0 Map of the Week 5-28-2012: Blaeu’s 1654 Atlas of Scotland

Map of the “Yle of Skie,” from Blaeu’s 1654 Atlas of Scotland.  “Continue now, look at Scotland, and enjoy a feast for the eyes.”  So writes Joan Blaeu in his 'Greetings to the Reader,' part of the preliminary material to his 1654 Atlas novus. (from introductory remarks by Charles Withers, Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Edinburgh, on Blaeu’s Atlas of Scotland, at http://maps.nls.uk/atlas/blaeu/)

Joan Blaeu (1599-1673) was a very esteemed and prolific Amsterdam mapmaker working in the Map-mad 17^th century.  He received the prestigious appointment as mapmaker to the Dutch East India Company, which was responsible for opening up new markets for trade throughout the world, and for whom accurate maps would obviously have been of paramount importance.  But Blaeu’s maps were also tremendously beautiful and desirable in their own right as objets d’art.  For instance, in many of Vermeer’s wonderful paintings of everyday life in the Netherlands, a framed Blaeu map appears in a position of prominence in the interiors of the homes that are the setting for his paintings, indicating their cherished status as symbols of wealth and discernment of the occupants, but showing also how popularized and widely-owned his maps had become with the middle and upper classes.  (See an example of this at http://geographer-notes.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/geography-beach-books.html)

The Atlas was, for all intents and purposes, more than 70 years in the making, and for an interesting history of how the Atlas came to be, and all the obstacles, both technical and bureaucratic, impeding its eventual publication, see the excellent account at http://maps.nls.uk/atlas/blaeu/history_behind_publication.html When completed, Volume V of Blaeu’s Atlas Novus contained 49 maps of Scotland and 6 of Ireland.  It was published originally with all text in Latin, and later editions were translated into Dutch, French, Spanish, and other languages, but never into English! 

Blaeu’s Atlas of Scotland and Ireland was a quite a ground-breaking work.  It used the latest in scientific geographic knowledge (and all that word implied in the 17^th century – Geography was really a catch-word for most of the knowledge about the world) combined with “Chorography.”  What is Chorography, you might well ask?  It is a term which has gone out of service, for the most part, but perhaps will enjoy something of a comeback with the recent interest in more qualitative techniques and mixed-method approaches in Geography, all of which have seen a resurgence in recent years.  

From the good Prof. Withers again: “Geography in the age of Pont and Blaeu was not as we would now understand the term.  Early modern geographical knowledge drew upon natural history, astrology, even natural magic and was apparent in various forms: descriptive geography, mathematical geography - of importance to navigators and in mapmaking - and, notably, chorography.  Chorography as understood and practised in the late 16th and 17th centuries drew upon the work of the classical authority Claudius Ptolemaeus (known as Ptolemy).  In Book I of his eight-book Geographia, Ptolemy distinguished between geography and chorography:  'The purpose of Geography is to represent the unity and continuity of the known world in its true nature and location ... The aim of Chorography is to represent only a part'.  Crucially, chorography was a qualitative art: 'Chorography therefore concentrates more on the quality of places than on their quantity or scale, aware that it should use all means to sketch the true form or likeness of places and not so much their correspondence, measure or disposition amongst themselves or with the heavens or with the whole of the world' (cited in Withers 2001a, 140-1).

The intellectual worlds of the late 16th and 17th centuries recognised and used this crucial distinction between geography, the accurate representation of the whole known world, and chorography, the pictorial and written 'impression' of local areas and places, without regard to what we moderns would take to be quantitative accuracy.  Chorography appealed to late Renaissance intellectual ideas of order.  But it did more than that.  For three reasons, 'The chorographic/geographic distinction was perhaps the most important classifying scheme for maps in 16th-century Europe' (Mundy 1996, 5). It was a means to classify existing maps.  It created a standard dual model of how space should in future be mapped. It corresponded to models of the political state: 'indeed, its contours followed the fault lines between regionalism and nationalism' (Mundy 1996, 5-6).  The distinction was widely employed throughout the late 16th and 17th centuries in Europe, Japan, Russia and the Portuguese and Spanish colonies of the New World (Withers 2001a). In England in this period - and, after 1603, in the newly created geographical entity that was 'Great Britain' - chorography was 'the most wide-ranging of the geographical arts, in that it provided the specific detail to make concrete the other general branches of geography' (Cormack 1997, 163).

Chorography's textual features took several forms.  Description of places and regions very commonly incorporated topographical poetry: 'self-fashioning' through versifying was a commonplace in Elizabethan accounts of land and nation (Greenblatt 1980; Helgerson 1986, 1992; Klein 2001).  Chorography emphasised the local and did so historically and geographically: with reference, for example, to the genealogies of families of note, and to the remarkable features in a place.  This attention to place had political significance in that matters of a local nature - notable families, distinctive natural features, historical antiquities and such like - were made to appear part of that place, fixed over time as well as in space. Because of this, chorography - with geography one of what the late Renaissance and early modern worlds understood as the 'eyes of history' - was closely associated with chronology (the other 'eye'), with antiquarianism and with emerging ideas of public utility and of national identity (Cormack 1991a, 1997; Mayhew 2001).

In sum, chorography was a particular form of geographical knowledge, rooted in certain intellectual traditions and apparent in words and maps, that was concerned to capture the 'impression' of a region or place.  It was, textually, an essentially conservative form of regional description in as much as it assumed the continued authority of the monarchy and nobility.  That fact in turn is why chorographical writing often lauds leading families and prominent individuals of note: patronage, patriotism and the political well-being of the realm revealed through its regional portrayal were closely associated elements in Blaeu's world.” (From: “A Vision of Scotland,” by Prof. Charles Withers, at http://maps.nls.uk/atlas/blaeu/vision_of_scotland.html)

Works Cited in above Excerpt:  

Cormack, L. B., Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

Greenblatt, S., Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)

Helgerson, R., 'The Land Speaks: Cartography, Chorography and Subversion in Renaissance England', Representations16 (1986), 51-85

Klein, B., Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001)

Mayhew, R., 'Geography, Print Culture and the Renaissance: "The Road Less Travelled By", History of European Ideas 27 (2001), 349-369

Mundy, B. E., The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaçiones Geograficas(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

Withers, C. W. J., 'Pont in Context: Chorography, Mapmaking and National Identity in the Late Sixteenth Century', in The Nation Survey'd: essays on late sixteenth-century Scotland as depicted by Timothy Pont edited by Ian C. Cunningham (East Linton, 2001a), 139-154.

“The nether ward of Clyds-dail and Glasco” Zoom-able map at: http://maps.nls.uk/atlas/blaeu/page.cfm?id=96 

On this map of the Lower Clyde region, north is the right side of the map, “Glasgva” is shown in the top middle as a major city (in red) on the banks of the River Clyde, with the location of “The Mills” below it (to the east of the city, but in this orientation it looks like to the south since we are used to north being on top rather than to the side.  Likewise, the River Clyde runs east-west in reality, but in this map appears to run north-south, until we get used to the idea that north is on the right).  Many of the place names on this map still exist on modern maps, with little change, such as Parthick (now Partick), Blyths Wood (now Blythswood), Burrowsfield (now Barrowfield), Carntynenoc (now Carntyne), etc. 

            The map of the Isle of Skye (Yle of Skia) shown above at the top of this post – zoom-able version at http://maps.nls.uk/atlas/blaeu/view/?id=119 - depicts the largest of the islands in the Inner Hebrides.  In old Norse, the name for Skye is skuy (misty isle), skýey or skuyö (isle of cloud).  In Gaelic the name for the Isle of Skye, Ellan Skiannach, means “the winged island,” possibly owing to its many notches and indentations and peninsulas radiating out from the central core of mountains, making it look like feathered wings.  
              "This Ile is callit Ellan Skiannach in Irish, that is to say in Inglish the wyngit Ile, be reason it has mony wyngis and pointis lyand furth fra it, throw the dividing of thir foirsaid Lochis."  English translation from Lowland Scots: This isle is called Ellan Skiannach in Gaelic, that is to say in English, "The Winged Isle", by reason of its many wings and points that come from it, through dividing of the land by the aforesaid lochs.  From Munro, D. (1818) Description of the Western Isles of Scotland called Hybrides, by Mr. Donald Munro, High Dean of the Isles, who travelled through most of them in the year 1549. Miscellanea Scotica, Quoted in Murray (1966) p. 146. 

Near the center of Blaeu’s map of Skye (above and to the left of the town of Portry – now Portree) is Loch Cholumbkil (Colum Cille - Saint Columba’s lake), and in the middle of the loch is a little island with an abbey, and on the little island is a little lake.  The loch appears to be at the end of a river which leads from a sea loch, Loch Snizort (love that name – SNIZORT!).  Unfortunately, I can find no trace of this lake within an island on a lake within an island on a current map of Skye, but I will look for it when I am in Skye next week and perhaps find it on large-scale OS maps. 

I did find some notes about Loch Columbkille in an old journal written in 1883 by a well-known (at the time) travel writer and painter who spent 6 months in the Hebrides, so apparently the Loch and its islet were still extant 130 years ago or so. 

“This fine sea-loch divides itself into an inner and an outer harbour, perfectly land-locked. The former is still known to the older fishers as Loch Columbkille, being one of the spots specially dedicated to St. Columba, who was patron saint of half of Skye, and many neighbouring isles. The other half was the property of that St. Maelruhba to whom, as we have seen, were offered such strange sacrifices.' At the further end of the loch, close to the sheriff's house, is a small rocky islet, where a few fragments of building, and traces of old graves are all that now remain to mark the spot where once stood the oldest monastic building in Scotland; so, at least, say certain of our wisest antiquarians.”

From In the Hebrides, (Chapter 13) by C. F. Gordon Cumming (1883) at http://www.electricscotland.com/history/hebrides/index.htm

Kilt Rock is a spectacular rock formation south of Staffin on the Trotternish peninsula, Skye. The 200ft-high cliffs take their name from the basalt columns which resemble the folds of a kilt. There is also a waterfall where the River Mealt plunges 200 feet straight down to the shore.

The ruins of Duntulm Castle lie approximately six miles north of Uig on the Trotternish peninsula of Skye. Duntulm was previously the site of an iron age broch, a Pictish fort and a Viking stronghold. The castle changed hands several times between the Macleods and the MacDonalds but it was secured as a MacDonald stronghold after the Battle of Trotternish in the 16th century.  Written in Gaelic as Dun Tuilm, the meaning is often debated but it is most commonly translated as 'fort of the green grassy headland'. The castle was abandoned by the MacDonalds in favour of Monkstadt in the 1730s and stone from the castle was used in building the new house.  This left the castle in a dangerous state of disrepair and it has only recently been stabilized.

These illustrations were taken from 'In the Hebrides', by CF Gordon Cumming (1883) at http://www.ambaile.org.uk/en/item/item_illustration.jsp?item_id=21491

            This will be my last blog posting for a little while.  I have to take a short hiatus for the next few weeks from all extracurricular activities.  I will be in Skye for the long Jubilee weekend, I need to finish my research and prepare and give five presentations in June based on my work here over the past 6 months, and finally I will then have to organize myself and pack up my life here in order to return home to NYC.  I hope to be back to full blogging power in mid-summer, and I’m sure will have a good backlog of interesting tid-bits of geographica to share. 

Detail: Map of the Week 5-28-2012: Blaeu’s 1654 Atlas of Scotland

0 Map of the Week 4-23-2012:Ultima Thule

Map of the Island of Thule, (spelled “Tile” on this map) in Scotland, by Olaus Magnus, 1539.  This is a detail of his much larger Carta Marina – a map of the ocean showing the Northern Lands.  For many years, it was commonly thought that Thule was one of the Hebrides Islands in Scotland.  Notice the whales (Balena, Orca) in the foreground.  The Hebrides are still famous for their whales, seals, and sea otters, and there are lots of opportunities for whale-watching boat trips.

            As far as we know, there is no actual place called the Isle of Thule.  It was a captivating idea, started in long ago times, perhaps 2,500 years ago or more, and carried on up to the recent past (maybe until about 300 years ago).  Thule represents a kind of a mythical place at the ends of the earth, as these ends were imagined at the time.  But by about 300 years ago, most of the earth had been explored, documented, “discovered,” or whatever other word you would like to use that is not pejoratively implying that the indigenous people of those parts hadn’t already “discovered” their own lands.  And so, over the years, the location of the Isle of Thule kept slipping further and further north, as more and more lands became known to western civilization.  Originally thought to be one of the Hebrides off the western coast of Scotland, it was later thought to be one of the Orkneys to the north of Scotland’s mainland, or one of the Faroe Islands to the northwest, or even Iceland or Greenland, further and further north and west. But for centuries, really up until the early 1700's, there were parts of the Scottish Highlands and the Western Isles that were "less well known to the people of England than either of the Indies," and writers still wondered whether the Hebrides were the mystical lands of Ultima Thule, according to Rachel Hewitt's account in Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey, (2010).  Ultima Thule was described as "those regions in which there was no longer any proper land nor sea nor air, but a sort of mixture of all three of the consistency of a jelly-fish in which one can neither walk not sail, holding everything together."

Eventually, it was realized that Thule didn’t exist, similar to the discarded concept of a huge southern continent linking southern Africa and Asia, and making the Indian Ocean an inland sea, as popularized by Aristotle and Ptolmey.  Terra Australis Incognita, the “unknown lands of the south,” supposedly balanced the land mass of the northern hemisphere, (so that the earth wouldn’t wobble off its axis!) and this imaginary southern continent appeared on maps and globes well into the 18^th century.  (Obviously, the 14^th century Portuguese explorers who rounded the southern cape of Africa proved that idea wrong, but the name of the imaginary continent was still used as the derivation for Australia’s name, when it was finally “discovered.”)  However, the idea of Terra Australis was not totally discredited until 1814!  But I digress (what else is new.)

An expanded view of the detail above, showing “Insulae Hebrides” (the Hebrides Islands), "Farne" (the Faroes, or perhaps Fair Isle - where Fair Isle sweaters come from), Hetlandia (the Shetlands), and Orcades (the Orkneys). 

In about 320 BC, a Greek geographer, explorer, mathematician, and scientist, called Pytheas, decided to travel from the Mediterranean to “Ultima Thule,” the frozen lands of the most northerly parts of the earth - the ends of the earth, in other words - the ultimate limits of the world, hitherto unknown from direct experience of the Greeks, although they knew of it indirectly from their trade in important commodities such as tin.  Pytheas set out, therefore, to make a journey of scientific discovery, undoubtedly coupled with commercial purposes of opening up the tin market to Greek traders, and to cut out the middle man.  He was most probably the first person from the Greek civilization to visit Scotland; certainly he was the first to record his journey there and pass along his knowledge in written form. 

During the course of his travels, Pytheas also took measurements, estimating the length and breadth of Britain, as well as its coastline circumference, and was accurate to within 400 km of its true distance, (coastline of 7,900 km vs. 7,580 km).  He also calculated latitude along the way with a gnomon (a straight stick stuck into the ground at a 90^o angle, with which to measure the length of its own shadow at high noon in proportion to the length of the gnomon, similar to Eratosthenes’ method of calculating the circumference of the Earth in Egypt 100 years later). 

In his book “On the Ocean,” Pytheas entered the latitudes of the places where he used the gnomon, so we have a fair idea of where his travels took him, even though the place names have changed since his day (and in any event he was trying to transcribe local Celtic place names -and sometimes older ones -  into Greek, probably through an illiterate translator, a method that guarantees less than accurate results).  He was, apparently, the first Greek to use the term Britannia for the British Isles.  The last place he seems to have taken a latitude reading was in the Hebrides, which he believed to be the Island of Thule. 

I got interested in Pytheas and the idea of Ultima Thule after reading a book called “The Faded Map: Lost Kingdoms of Scotland,” by Alistair Moffat, where Pytheas and his travels to Thule were mentioned in relation to Pytheas’ interpretation of the standing stones and stone circles in the Hebrides, which would have been already about 2,500 years old at the time of Pytheas’ visit in the fourth century BC, and the civilization of the original builders was long gone or absorbed into subsequent Hebridean populations and cultures.  Pytheas wrote:

“In the region beyond the land of the Celts there lies in the ocean an island no smaller than Sicily.  This island is situated in the north and is inhabited by the Hyperboreans, who are called by that name because their home is beyond the point where the north wind blows.  Worship [of Apollo, by which he probably meant there was a moon cult] takes place in a notable temple which is adorned with many votive offerings and is spherical in shape….They also say that the moon, as viewed from this island, appears to be but a little distance above the earth…The account is also given that the god visits the island every 19 years…At the time of this appearance of the god he both plays on the lyre and dances continuously the night through from the vernal equinox until the rising of the Pleiades.” 

The moon does run through an 18.61-year cycle at a particular northern latitude – in the Hebrides – which fits with a lunar cycle of approximately 19 years as reported by Pytheas.  In about 2,900 BC on the Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides, prehistoric farmers came together to build a spectacular temple – the standing stones at Callanish.  This, then, was likely the spherical temple of the Hyperboeans that Pytheas described with such obvious fascination.  From the elliptical circle of outer stones, alignments run from the magnificent inner group to very particular seasonal configurations of the heavens.  One aims directly at the southern moonset, another to the sunset at the equinox, and a third to where the Pleiades first appear.  But every 18.61 years, the moon appears to those standing in the circle at Callanish to move along the rim of the horizon, “dancing continuously the night through.”  The transit can be seen on clear nights between the spring equinox and the first of May.  May 1^st, of course, was an important day in the Celtic year – Beltane - the spring celebration of fertility and awakening from the death of winter, dimly retained in our modern holiday traditions as May Day.  Patrick Ashmore, who excavated at Calanais (the Gaelic form of the place name Callanish) in the early 1980s, writes in his book Calanais: The Standing Stones, (2002): “The most attractive explanation [to the question of why Calanais was built]… is that every 18.6 years, the moon skims especially low over the southern hills.  It seems to dance along them, like a great god visiting the earth.  Knowledge and prediction of this heavenly event gave earthly authority to those who watched the skies.”

Even though the people who raised the stones and worshipped there were replaced by other cultures through the intervening millennia, when Pytheas landed in the Hebrides he probably heard stories about the Old People who built the henge.  The then-current occupants of the Hebrides during Pytheas’ visit still used the stones as a temple, laid down offerings, and although they honored different gods, the impressive stone circle still had powers and importance in the lives of the people, even through all the periods of profound cultural change. 

           

Carta Marina, 1539, by Olaus Magnus.  It is a very large map, about 5 ½ feet wide by 4 feet high.  “Magnus' map of the great northland was a fantastic achievement, its stature undeterred by the liberal use of sea monsters and other fanciful creatures.  The detail in the coastlines (as well as the depiction of currents between Iceland and the Faroe Islands) as well as interior features make these among the most detailed maps of the north yet printed in the 16th century.”  From http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2009/01/jf-ptak-3.html

The National Geographic website has a nice interactive version of this map, (albeit a smaller map, published in 1572) where you can zoom into all the sea monsters and other illustrations.  http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0512/feature3/zoomify/index.html  Some of the detail is a bit different than on the larger map, and of course, all colored maps in those days were hand-colored, since color printing was not available yet, so each map would have been slightly different-looking in terms of coloration, as well. 

Olaus Magnus, whose actual name was Olof Månsson, was a Swedish geographer and cartographer in the early 16^th century.  He was also a Catholic archbishop, at an unfortunate time for him in Swedish history - during the Protestant Reformation.  As a consequence of his failure to renounce his faith and become Lutheran, he forfeited all his lands and was exiled, and subsequently spent most of his life in Rome, which is where the “Carta Marina” was created and published.  This map, this Carta Marina of the Northern Lands in 1539, is an incredible work.  The sea monsters and other drawings illustrating the map and giving it context are amongst the best I have seen, and apparently many of them were innovative at the time, and much copied by later cartographers.  I came across a nice write-up about this on a blog, comparing some of his monsters with other cartographers of roughly the same time period, and demonstrating that Magnus’ monsters were created first, in most cases, and the others copied his drawings, embellishing them further in some cases, and in others simplifying them.  http://johnmckay.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/monsters-of-islandia.html

This was a creature called “the Island Fish.”  It was apparently so huge that sailors would mistake its back, cresting out of the ocean, for an island, and sometimes disembark on it.  This little group of mariners has not only disembarked on the fish’s back, but has actually started to make a fire on it!  Imagine their surprise when the beast decides to re-submerge! 

In the interests of full disclosure, I recently returned from a little spring break holiday in the Hebrides, and I can attest to the fact that they truly are a world apart, and a pretty wonderful world, at that.  They may not be Ultima Thule, but I can understand how they might have been mistaken for the ends of the earth. As Kevin MacNeil wrote in The Stornaway Way, about growing up in the Hebrides: “We do not live in the back of beyond; we live in the very heart of beyond.”

And here is an old Scottish folk tale, a sort of a creation myth about how the Hebrides were formed: 

Long ago, back in the mist, there was a giant.  He was building a house in the mountains.  He went down to the shore with a creel and collected a number of rocks for his house, and placed them in the creel.  When it was full he swung it up on to his great back, but the weight was too much and the bottom of the creel broke and the stones fell into the sea as he swung it round, and that was how the Hebrides were formed.  From “And the Land Lay Still,” by James Robertson.

Detail: Map of the Week 4-23-2012:Ultima Thule