear to be a number of polities that I had originally thought were all Spanish. This map identifies them separate: Florida, New Mexico, New Spain and California are all distinct from one another. I admit to being surprised by this and not knowing the history of these regions well enough to understand the distinctions.

Under each of these European polities, however, are the identification of First Nations groups that lived in these areas. For example, there are regions listed as being dominated by the Illinois, the Outaouais and that 'the Apaches are powerful to the west of here'.

Powerful Apaches to the west

 There are a few other things I love about this map. Other than the beauty of the cartouche, and the identification of certain routes of exploration by great navigators, the map has a couple of elements I find somehow whimsical. My favorites are the annotations that in some places there is floating vegetation, though, not as bad as in other places on the same map. This was probably important for navigators to know,

and interesting for Europeans to learn about, but to me, today, it seems somehow comical.

This map definitely makes the wishlist!