num_pages: 319
description: For three centuries the mapping of America would tell an unfolding story of daring exploration, tenacious settlement, and fierce colonial rivalry. And fortuitously, during this same period, cartography itself--both as a science and an art form--would come of age and would thus dedicate some of the most dazzling artifacts produced in its long history to the subject of America.The maps faithfully reproduced in this book summarize this great enterprise. They document both the steady growth of geographic knowledge and the uncanny persistence of geographic fantasy. (Almost until the American Revolution, for example, California was still widely held to be an enormous island, and many people believed that the fabled Northwest Passage flowed into the Pacific in the vicinity of what is now Seattle.) And simultaneously they document the flowering of the mapmaker's art, as such pioneer cartographers as Waldseemuller, Ortelius, Mercator, Captain John Smith, de Champlain, the Blaeus and others, in increasing numbers, cast aside the orthodoxies that had shackled men's minds since the days of Ptolemy and stove to understand the world afresh.
language: English
title: The Cartography of North America: 1500-1800
publisher: World Publications Group