Untitled

1¾ @ IV OF: PLANIMETRIC MAPPING OF WORLD CONTINENTAL LAND SURFACES

Mary Lynette Larsgaard

Map and Imagery Laboratory, Davidson Library

University of California, Santa Barbara

mary@sdc.ucsb.edu

Planimetric Mapping: A.D. 1700-1800

Past the small islands that speckle the Coral Sea,

past the New Hebrides, those mossy stones,

years from France and still hundreds of miles

east of Borne:

Islas de Salomon,

lost coffers of pearl, sandalwood, tortoiseshell--

this would be his mark on the world's maps,

another minnow in the bottom

quadrant of blue.

Ellen Bryant Voigt, from: "The Discoverer" (Louis Antoine de Bougainville)

Overview

France produced superb cartographers, notably Guillaume de l'Isle (frequently known as Delisle) (1675-1726), Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville (1697-1782), and Phillippe Buache (1700-1773) (Lister 1970, pp. 48-50). De l'Isle produced nearly 100 maps, and among much else gave the Mediterranean its true length (Jervis 1938, p. 195). De l'Isle left unknown areas blank, as did d'Anville:

D'Anville's great contribution to cartography was his rigorous exclusion of all features which were not proven; his cartography was truly scientific.

(Dickenson and Howarth 1933, p. 117)

De l'Isle's 1700 map of the world, free of Ptolemaic tradition, was the most accurate to that date (Jervis 1938, p. 195). But the grasp of the general public on geography remained somewhat hazy, as evidenced by such occurrences as Manon Lescaut, the heroine of a book by the Abbe Prevost, perishing in the deserts of Louisiana (Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut).

From the second half of the seventeenth century on, contemporary cartography was marked by a search for Cartesian accuracy, spearheaded, appropriately enough, by the French (Armando Cortesao 1969-70, p. 6). The eighteenth century was particularly notable in this repect because of the rise of the great powers of Europe amid almost constant warfare, which latter required large-scale mapping and thus national surveys (Raisz 1948, p. 35). A conspicuous part of this move toward more detailed mapping was in developing the technology necessary to support accurate work, with the most important single occurrence in the development of instrumentation being the invention in 1764 by John Harrison of a timepiece "sufficiently robust and accurate" to allow longitude to be determined from calculating the difference between local time and time for a given meridian as indicated by the chronometer (Crone 1968, p. 134; Arthur H. Robinson 1973, p. 453). The sextant and the theodolite, the latter an efficient instrument for observing angles in survey were also important. The first result of these technological advances was an increased accuracy in the making of hydrographic charts (Baker 1967, p. 159).

Planimetric Mapping of Africa: A.D. 1700-1800

Not until the end of the seventeenth century had real exploration begun in the interior of south Africa; by 1700, intrepid Europeans were making forays into Algeria and inland from the west coast into the area called French West Africa (Debenham 1960, p. 239). Maps became more accurate and less decorative, as witness Jonathan Swift's famous quote (without which no work on the history of cartography is complete):

So geographers in Afric-maps,

with savage pictures fill their gaps;

And o'er unhabitable downs

Place elephants for want of towns.

(from On poetry 1./177)

The eighteenth century was the beginning of the end of the truth of Swift's quatrain. Many maps were being produced, and Ptolemy's version of Africa was slowly being abandoned (Lister 1970, p. 98; Tooley 1966, p. 5). Lake Nyasa began to show indications of its true form, and Madagascar, which had been ignored since 1648, began to show some changes in its map in mid-century (Heawood 1965, pp. 166-67). French cartography dominated the century, and was itself dominated by the names of Guillaume de l'Isle and Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville. De l'Isle was the first to have latitudes and longitudes generally correct, and also the first to omit Potlemy's two Nile lakes. His 1700 map was copied until d'Anville's critical map. Maps became simpler and less ornamented - as science came in the door, the more obvious appurtenances of art went out the window - and the geographic information presented became more exact, although some vestiges of Ptolemaic tradition survived in maps such as the ones produced by Overton and Sayer, 1730-1770, which wistfully retained the great inland lakes, the Mountains of the Moon, and the linking river systems (Langlands 1971, p. 67; Ravenstein 1891, p. 299; Randles 1958, p. 88; Tooley 1969, pp. iv, v).

By the end of the eighteenth century, the country in south Africa up to the Orange River was known in its general outlines, and there was some knowledge of the arid regions of southwest Africa. Overall, there was a gradual extension of European penetration into the African interior, and maps of islands off Africa - the Canaries, Madagascar, the Cape Verde Islands, and St. Helena - were relatively common (Tooley 1961, p. 99; Lister 1970, p. 98). The century closed with a healthy dependence on discovery as the proper basis for any map, on a refreshing ability (new to a secrecy-prone European world) to keep a map up to date. Although mapmaking had finally become a science (or rather, once again, for the first time since the Greeks and Romans), it would retain an awareness of its past as an unscientific art.

Planimetric Mapping of Australia: A.D. 1700-1800

When the Dutch, who were traders first, fighters second, and explorers by accident, lost interest in Australia, the fifth continent faded into the background for 150 years (Knight 1967, p. 85). Only the French cartographers attempted to fill in the blanks, and in spite of d'Anville and de l'Isle they were still deep in speculation, so that representation of the continent was somewhat peculiar (Tooley 1979b, pp. xi, xii).

The Dutch retained early in the century a geographic fantasy of the south land as a group of islands (Skelton 1958, p. 223). South of the Tropic of Capricorn the map (provided it were not French-made) showed empty space from Tasman's west coast of New Zealand almost to Patagonia. By mid-century, geographers were able to construct a world map roughly correct in outline except for three areas (which would all by filled in by Cook): the northwest coast of America; the northeast coast of Asia; and the far southern latitudes, which latter offered the greatest problem (Tooley 1964, p. 3).

Captain Cook's chart of New Zealand, resulting from his 1769-1770 tour, is "but an outline" (Hargreaves 1964, p. 3). Nonetheless, it would remain until 1840 the only English source of knowledge for 3,000 miles of coastline ("Maps and mapping" 1968, p. A232). In 1770 Captain Cook discovered and surveyed the whole east coast of Australia, inaugurating "a new phase in the progress of cartography" (Schilder 1972, p. 43; Tooley 1979b, p. xii). Only portions of the east and southeast coasts remained uncharted; in 1788 surveying work began on them (Schilder 1976, p. 204). Excursions (which can scarcely have been as pleasant as the modern-day trips so termed) began about 1791 (Ballard 1972, p. 24). In 1799 George Bass and Matthew Flinders established that Tasmania was indeed an island, and at last the shores of Australia were completely explored (Schilder 1976, p. 204; Dickenson and Howarth 1933, p. 129). Salient inland features, such as mountains, began to appear in a sketchy fashion on maps at the end of the eighteenth century (Lister 1970, p. 117).

Planimetric Mapping of Eurasia: A.D. 1700-1800

Asia

In China, the Jesuits began surveying south of Peking in 1705, the Great Wall in 1708, and Manchuria in 1709 (by Regis and Jartoux); by 1710 Pechili was completed, by 1711 Shantung, Honan, and Fukien; and in 1715 Yunnan, at which point material was available for all of China except Tibet. In 1717 two lamas turned in data on Tibet, to remain until recent times almost the sole basis for knowledge of Tibetan geography (Heawood 1965, pp. 139-49; Fauvel 1901, p. 65). Father Jartoux put together the overall map in 1718; it was published in Paris by J.-B. du Halde in 1735, and in 1737 in d'Anville's Nouvel Atlas de la Chine (Heawood 1965, p. 140; Brucker 1890, p. 378; Tooley 1952, p. 107; Walter Fuchs 1937, pp. 20-21).

Western cartography of Korea before the 1710-1735 map by Father Jean-Baptiste Regis had been imprecise; d'Anville copied the Regis map for his "Royaume de Coree" in du Halde of 1735. Despite the broadening of the southern part of the peninsula, this map was in the main accurate and was widely copied in the next 150 years (McKuen 1977).

Between 1730 and 1841 the depiction of the coastline of Palestine varied ("Present geography" 1857, p. 81). Elsewhere in the Near East, Guillaume de l'Isle's Arabia of 1701 took on features familiar to present-day map users; there is a lack of detail in the Rub'al-Khali, but the main range near the Red Sea coast, another range in the central south, and all of the main northerly settlements are roughly in place. D'Anville's 1751 great map of Asia shows the Arabian peninsula as virtually blank except for the Hijaz coastal region, Dhafar, Oman, and a band from Mecca to the Persian Gulf through Yamama (Tibbetts 1954, p. 24).

Maps of India finally began to show improvement about mid-century; prior to that time, the content of maps was largely a matter of guesswork and travelers' tales, but after that, English army engineers traversed the country (Gole 1976, pp. 61-75; Markham 1969, p. 54). The most notable work was done by James Rennell, appointed Surveyor-General of Bengal in 1764 when he was 21 years old. His atlas of Bengal came out in 1779, two years after his retirement; in 1782 he constructed the first approximately correct map of the whole of India (Tooley 1952, p. 104; Gole 1976, p. 75). By the end of the century, painstaking accuracy was a hallmark of British maps of India.

In the early eighteenth century, Japan's coast was accurately portrayed. The 1750 Sieur Robert map of the Japanese empire showed a more correct northeast sweep of the islands (Tooley 1961, p. 108). Accurate maps of the Ryukyu Islands were drawn in 1758 by the Jesuit Antoine Gaubil (1689-1759) (Lister 1970, p. 105). Maps by Reland and Kaempfer dominated the eighteenth century. From Martini on, cartographic work on Japan was a retrogression, and would remain so until Japan's now familiar outline on maps emerged in the nineteenth century (Campbell 1967, p. 4).

Burma first received some sort of shape in 1795 due to the mission of colonel Symes. In his map of the area d'Anville undortunately confused the Pegu Riva, the Sitan, and the Salwen (Yule 1857, p. 54).

Europe

The mapping of western Europe in this century was in the main filling in the details (a process that would continue into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), with planimetric mapping accomplished, and large-scale topographic mapping the main concern. Only planimetric mapping is treated in this study; see previous works by Larsgaard on topographic mapping for history of that mapping.

A very large map of Iceland was made by the Danes in 1723 (Hermannsson 1931, p. 44). The early mapping of Scotland ended in 1745, moving from older, imperfect maps to maps incorporating important improvements based on the Gordon-Blaeu outline (Rae 1956, p. 122). Elsewhere in the British Isles, all that could be said of English cartography from 1650 to 1750 was:

The general reliability and accuracy of the geographical content of maps saw no great improvement either; compared to the French efforts of Sanson, Delisle, and the Cassini family, the English contribution was poor indeed.

(Thrower 1978, p. 192).

By 1772, Poland was relatively well mapped, specifically by a 1:525,000-scale map published 1771 to 1772, and on a 16-section map at a scale of 1:675,000 published in 1771 (Buczek 1966, pp. 91-92). German cartography, especially at its centers in Nuremberg and Koln, was particularly prolific, showing then as now an enormous amount of detail in its products (Nischer von Falkenhof 1937, p. 83). The early stage of cartography in Silesia, Switzerland, and the Netherlands closed at the end of the eighteenth century, as the idea of the national survey took over (Janczak 1976, p. 115; Fockema and van't Hoff 1947; Graf 1891-1892, p. 115). Finland was not quite at that stage, but had completed the progeression from being an indefinite peninsula in the far north to its present shape, as evidenced in Bureu's map (Suomalaisen 1967, p. 8).

Russia

At the beginning of the eighteenth century there is a switch from cartography of Russia to Russian cartography, at a time when the main geographical outlines of northern Asia were known (Bagrow and Castner 1975b, p. 97; Newby 1975, p. 148). The century was marked cartographically by the absorbing of contemporary western European techniques, including land surveys, nautical charts, a national map printing office, and military influence in mapping (Atobe 1969, p. 9; Goldenberg 1971, p. 41). Semyon Remezov's atlas Chertyozhnaya Kniga, was completed as of January 1, 1701 (Bagrow and Castner 1975b, pp. 38-42).

"The development of scientific geography and cartography in Russia is greatly indebted" to Peter I (Pytor Alekseyevich Romanov, 1672-1725) (Essays 1975, p. 27). After his return from Europe in 1700, Peter saw, among much else, the necessity for a survey of all of Russia, which would begin with a determination of the state's boundaries by mapping the coastline and then proceed to the complete geographical (as opposed to topographical) mapping of the country, beginning with the most important districts (Essays 1975, p. 44). Peter opened the Sukharev Navigational School in 1701, which was "the cradle of Russian geodesy and cartography of the eighteenth century (Essays 1975, p. 28). In 1718, the first geodesists graduated and set to work (Bagrow and Castner 1975b, pp. 44, 46). By 1720 enough of the school's pupils had graduated so that the enormous task of mapping Russia could begin (Essays 1975, p. 29). At this time, the French Academie royale des sciences was leading the world in accurate mapping, so it was logical that Czar Peter should discuss his mapping problems with the younger de l'Isles; they came to Russia after Peter's death, in 1726, and were handsomely treated by Empress Catharine I. Their arrival marked the end of the primary stage of Russian mapping (Brown 1948, p. 502; Bagrow 1952, p. 93).

The Geographical Department of the Academie royale des sciences eventually received all field surveys, which were under the direction of Joseph Nicolas de l'Isle (Essays 1975, p. viii). Louis de l'Isle de la Croyere, the half brother of Joseph and Guillaume, explored Lapland, Archangelsk and the coasts of the Arctic Sea, took astronomical observations, went to Kamchatka, and voyaged with Vitus Bering on the second trip. Not surprisingly, he died of fatigue and exposure (Brown 1948, pp. 502-503; Wroth 1944, pp. 219-20).

Afanasiy Shestakov, a Cossack chief, produced a map that represented for the first time Kamchatka, the Kurile Islands, and the western tip of Alaska. The First Kamchatka Expedition (1725-1729) completed the map of Kamchatka and the eastern coast of Siberia to 67 degrees 18 minutes N, and determined the geograpahical positions of places from the Urals to Petropavlovsk. This and the voyages of the Frenchman La Perouse kept Sakhalin from being confused with Kamchatka. The Second Kamchatka Expedition (1734-1743) was chiefly concerned with the Arctic coast to the Japanese coast, the north coast of Eurasia, and the west coast of North America in latitudes 55 degrees N to 60 degrees N, an area never before visited. Both expeditions had at the helm Vitus Bering. The activities of these trips were kept secret, but the resulting maps were copied and the copies smuggled back to Paris by de l'Isle. De l'Isle's 1731 map, used for the second expedition, unfortunately continued a number of major errors and was the cause of failure of some parts of that expedition. Bering died during the 1741 voyage to America (Breitfuss 1939, pp. 87, 89-90, 99; Bagrow 1950b, p. 35; Campbell 1967, p. 4; Washburn 1952, p. 236; Bagrow and Castner 1975b, p. 168).

By 1736, the idea that North America and Asia are separated by water was expressed by a Professor Muller, based on Deschneur's 1648 discovery of ocean east of Kamchatka (Burner 1818, p. 81; Bagrow 1952, p. 91, says Deschneur's publication discovered in 1742).

The first written news of the second expedition appeared in the Gazette de France in November of 1743; stories differ as to whether de l'Isle sent the maps to Louis D'Ohsen-Bray or to the Count de Maurepas, but all agree that the maps were sent that same year (Essays 1975, p. 37; Bagrow and Castner 1975b, p. 163).

By 1744, Peter's surveyors and their successors had surveyed 164 of 265 districts in European Russia, and all 26 districts of Siberia, but the latter was confined to river traverses (Essays 1975, p. 63). By 1745 almost all of the north coast of Asia and its rivers were surveyed and mapped except for the area from Bol'shoy Baranov Kamen to the Bering Strait (Bagrow and Castner 1975b, p. 167). In that same year, the first concrete results of de l'Isle's work were publsihed in Russia by the Imperial Academy of Sciences in the Russian atlas (Brown 1948, p. 503; Essays 1975, p. 63).

When de l'Isle was safely back in France, he and Buache issued in 1752 Carte des nouvelles decouvertes au nord de la Mer du Sud, and included an erroneous description of the progress of the expedition (Bagrow and Castner 1975b, p. 163).

By 1771 mapping of the Black Sea area was fairly accurate. Little cartographic work was done in the Siberian interior during the latter half of the century. By the end of the century, the Geographical Department of the academy of sciences had played a central role in Russian cartography for 60 years, and the expeditions following 1741 had completed the coastlines of the North Pacific, with the north and east boundaries of Asia specified and charted, the correlation between Asia and the North American continent established, and groups of islands in the Arctic discovered (Atobe 1969, p. 9; Tompkins 1955, p. 1; Akademiia Nauk SSSr 1962, p. xv; Bagrow and Castner 1975b, pp. 223-32).

Planimetric mapping of Latin America: A.D. 1700-1800

A ship was scheduled to leave the Philippines for Acapulco every year, and except for accidents or the occasional shortage of a vessel, actually did so.

(Baker 1967, p. 148)

By 1700 the major unmapped areas of Mexico were interior east Mexico bordering on the Gulf of Mexico, north central Mexico (Coahuila, Chihuahua) and interior northern Baja. Ecuador's coast and immediate interior and some of the Brazilian interior (from Natal to the mouth of the Amazon and around Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo and inland along the Paranapanema and Parana Rivers) had appeared on maps, but large tracts within the Amazon Basin, both north and south of the main river, were completely unknown (Debenham 1960, p. 238; Heawood 1965, p. 175). During this century the coastal profile of Venezuela began to fill in, and maps of Guatemala that showed "alguna exactitud" appeared (Spain. Archivo General de Indias 1968, p. 6; Pan American Institute of Geography and History. Centro 1952, p. 5).

Especially immediately before and after 1730, the Jesuits were very active in South America until their expulsion in 1767, and as in the St. Lawrence basin and in China, they were able and assiduous geographical-data gatherers; their information for South America was used by such cartographers as d'Anville (Decoud 1904, p. 46; Heawood 1965, p. 46). In 1707 the Jesuit Samuel Fritz made an important map of Ecuador (Larrea 1977, p. 32). Topographic knowledge of interior Suriname was gained by what might be considered an opposing motive to that of the Jesuits, namely military expeditions against escaped black plantation slaves; Alexander de Laraux's 1737 map was the first to note the geographical discoveries of these expeditions (Wekker 1966, p. 196). The Condamine map, ca. 1751, which depicts Ecuador, is the map of the period "most adjusted to scientific principles" (Larrea 1977, p. 45). The 1762 map Carte de Bellin depicts French Guiana (Brasseu 1974, p. 56).

The landmark map of the century is the 1775 or 1776 Mapa de America Meridional, by Juan de la Cruz Cano y Olmedilla, one of the greatest compilations of the epoch and an encylopedia of geographical knowledge of South America at mid-century. Its accuracy compares favorably with that of maps issued 150 years later (Platt 1933, p. 660; Raisz 1948, p. 35; Kish 1970, pp. 125-26; Luxardo de Castro 1952, p. 87). Between 1774 and 1778, J.C. Hennemen compiled a map of Surinam, the first since Mogge's (Wekker 1966, p. 196).

By the close of the century, most of interior Ecuador and Chile had been explored, and no major area on the continent was completely unknown, but information did tend to be scanty and inaccurate, especially of the Gran Chaco, Patagonia, and the Amazon River basin (Bettex 1960, front endpapers).

Planimetric Mapping of North America: A.D. 1700-1800

Until the beginning of the eighteenth century, maps of North America were restricted to the eastern seaboard and were general in nature (Ristow 1971, p. 197). Geographical knowledge of the central and eastern parts progessed significantly; areas east of the Mississippi and the Great Lakes had been explored extensively, although the shape of the southern tip of Lake Michigan still showed some confusion, with the peninsula varying in shape from short and almost square to an elongated, pointed, triangular shape (Oppen 1975, p. 32; Karpinski 1931, p. 12). Mapping of the eastern United States showed considerable development in the eighteenth century due to land disputes between Britain and France, keeping up with a fast-moving frontier and expanding settlements, and the emancipation of the British colonies other than Canada in the late eighteenth century, all of which stimulated the demand for new and correct surveys of large areas, with much fine work done by military and naval engineers. Nonetheless, in the first half of the century, apart form maps of coasts and the immediate hinterlands, only rough sketches were available (Bagrow 1964, p. 194; Tooley 1961, p. 113; Crone 1968, p. 135).

De l'Isle issued, as for other continents, important maps of North America, the first in 1700 correctly showing California as a peninsula, and the northwest coast resembling that of the 1630 map by de Laet (Lockman 1978, p. 21). The 1703 map is one of the most important maps of North America of the century; de l'Isle used 67 separate sources, including Father Kino's writings. It is one of the first correct maps of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence inland waterway system; the Missouri is depicted well as far north as the Big Sioux . The delimitation of the Louisiana coast is defective, and a mythical high plateau is shown in Michigan (Kish 1978, p. 30; Hamilton 1934, p. 65; Tooley 1967, p. 4).

Father Kino's 1710 map was for more than a century the best map of the northwest frontier of New Spain (Burrus 1965, p. 61). South of 45 degrees N the charting of the west coast was "an altogether Spanish affair" (Koeman 1977, p. 3). De l'Isle's 1718 map of North America is the mother map of all subsequent maps of the Mississippi; it is the first map to represent the two tributaries of the Ohio (the Cumberland and the Tennessee), and the first to have the name of Texas (as "Teijas") on it. The Great Lakes are much improved, although the rivers of the Atlantic coast are poorly done; the Applachians, Ozarks and Rockies are correctly located, and the portrayal of detials in the upper Mississippi Basin and the place names in New Mexico are good (Lockman 1978, p. 23; Fite and Freeman 1926, pp. 177-79).

A 1719 map by Henri Chatelain incorporates most of the discoveries by Champlain, La Salle, and Joliet (Oppen 1975, p. 32). During the second quarter of the century great progress was made in the mapping of the continent (Thomas R. Smith 1977, p. 4). Between 1731 and 1742 Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, Sieur de la Verendrye, found much to occupy him in the lake of the Woods-Lake Winnipeg-Red River-Assiniboine area (Baker 1967, pp. 210-11). Henry Popple's 1733 map, a A map of the British empire in America, provided the best and most detailed image of British North America in the first half of the century, even though the depictions of Lakes Superior and Ontario are retrogressions (Kish 1978, p. 15; Gohm 1972, p. 60; Karrow 1977, p. [10]; Tooley 1961, p. 118).

The modern period of mapping by British Admiralty surveys of the east coast of Canada began in 1750; meanwhile, the northwest coast of America was still relatively unknown (Tooley 1964, p. 3). A 1751 map of Virginia by Peter Jefferson and Joshua Fry would be in use until about 1826 (Roberts and Bloomer 1939, p. viii).

Dr. John Mitchell's 1755 map, one of the most important in United States history because of its use in treaty boundary negotiations, shows the British colonies south to Florida and all the French holdings north of the Great Lakes and along the St. Lawrence River (Karrow 1977, p. [11]; Kish 1978, p. 16). Lewis Evans' map of the same year, a great critical success, stretched in coverage from Connecticut and Lake Ontario (much improved from previous maps) to Carolina, at a scale of 1:3,168,000 (Crone 1968, p. 136; Karrow 1977, p. [12]). Interior New England was left out of this flurry of activity, and was not known or mapped as early as were eastern Canada and the southern United States (Cumming 1974a, pp. 22, 26).

In 1756 a comprehensive, accurate survey of Delaware Bay resulted in a map engraved and printed in the form of a large-scale chart - Joshua Fisher's Chart of Delaware Bay from the Sea-Coast to Reedy Island. It would stay in use until a U.S. Coast Survey chart was issued in 1849 (Wroth 1950, p. 93). The modern period of mapping the southeast United States began the following year, with the first published work of John Gerar William De Brahm, who began work in about 1764 as Surveyor General of east Florida. Maps of this period were the product of professional surveyors using refined instruments and methods, and form a striking contrast in accuracy and detail to the maps preceding them (Cumming 1958, p. 3).

The French and Indian War (1754-1763) stimulated the production of maps more than any previous event in U.S. history (Clark 1978, p. ix). British maps of Florida in the 1760s and 1770s revealed "gross distortions of its lineaments" and geographic patterns; it was represented as an archipelago in about 1763 (DeBrahm 1971, pp. 3, 4).

It was not until the years between the Seven Years War and the American Revolution that a general sketch of Ohio was compiled. The task of mapping the western frontier was left to American surveyors and cartographers, and it was not until the land was settled, the Indian threat reduced, and a system of efficient internal transportation evolved that full and accurate maps of Ohio were produced (Thomas R. Smith 1977, p. 27). Further north, by 1775 there did exist a substantial body of information, some of it confused, concerning British Columbia (Farley 1961, p. 40).

One of the chief problems of the time was the grossly inaccurate sea charts; mariners were frequently wrecked on shores they thought to be hundreds of miles away. As a response to this and to the invention of the chronometer, in 1777, the Atlantic Neptune (printed by the British Admiralty), compendiums of coastal charts of the eastern United States and Canada - which were tailored to the purchaser and thus were each different - were issued, superintended by Joseph Frederick Wallet des Barres (Cumming 1974a, pp. 51-56). The Revolutionary War also emphasized the need for accurate mapping, this time of the land, a need felt particularly strongly by that erstwhile French and Indian War surveyor, George Washington, who wrote - shortly after he took command of the Continental Army - on January 25, 1777:

The want of accurate Maps of the country which has hitherto been the bane of the war, has been a great disadvantage to me. I have in vain endeavored to procure them, and have been obliged to make shift, with such sketches, as I could trace from my own Observation and that of Gentlemen around me.

(Ristow 1971, p. 191).

Far to the west, the northwest coast (although fairly well sketched in to 58 degrees N by 1779) was finally visited by someone other than the Spaniards or the Russians - Cook - for the first time since Drake in 1579 (Wheeler 1885, p. 486; Tooley 1964, p. 3). In 1779 Cook was killed on Oahu (Baker 1967, p. 188).

Back on the home front, Robert Erskine was serving as the Geographer and Surveyor General for the Continental Army, a post he took up in 1777 (Friis 1958, p. 188; for detailed treatment, see Heusser 1966). Following the war came the Ordinance of 1785 "for ascertaining the mode of disposing of the land in the western territory," providing for the rectangular township system (still in existence) of surveying and subdividing the public lands of the United States (Joerg 1951, p. 272; Friis 1958, p. 189). Frontiersmen, clever young officers, and professional military engineers all made maps during this time. Cartography ran in presidential veins; Thomas Jefferson produced a map of four of the eastern states in 1786, said to be the best surviving eighteenth-century map of the area - although it was later corrected by de l'Isle (Cumming 1974b, p. 59); Lister 1970, p. 109).

By 1788 the Strait of Juan de Fuca had been entered, and the lower end of the Columbia River and the Straits appear in a 1794 map by the British mapmaker, Aaron Arrowsmith (Baker 1967, pp. 209, 213). In the late eighteenth century England began to make advances and to take voer from France as a leader in cartography (Goode 1927, p. 13; Bricker and Tooley 1968, p. 98). Representatives of the Hudson's Bay Company, which existed initially to solve the problem of finding the Northwest Passage, had by mid-century reached Lake Athabasca and Great Slave Lake; by 1789 Alexander Mackenzie, one of the company's employees, had gone on from Athabasca to the Arctic, and by 1792 he had reached the Frazier River, thus becoming the first white man to cross the North American continent since Cabeza de Vaca (Baker 1967, pp. 221-27).

By the close of the century, the broad outlines of the vast region between Hudson Bay, the Great Lakes, the Arctic Ocean, and the Rocky Mountains had been sketched in; the latter part of the century was a time of rapid advance in northwest Canada (Heawood 1965, p. 345). Russian geographic discoveries led to the clarification of geographic locations and configurations of northwest America, and included the discovery and exploration of the Aleutians (Essays 1975, pp. 88-089). Still, in a 1796 Arrowsmith map, much of the far west's interior and the Arctic was left blank, and theories concerning the possibility of an inland passage received some attention (Oppen 1975, p. 35). By 1800 the country east of the Mississippi and north of Mexico to southern Nevada was appearing on maps. Knowledge of interior Canada was still scanty, although explorers had worked west from the Great Lakes and south and west from Hudson Bay (Outhwaite 1938, p. 218; Debenham 1960, p. 238). Greenland had looked about the same on the map from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries; exploring was generally done only on the southeast, south, and southwest coasts (Hobbs 1949, p. 19).