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Dear Ms. Maril,
I had intended to send this note sooner but needed a quiet Sunday morning after the elections to do so.
I have a number of maps collected since 2000 or so, but want to highlight four to make a few points. All are beautiful, none is priceless but each was made for a different reason.
- Thomas Fuller’s “Juda” (or Judea from his “A Pisgah Sight of Palestine” published in 1650. It goes from the Med in the West to the Dead Sea in the East, from Jerusalem in the North to Kadesh Barnea (the furthest point the Israelites reached in their first journey to Canaan) in the South. Fuller, an English preacher and writer on religion and history, was not a cartographer and it is said that three artist collaborated with him to produce the three lovely cartouches on the left and the dramatic scene of the Dead Sea on the right. There’s a small scene of David and Goliath, a depiction of Moses standing on Mt. Pisgah as he oversaw the locations of the 12 tribes of Israel with many annotations, flags and historical sites shown clearly. This is a quintessential Holy Land map meant to accompany his text. “Booksellers have always done well by me.” he said. It is a map that accompanied his unorthodox views of sects for which he was pilloried by Puritans and loyalists alike.
I had the map mounted with a mid to dark blue inside matte and a larger yellow matte. It’s stunning and, I believe, colored contemporaneously. Which brings me to two other points: contemporaneous color makes the map slightly more valuable though fading over 350+ years in this case may have encouraged owners to have the coloring redone; second, any maps mounted on non acid-free matting will deteriorate over time, a consideration all collectors should observe.
- Georg Matthaus Seutter’s 1728 map of the Mogul Empire, a part of his “Atlas Novus.” This large (25″ X 21″) map was once folded to fit the folio. The overall shape of India is incorrect, the hinterlands is roughly accurate. The map has two lovely cartouches (top and bottom left) and a trading ship taking on cargo in the Bay of Bengal. The theme of the map is the wealth of Indies and north to the Tartariae Pars and east to China. I’ve not checked the interior geography (which, in such maps was often a guess based on limited access) but the coastline appears fairly accurate but probably not good enough for an exacting navigator. It was made at the time that the East India Company was consolidating its trade and political power which led in many ways to the British eventually gaining complete control of the Indian subcontinent. As this was not a practical map for navigators, my guess is that it had a fair amount of cheerleading underlying its publication but it remains a very handsome map whose message was “wealth.” It’s interesting nonetheless that the Portuguese Vasco de Gama was the first major explorer of this region, though no maps remains from his visits as the Portuguese were notoriously guarded and suspicious that others would use their discoveries against them. Find me a fine Portuguese map and I’d be highly interested.
- Willem Blaeu’s 1634 Prester John (Presbiteri Ioannis) map featuring present day Ethiopia. It is in two pieces, the large map and an accounting in Latin of the “Regnum Abissinorum” that I’ve placed on the back of the mounted map. But, the interest is the story that the Pope feared a Mongol invasion and turned from help to “Prester John,” a Christian potentate who ruled over an empire carved out from within Muslim and pagans in the Orient. This was a popular though thoroughly mythical story that endured from the 12th to 17th Century and the locus shifted from the Orient to Ethiopia when Blaeu made his story map, accurate along the coast but fantastical in the interior with animals and large lakes not present then or now. Decorative they are and that must have been the point. Much the same with an “Oceani Ethiopici” in the lower left where the Sudan now is. The Red Sea is well-depicted, but the upper right just shows an empty Arabia Pars, the desert that it must have seemed in 1634. The map, however, is to retell the story of Prester John, a tale five centuries in telling and retelling. It just does it in the form of a map with an accompanying test. The map was based on an Ortelius 1573 map that’s almost a duplicate on a larger scale, more colored and with many of the improbable animals in the same places. (The Ortelius is on sale for 1000 euros, the Blaeu was much less, than half, no doubt because of Ortelius’ fame, the older age of the original and the “ripoff” by Blaeu.) A last note on this map: it shows the Congo to the west and Mozambique to the bordering south, a truly Sarah Palin view of Africa but centuries before her time.
- Back to Blaeu, this time Johannes and Cornelius, sons of Willem (17thC vice 16th). This map is a 1666 highly color-outlined map of Greece and its islands. It would have no value for navigation, has a wonderful cartouche of Socrates or an allegoric figure in the lower left, and would probably just be a part of an atlas or folio of maps. It also has a coat of arms of the probable sponsor of this map, Claudio Salmasio, a French author of an Anthology of Greece. My guess is that this map was for home collectors of handsome “coffee table” books but was incorrect in showing Macedonia as a part of Greece, a mistake made by several prominent 17thC cartographers. This map is much in the spirit of the Stoopendahl bible books that highlighted the map showing the “Journey of St. Paul and the Other Apostles,” via a shipwreck and his grievous injuries near Malta and his death upon reaching the Vatican. This map has been done many times by others with 12 surrounding small pictures showing various biblical scenes. The Stoopendahl may not be the best of many maps on thuis subject, but it makes for a handsome piece of decoration with a story.
I suppose what I’m saying is that maps more often told stories than they were practical. I doubt that many three century old navigational maps or charts exist. The maps were educative, they were handsome, they were in some ways historical, but they were often allegorical and they were created by men who did not travel on the vessels that collected the information on coastal navigation and interior features that they depict.
D.H.
Crownsville, MD
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