A World of Maps

After reading Valerie Babb's "Crafting Whiteness" chapter, I was able to learn how our white identity was truly created. It did not just form by itself there were many contributing factors to help construct where we are today. One of the most resourceful tools in our history were maps. Cartographers made these works of art to tell stories. It provided directional guidance for our people, being reading a written language wasn't heard of back then. These pictures created stories and sent crucial messages to people in different geographic areas as they accumulated important information about our world.

While researching on the Internet for unique maps, I found one that bewildered my mind...the amount of detail, color, and perfection was completely baffling. The craziest part was there was no key, like we have on our maps today.

http://www.loc.gov/resource/g3201pm.gct00065/#seq-5

Above is the link leading to my selected map. This map is the Portolan atlas of the Mediterranean Sea, western Europe, and the northwest coast of Africa.


1) Some essentially remarkable details in this map are the drawings of the ships. These ships were drawn with such perfection that they make the map really "pop". Then, there are little dots surrounding the countries, almost like an outline. Another one of the most outstanding parts is the use of the compass. The grid lines go all over this map, and are traced in the colors red and black. There are compass looking figures present but nothing defines north, south, east or west, which would have me lost. There are many amazing details on this map, and I could go on forever; however, the last micro-level detail I found interesting was that there was English words present and smaller words in a language which I could not decipher, but after reading a bit about its bibliographical information I found out that some of it is Italian and some of it is Latin.


2) I think this map tells a story of traveling. Clearly these cartographers are interested in ships sailing and in what direction. Although, they have their own way of telling this story. They do not provide an obvious key in this map of what they are trying to share. This map is almost secret because if some random person were to pick it up, it would almost be impossible to learn anything from it. They obtain their own symbols, own meaning for colors, and own language, that only them, back then, would be able to figure out. This map follows the path of some of the other narratives we have learned about; they were meant for their people and their people only. Maps really are like secret treasure maps, but the treasure does not necessarily have to be gold; it could be a very promising area of fertile land to these people, which they want to keep secret, so others cannot find it.

3) These maps did define whose land was whose. It was a way of claiming, and I believe this land says something about that. There are areas shaded, colored, and numbered differently, which could display ownership. Like Valerie Babb says in Crafting Whiteness in Early America, "Maps foreshadowed visually the ways in which English narrative prose would claim land through words and as such are a fitting prelude to an analysis of accounts of exploration and their relationship to constructions of whiteness." Pretty much she sums it up. She makes it clear that maps started the process of claiming whose land is whose. Claiming land through words started because of these maps and their markings.