26 October 2005

The Charting of the Oceans: Ten Centuries of Maritime Maps
by Rachel Kaufman

Rachel Kaufman is a freelance writer and an English major at Adelphi University. Someday her fantasy novel-in-progress will sell millions of copies, but faced with all that fame, she'll still be skulking around used bookstores and ogling old maps and sea-charts.

I love maps. Big maps of the world, tiny maps showing only a few city blocks, and everything in between. Sometimes I open up Mapquest and just browse.

Why are maps so great? They're inspiring. I look at a map of an exotic place and see somewhere I'd like to travel someday. I see oddly-named city streets and build stories around them. I navigate a fantasy man-o-war through narrow straits, past long stretches of uninhabited land or busy harbors. In short, not only are maps beautiful representations of the real world, but they're structures with which to build a world for your writing.

Now, good news for map maniacs and writers alike: Peter Whitfield's The Charting of the Oceans: Ten Centuries of Maritime Maps is here. With 130 pages containing full-color reproductions of maps dating from the late 13th century and tons of relevant historical information, this book is essential for anyone who's writing about ships or the ocean.

Whitfield starts his text with a description of early naval history, beginning with the invention of the sail and following major nautical developments since then. The text doesn't bog down in too many details, as the maps are the focal point of the book, but the text provides a good starting point for research.

Want to see a picture of an astrolabe? A traverse board? Maybe you want to know what a 15th-century harbor looked like, or how mariners navigated before the compass. Whitfield's book will show you all of this. He also will tell you when latitude and longitude began to be used correctly on charts, and who was actually responsible for the widespread use of the Mercator projection. If you need an overview of how cartography information was taken, you'll get that, too. Whitfield also provides a basic overview of seafaring politics in the Age of Exploration and beyond. He lays out clearly who was attacking whom, and which wars and competitions led to the development of new naval technology. He gives a quick History 101-type refresher on ships' roles in the slave trade, in colonization, and in companies like the East India Company.

The text of the book is a useful resource, but what will really draw you to this book are the maps, or, as Whitfield is careful to call them, the charts. (Charts are used for navigation at sea, so though many contain almost as much land as ocean, they must be called "charts" and not "maps.") Some are printed in colorful inks, some have elaborate illustrations painted into the margins, embellished with gold leaf, and some are simple black-ink-on-vellum charts. Whitfield starts with the Pisan chart, the first known sea-chart, which shows the Mediterranean in impressive detail. There's a map on almost every two-page spread from then on, progressing chronologically through charts of various parts of the world. Some of these early maps are drawn so differently—not inaccurately, just differently—from what modern readers would expect that they are almost unrecognizable, until suddenly something clicks and a familiar part of the world materializes. These maps are illustrated with kings' thrones, wild animals, exotic plants, and castles and monuments. Each map is accompanied by a caption usually three or four sentences long. The captions contain enough information that you could read only them, skipping the text of the book, and still come away feeling like you had learned a lot.

These charts can also be used as a resource for anyone writing fantasy with a nautical bent. Maybe you just want to be inspired to draw a map of your world, or maybe you want to use something map-related to throw a wrench into your characters' plans. Try these ideas, all of which I thought of while reading Whitfield's book:

• Sailors were not always educated enough to use complicated sea-charts. For centuries, the stars and a rhumb-line drawn on the chart were all a navigator would use, if he used a chart at all. Therefore, the charts in use at that time used simple pictorial representations to depict cities, major landmarks, etc., and tiny flags to represent nationality or religion. Consider how easily one of these flags could get smudged in a storm or other natural disaster. Maybe your characters land at what they believe to be a friendly port and find themselves surrounded by citizens of a country with whom they're at war.
• Some of the maps in Whitfield's book are covered with illustrations of sea-monsters. I saw two-spouted, four-legged whales, giant eels, dragons, and what I could have sworn was a leopard. Maybe an illustration spawns a tale of a legendary monster that your characters decide to hunt? Maybe one of your characters sets out to prove that a certain mystical sea-monster, as drawn by a famous mapmaker, is a myth and ends up discovering something else. Who knows?
• My favorite map-related plot points, though, have to do with the inaccuracy of mapmaking. Continents that haven't been fully discovered end up fading into a chart's margins. Who knows what might be lurking at the edges of the known world? According to Whitfield, part of the reason Europeans were so convinced of the Northwest Passage was because of the way maps of North America were drawn. The incorrect placement of Pitcairn Island on a sea-chart led the sailors on the Bounty to believe they could hide there after their mutiny. (It worked; they remained undiscovered for 19 years.) Perhaps your characters will experience something similar.

A few caveats come with this book. First, besides the short blurb on collecting cartographical data, Whitfield provides almost no information on the technical details of making maps. I would have liked to see more about which materials were used to make charts—he does say that most were made using vellum, but doesn't specify, for example, whether any special inks had to be used to withstand sea conditions. The maps' sizes aren't noted, either, but that's only a small oversight and can be overlooked. Second, the book's text doesn't sync up with the maps and illustrations. A paragraph on page 65 referred to a map 20 pages earlier; if you use this book, consider reading the text separately from the charts and captions. Reading them together just turns out to be too confusing.

Despite these small problems, The Charting of the Oceans is a wonderful resource for any writer and would be a great addition to any coffee table or bookshelf. Good luck with your writing, and may you have smooth sailing ahead.