Maps Tell Everything!

America Septentrio Nalis

1)      The first thing that is very noticeable about this map in the amount of detail around the coasts. Around the coasts, there is a lot of care taken in the drawing of the ports, capes, as well as the inland rivers. This makes sense because shipping was the key reason for wanting a map like this. Therefore, the most useful information would be how to navigate around the coast in order to find key trading areas and port cities. Where the East Coast seems to be drawn fairly accurately, the West Coast is full of mistakes. The peninsula of California is an entirely separate island and it is clear that there hasn’t been much exploration of the middle and western parts of North America. The middle of the U.S. is completely barren with mountains springing up much too far to the East. There are also many pictures of different animals in the West. At the top of the map there is a drawing of some natives.

2)      This map tells a story in many ways. The fact that the East is so detailed when the central part of the United States is not shows how the Americas were settled. The colonies started on the East coast so as the map shows, much more information was known about this area of the country. The wild animals drawn in the middle of the map show how the explorers felt about the “Wild” West. The Appalachians were the frontier and beyond that, there was a foreign world filled with natives and wild animals. Finally, the way the natives are drawn tells a story in itself. There are shown as barbarians. They are hardly clothed and seem to be ready for a war. This shows that they were seen as violent savages who only wanted to kill. They were looked down upon which is clearly identified by how they were drawn.

3)      Not only do maps show how the people felt, they also acted as a sort of propaganda tool to convince people that the colonization efforts should continue. They portrayed natives as savages in order to both separate themselves from the natives and also defend their actions. Maps both help define the culture of the explorers and shape it into the future says Babb: “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.” She is essentially saying that the maps represent a feeling of early white supremacy.