Chapter 6 further examines the Jenkinson map, remarkable far more for its voluminous illustration than its cartography, which adds little that is new and renders Jenkinson’s route into Central Asia inaccurately. The map includes dozens of small illustrations, explained by almost thirty captions in cartouches, producing a map that informed Muscovy Company merchants of societies they would encounter on the route. The chapter concludes with three images of Central Asian exotica, added to the map for no more obvious purpose than entertainment.

An account of the RAF raid on Hanover in October 1943 that resulted in the incineration of the Ebstorf Map, kept in the State Archive there, followed by a history of the work done upon this medieval world map from the time of its rediscovery in 1834 until its destruction, emphasizing the role of photography. A comparison with the surviving Hereford World Map.

Anamorphic, or distorted, images problematized the idea that viewing was a neutral act. Anamorphic images in print frequently took portraiture and topographic renderings as their subject matter, the same content around which visual acuity was being developed in printed books.

Cartography can help us understand how European knowledge of the topography and toponymy of the Delta has evolved over the centuries; however, we must be aware of the intellectual, social, religious and economic conditions under which maps were produced. Their content is far from exclusively geographic and the same map could show many levels of miscellaneous knowledge. Often, no European traveller had ever seen the cities drawn on the map. Consequently, before the nineteenth century, maps of Egypt and the Delta were unstable and contradictory – different maps expressed different Deltas, different representations of the world. The maps discussed in this chapter will paint a picture – a necessarily uncertain, shifting and composite picture – of knowledge acquired on the north of Egypt. This chapter will hopefully be a useful tool for understanding the evolution of European knowledge of the Delta and the research conducted in different places. By providing a list of the main documents, both cartographic and textual, relevant to the evolution of the cartography of the Delta, I hope to make place-specific research possible for those who wish it. It will also allow us to better understand what a thirteenth- or eighteenth-century map can say and not say.

Mungo Park’s second expedition in 1805-1806 was a deadly failure, yet it did nothing to diminish his posthumous reputation as a national hero. What prompted this expedition, why it failed, and how it inspired new expeditions in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars are the subjects of this chapter. It frames Park’s expedition in the context of the transatlantic slave trade, showing how that trade shaped British imperial rivalry with France and Park’s efforts to solve the riddle of the Niger River’s route and outlet. Logistical problems, political tensions, and endemic diseases weakened the expeditionary force, and violent clashes with Africans along the Niger led to the deaths of Park and his remaining companions at Bussa. An investigation by the African trader Isaaco confirmed Park’s fate. With the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the British developed an ambitious new plan to vindicate Park’s sacrifice by sending expeditions to the Niger and the Congo.

Chapter 3 engages with literary criticism’s argument that English national imagining became increasingly spatialised under Elizabeth Tudor. Critics argue that cartography and chorography introduced a new spatial awareness into English national consciousness. This criticism, which ignores Scotland, misrecognises as merely ‘national’ the imperial connotations of ‘British’ in the sixteenth century. The chapter shows that sixteenth-century chorographic British antiquarianism is shot through with both nostalgia and imperial ambition: ancient place-names and local legends fill the idea of England with the immanent presence of the British past and the promise of a pan-insular, imperial future. John Dee’s claims for English sea sovereignty over the Arctic and the Americas depended on claims to Scotland. Chapter 2 shows how Spenser’s The Faerie Queene conjures the vision of an Anglo-British imperial island in which Scotland becomes inconceivable. Spenser fuses river poetry, chorography and classical poetry with these texts on naval power, maritime law and English sea-sovereignty to shape the love of Florimell and Marinell as an allegory of Chastity as key to English insular empire.

The chapter examines the efforts of a group of veterans from earlier expeditions to capitalize on their knowledge of Asia and/or routes between the Indies, while grappling with their relatively modest position within the hierarchy of meritorious. The chapter argues that such a hierarchy became increasingly clear during the 1540s, due to the viceregal authorities’ efforts to identify and hierarchically order New Spain’s conquistadores, primer pobladores, and other beneméritos who had served the Crown. Against the background of these initiatives, it considers the efforts of men such as Andrés de Urdaneta, Guido de Lavezaris, García de Escalanate Alvarado, Castaneda de Nájera, and Juan Pablo de Carrión – who all fell within this third category of meritorious – to stand out among those included in the register by presenting themselves as veterans. Analyzing their interactions with the viceregal authorities and referring to reports produced during the 1550s and 1560s, the chapter reveals how the men’s drive for social advancement inspired them to fuel interest in Spanish expansion into the Pacific. In the process, they presented various visions of the Pacific and the potential benefits of New Spain’s connections to Asia.

The chapter explores how the production of cosmographical knowledge and acts of self-fashioning interacted in negotiations over royal capitulaciones, which were contracts between the Crown and private individuals that permitted the latter to act on the Crown’s behalf in matters such as exploration. After a brief discussion of prior Spanish efforts to reach Asia, the chapter then concentrates on the legal cases that were argued and decided during the 1530s and early 1540s concerning the right to explore the regions in the Pacific Northwest and who was to be recognized as the discoverer (descubridor) of this part of the world. The analysis presented here shows how the efforts of Hernán Cortés, Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, and others to prove they deserved to be recognized as discoverers had an impact on the mapping of the Pacific Northwest and left deep marks on the laws of the Indies.

This chapter addresses the relationship between knowledge claims and cartography. It begins by interpreting a world map published by the Nippon Yūsen Kaisha (NYK) company in the mid 1920s, a map which, among other things, depicts the new shipping line established by the NYK between Yokohama and Melbourne in 1896. The chapter traces the Yamashiro-maru’s journeys on this line in order to question the map’s carefully curated claims of peaceful commercial exchange between Japan and Australia. Yet even as the author critiques the map, his own archival itineraries in Australia serve to reinforce its basic worldview. Reflecting on this problem of ‘archival directionality’, the chapter closes by trying to imagine Australia’s historical relationship with Asia through a very different representational form, namely a bark painting from Yolŋu country. As with the NYK map, the chapter examines the cartographic claims made in the bark painting, and the archival basis of those claims, before reflecting on how such sources might reframe a historian’s understanding of the ‘global’ archive.

There is a wealth of literature on Antarctic research. Many overviews on the nature of Antarctica, cartography, its geology and glaciation, inhabitants and visitors, and cultural perspectives have been published recently.1 The first history of polar exploration of Europeans was published in 1756.2 Since then, many more Western historical overviews have been published, and we also have a chronological list of expeditions to Antarctica as well as good coverage in encyclopedias.3 In addition to these publications, there are several studies of the significance of ice and the development of natural sciences in the understanding of the physical nature of Antarctica. There are also some important recents works on the history of science which have not been fully integrated with the histories of exploration and discovery.

The interconnections within the natural world as observed by European explorers and armchair cosmographers connected meaningfully in the eighteenth century with the longer history of early modern cosmopolitanism, relying on an evolving understanding of the globe and its peoples in all their particularities and diversity. This chapter examines the tenets of eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism through the natural sciences by examining how individual actors, largely based in Europe, explored their world and described its geographies. Working across the disciplines of cartography, natural history, and ethnography, these individuals aspired to be inclusive within a cosmopolitan frame but often struggled to articulate a universal principle about whose knowledge should be included and whose voices should be excluded. These practices became critical sites of cosmopolitan contestation as they underlined a highly ambivalent attitude toward local sources of knowledge while proclaiming Europe’s unequivocal ability to describe and depict nature and space with a particularly vehement denigration of the tropical regions of the globe and their inhabitants.

The first chapter describes the rough and tumble of Coleridge’s rambles between 1794 and 1804. The chapter opens by placing these excursions within a culture of walking. It depicts his propensity to be his own path-maker rather than follow either the directives of the picturesque guides or the assigned routes of maps. Entries in his pocket notebooks reveal Coleridge’s understanding of a landscape based both upon what his eyes could see and what his feet could register. In many respects, he becomes a surveyor who measures the terrain with his boots. Often modeling his understanding of a landscape on the spirit of geometric exercises, Coleridge measured and counted his paces over a portion of ground in order to observe its lines and angles.

This chapter introduces the readers to the relationship between toponymy and cartography. Although given for granted, place names are an essential component of a map. Toponyms serve important cartographic/topographic functions, such as helping users to search for and to locate places on a map. They also have an affective role; the act of seeing place names on a map evokes an emotional input that (re)connects a person with a place. Both toponyms and maps have the ideological function of possession and control of territories. This is especially true in colonial contexts. The chapter makes a note that maps are not a modern invention; they have been produced since ancient times and, hence, are useful in studying the denominations of old place names and the geopolitical realities of the past. In the final part of this chapter, the authors turn their attention to phantom place names, i.e., places that have been believed to be real and, although charted on maps, turned out to be non-existent. They are part of a broader set of legendary and literary place names that evoke what is called the ‘feeling of place’ and reveal much of the human nature (e.g., the love for exploration and the desire for beauty/earthly pleasures).