Marginalia in cARTography.pdf Oct. 2014 | Page 25

later the cartographer Herman Moll (ca. 1654–1732) popularized “embellished.” Colton’s Illustrated & Embellished Steel Plate Map in A New and Exact Map of the Dominions of the King of Great of the World on Mercator’s Projection was compiled, drawn, and Britain on ye Continent of America, printed in 1715 and reissued engraved by D. Griffing Johnson and published in New York in 1854 with minor revisions for decades afterward (fig. 9). These animals by J. H. Colton, the founder of an American mapmaking company were thought to possess a great intelligence and were considered that was an international leader between 1831 and 1890 (plate 26). models of hard work and natural skill, and that is why they appear Cartouches interlaced by filigree frame the map, and as with Dutch as a well-orchestrated group with each in charge of a task: felling the map borders, cities and peoples are illustrated all around. At the trees, cutting or carrying the branches, making mortar, and so forth, top center the landing of Columbus is flanked by London and New under the strict direction of the “commandant or architect” that Orleans (left), and St. Petersburg and Paris (right). In the lower margin gives instructions with its raised forepaw. There is even a beaver that appear Constantinople, Naples, New York, Rome, and Canton. On lies incapacitated from overwork, and two others are approaching it the laterals there are different people: American Indian and Turkish to inspect. As J. Brian Harley commented, this scene “might merely (left), a nd Swiss, Circassian, Greek, and Mandarin (right). Although stylistically these images are very far from those that suggest an interest in natural history, or that the fur trade was a source of wealth to some of the atlas patrons. Yet a closer look framed sixteenth- and seventeenth-century maps, the same spirit shows an absence of people and especially of the native Americans that moved those cartographers to include marginalia in their maps upon whom the fur trade depended. In the final analysis, unless the seems to underlie the maps of the mid-nineteenth century. Not in beavers are intended as symbol for the hard-working Europeans, it vain, the subtitle of this world map, which reads Compiled from the is just as likely that it was this negative aspect, the absence of people, Latest & Most Authentic Sources Exhibiting the Recent Arctic and which entered the reader’s consciousness … Such images, associated Antarctic Discoveries & Explorations, seems to evoke Ortelius’s with the representation of the territory on the map, and becoming words in his 1564 world map, in which he included the images of part of the process of persuasion and mythmaking, rendered Cuzco and Tenochtitlan “as they have come to us and that we can legitimate the holding of English colonies in America.” consider as genuine.” If in Châtelain’s 1719 world map it was the lavishly marginal illustrations that made it “very curious,” more than a century later, artistic marginalia again defined another map, this time as 21