Mapping Travel

More often than not, readers of travel narratives expect to find one or several maps showing, as English privateer William Dampier wrote, “the Course of the Voyage,” that is, where the author-traveler went and, implicitly, a sense of what was seen and experienced. Dampier used a now-common cartographic strategy to tell the story from beginning to end as well as focus on significant places on the way by marking the journey with a “pricked” line. Despite the lines’ popularity and present ubiquity, the complex intellectual processes of considering travel as a continuum rather than as a series of stops and of plotting a journey onto a map have attracted relatively little academic attention. Drawing on a thousand years of European travel writing and map-making, this work suggests that in fifteenth-century Europe, maps joined text-based itineraries and on-the-spot directions to guide travelers and accompany reports of land and sea travel. Called in subsequent centuries “route maps,” “itinerary maps,” and “travel maps,” often interchangeably, what are defined here as journey maps added lines of travel. Since their emergence, most journey maps have taken one of two forms: itinerary maps, which connected stages with line segments, and route maps, which tracked unbroken lines between endpoints. In the seventeenth century, journey mapping conventions were codified and incorporated into travel writing and other genres that represented individual travel. With each succeeding generation, journey maps have become increasingly common and complex, responding to changes in forms of transportation, such as air and motor car “flight” and print technology, especially the advent of multi-color printing.

Mapping Mountains

Mountains appear in the oldest known maps, yet their representation has proven a notoriously difficult challenge for map makers. This essay surveys the broad history of relief representation in cartography with an emphasis on the allegorical, commercial and political uses of mapping mountains. After an initial overview and critique of the traditional historiography and development of techniques of relief representation, the essay features four clusters of mountain mapping emphases. These include visions of mountains as paradise, the mountain as site of colonial and postcolonial encounter, the development of elevation profiles and panoramas, and mountains as mass-marketed touristed itineraries.

Maps of the Moon

When does a depiction of the moon become a lunar map? This essay addresses this question from theoretical and historical standpoints. It is argued that moon maps are of crucial importance to the history of cartography, for they challenge established notions of what is a map, how it functions, what are its purposes, and what kind of power it embodies and performs. The work also shows how terrestrial cartography has shaped the history of lunar mapping since the seventeenth century, through visual and nomenclature conventions, the cultural currency of maps, mapmakers’ social standing, and data-gathering and projection practices. It further demonstrates that lunar cartography has also been organized by an internal principle that is born of the fundamental problem of how to create static map spaces capable of representing a referent that is constantly changing to our eyes, as is the visible face of the moon. It is suggested that moon maps may be classed on three broad categories, according to the kinds of solutions for this representational problem that have been devised over the last 400 years.

Maps in Newspapers

Maps in newspapers generated many discussions among cartographers and geographers working from different approaches and theoretical backgrounds. This work examines these maps from a historiographical as well as a historical perspective. It considers three main questions, namely how maps in the press should be conceptualized, how cartographic images in newspapers have been studied, and how these images changed over time. In order to provide a perspective on the origins, development, and impact of war maps in the press, this work will explore maps representing three geopolitical conflicts for Brazilian audiences: The War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870), World War II (1939–1945) and the War on Drugs in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas (1994–2010). By exploring these war maps, specific cartographic practices used in this genre as well as the connections that this mode has with other types of map production and consumption will be identified.