Like many readers of The Beaver, I have long been a lover of historical atlases. My reference shelves include the classic, three-volume Historical Atlas of Canada from University of Toronto Press and three similarly styled atlases by the indefatigable Derek Hayes (on Canada, the Arctic, and explorer Alexander MacKenzie).
Would I need yet another work in this vein? I thought not.
But now, having perused Mapping a Continent, a see that I was wrong. By treating North America as a single entity, and by looking at the period from 1492 to 1814, this volume fills a gap I did not know existed.
With a good historical atlas, you don't read history; rather, you watch it unfold. Here, you watch as the French, having settled the St. Lawrence River Valley, find themselves hemmed in to the west by the Hudson's Bay Company and the fur-trading Scots. You watch as they turn south and follow the Mississippi River to Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico.
To see this happen, through a combination of narrative and maps, is entrancing -- quite magical.
Yes, the book takes a European perspective -- the only one viable. It opens around the time of Christopher Columbus, when, as far as map-makers were concerned, North America did not exist. According to a map of the world from the Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493, inspired by Claudius Ptolemy and the Old Testament, the earth centres on Jerusalem and includes an earthly paradise to the east where the sun rises.
We realize that, from the outset, ideology drove map-making: For fifteenth-century Europeans, the world comprised three continents -- Europe, Asia, and Africa -- as originally divied among the three sons of Noah. In truth, of course, the Vikings of northern Europe had long since reached North America and had established a short-lived settlement in Greenland -- but of this most of Europe remained ignorant.
Moving forward with explorers, we see North America appear on the horizon -- first through a fog, but then more and more clearly. By 1678, as the quest for fur-trade riches and a fabled route to the Orient continued, map-makers had revolutionized the European conception of North America.
The charts of Samuel de Champlain, Jacques Marquette, and Louis Jolliet, among others, caused mountain ranges to disappear, native people to emerge out of the forests, and a majestic river, the Mississippi, to take shape.
The authors show how, as the French, the English, and later, the Americans vied for control of the emerging continent, maps became propaganda tools. One drawn from an English perspective has the British colonies covering far more territory than they do on a French map. And now we see why much of the border between Canada and the U.S. follows the 49th parallel -- not by chance, but because that imaginary line roughly traces a watershed through the heart of the continent, with rivers draining north on one side, south on the other.
This book demonstrates, yet again, that geography is crucially important to history, and that a map can be both a synthesis of geographical knowledge and a symbolic weapon.
In that context Mapping a Continent can certainly be viewed as history with a French accent. When the authors write, for example, of Samuel Hearne ceding Fort Prince of Wales to an overwhelming French force, they do not mention that the invaders then razed the fur-trading post, thereby wreaking pointless death and destruction among native peoples.
But this is desperation quibbling. Mapping a Continent is a prodigious work -- gorgeous, authoritative, and necessary. May it find the vast audiences it deserves.
- Ken McGoogan, The Beaver, Special Collector's Issue, February - March 2008
