This made for greater accuracy, especially crucial to nautical maps, which were in turn basic to successful ocean crossings and harbor arrivals. Many of these developments and more are alluded to by the material in the exhibition and the well-written labels accompanying each display. It ends with several handsome late 18th-century city maps of Washington by Andrew Ellicott, laid out according to L'Enfant's crisply geometric plan. In between it is hard not to be struck, as one often is with antiquarian maps, by the desperate elasticity that the earth's topography can assume in the human imagination, driven by ignorance or need. Certain facts, like the Great Lakes, come into focus as the show proceeds.
Nationalistic skirmishes are also visible.
Certain Dutch and French maps made after 1664 fail to note that New Amsterdam has become New York. Luckily the maps themselves continually offer respite from their own complex histories. Among the several maps by Seller, a hand-colored rendering of the constellations of the Zodiac is striking for soft, drifting images. And after watching the metamorphosis of Delaware Bay, it is very gratifying to come across Andrew Shape Hammonds's 1779 nautical chart, with its spare, succinct, delicately textured indications of coastline, sandbars and shoals. It is exceedingly beautiful but also assured, clearly designed to guide its users to comfortable landings.