Book Review: North American exploration, vol. I: A new world disclosed, The history of cartography, vol. II, book 3: Cartography in the traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific societies

Abstract

I had the good fortune of being asked to review these two magisterial volumes, and now have the great misfortune of having to do so in 1500 words. A new world disclosed forms part of an ambitious three-volume scholarly overview of the history of North American exploration, and Cartography in the traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific societies is the fourth volume in the stunning History of Cartography project that was inaugurated by David Woodward and the late Brian Harley in the 1980s. Both of these volumes draw together an impressive range of work by eminent scholars from a variety of disciplines, and both of them are bound to become seminal reference works in their respective fields of exploration and cartography. The former project, we are told, is the first of its kind for over 100 years, and one has to go back to Bruno Adler’s pathbreaking ‘Maps of primitive peoples’ (1910) to find a work on ‘traditional’ cartography that has a global reach. A new world disclosed contains eight long chapters on processes of exploration from the pre-Columbian era of European contact to the close of what John Parry dubbed ‘the age of reconnaissance’ in the mid-seventeenth century, and an introduction by the editor, John Allen, which explains that the volume ‘emphasizes the role of the human imagination in exploration as much as it features observations and experience.’ I can think of few better scholarly syntheses of Europe’s early engagement with this part of the world than Alan McPherson’s assiduous reconstruction of the Norse voyages of the tenth and eleventh centuries, David Beers Quinn’s finely crafted exposition of Europe’s fixation with the Northwest Passage, or Karen Ordahl Kupperman’s wide-ranging discussion of how the Atlantic seaboard was brought into European focus. All of the chapters seek to take stock of current scholarship and debates about the meaning of exploration in an accessible fashion, and all of them are attentive to the reciprocal constitution of text and context. One can tease out of these chapters