New Found Lands : Maps in the History of Exploration

This work provides an intellectual context of exploration. The author asks, how did explorers and their patrons understand the expanding world and their place in it? What were they really seeking, and how did they believe they could achieve it? How did they balance the known and the unknown in their minds? Historical maps are important in answering these questions, and this book displays the geographical ideas of the explorers themselves, through the maps they used or the new maps which they caused to be made. The power that came with increasing technological and geographical knowledge is made plain by the European empires that grew out of conquest, annexation and exploitation. There are maps, which although they seem innacurate and imaginative, serve as reminders of the gaps in people's knowledge. Up until very recent times, as maps show, there have been areas of the world remaining to be explored and "new found lands" to discover.

Patterns of growth, power, and conquest, writes cartographic historian Whitfield, can be discerned in changing maps of the world, from that of the medieval Islamic geographer al-Idrisi to the latest Landsat images from NASA. In this scholarly, heavily illustrated survey, Whitfield traces this changing map of the globe from its origins in the ancient Near East to the present. He gives particular attention to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, when several nations, motivated by reasons of economy and ideology, vied to complete that map with explorations in East Asia and the Americas. --Gregory McNamee