Trailblazers’ Wakes: Ship Tracks in Western Imperial Mapping

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Acknowledgements

The author is currently in receipt of a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (PF22\220060).

Notes

1 Hugo Grotius, Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty, ed. Martine Julia van Ittersum, trans. Gwladys L. Williams (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006 [1950]), 334. In the original Latin, the term he used for ‘track’ was ‘vestigium’, meaning ‘trace’: ‘Sed nemo nescit navem per mare transeuntem non plus juris quam vestigii relinquere.’ Hugo Grotius, Hugonis Grotii De Jure Praedae Commentarius, ed. H. G. Hamaker (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1868), 228.

2 Pietro Janni, La mappa e il periplo: Cartografia antica e spazio odologico (Rome: Bretschneider, 1984); Kai Brodersen, Terra Cognita: Studien zur römischen Raumerfassung (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1995).

3 Franz Cumont, ‘Fragment de bouclier portant une liste d'étapes,’ Syria 6:1 (1925), 5–8; Benet Salway, ‘Sea and River Travel in the Roman Itinerary Literature,’ in Space in the Roman Word: Its Perception and Presentation, eds. Richard Talbert and Kai Brodersen (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2004), 92–5.

4 Richard J. A. Talbert, Rome’s World: The Peutinger Map Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Benet Salway, ‘The Nature and Genesis of the Peutinger Map,’ Imago Mundi 57:2 (2005): 119–135; Annalina Levi and Mario Levi, Itineraria picta: Contributo allo studio della Tabula Peutingeriana (Rome: ‘L’Erma’ di Bretschneider, 1967); Emily Albu, The Medieval Peutinger Map: Imperial Roman Revival in a German Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

5 Catherine Delano-Smith, ‘Milieus of Mobility: Itineraries, Route Maps, and Road Maps,’ in Cartographies of Travel and Navigation, ed. James R. Akerman (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 29–33, 58–9.

6 Photographs and detailed layer analysis of the original can be viewed at ‘Explore Peutinger's Roman Map,’ Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, https://isaw.nyu.edu/exhibitions/space/tpeut.html; and ‘The Complete Tabula Peutingeriana,’ Euratlas, https://www.euratlas.net/cartogra/peutinger/.

7 Salway, ‘Sea and River Travel,’ 86–92.

8 Richard Vaughan, Matthew Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979 [1958]), 235–50; Suzanne Lewis, The Art of Matthew Paris in the Chronica Majora (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1987), 321–76; Daniel K. Connolly, ‘Imagined Pilgrimage in the Itinerary Maps of Matthew Paris,’ The Art Bulletin 81:4 (1999): 598–622; Michael Gaudio, ‘Matthew Paris and the Cartography of the Margins,’ Gesta 39:1 (2000): 50–7.

9 Jan Mokre, ‘Globen als Repräsentationen des Zeitalters der europäischen Expansion,’ in Kartographie der Frühen Neuzeit: Weltbilder und Wirkungen, eds. Michael Bischoff, Vera Lüpkes and Wolfgang Crom (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 2015), 56. For an example of Agnese’s planispheres, see e.g. Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Battista Agnese, Atlas Universalis, 1542–52, Cim. 18 (= 2° Cod. ms. 337a), f. 17, available open access: https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/10934/.

10 René Tebel, Das Schiff im Kartenbild des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit: Kartographische Zeugnisse aus sieben Jahrhunderten als maritimhistorische Bildquellen (Bremerhaven: Deutsches Schiffahrstmuseum, 2012), 102–5.

11 Jordana Dym, Mapping Travel: The Origins and Conventions of Western Journey Maps (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 22–34, 37–8.

12 There is some slight circumstantial evidence for transmission which unfortunately I do not have the space to discuss here. See Sara Caputo, Tracks on the Ocean (London: Profile Books, forthcoming), ch. 2.

13 On chart pricking see Tony Campbell, ‘Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500’, in The History of Cartography, Volume I: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, eds. J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 443–4; Ramon J. Pujades I Bataller, Les cartes portolanes: La representació medieval d’una mar solcada (Barcelona: Institut Cartogràfic de Catalunya, 2007), 166–7, 462.

14 Paul Carter, ‘Dark with Excess of Bright: Mapping the Coastlines of Knowledge,’ in Mappings, ed. Denis Cosgrove (London: Reaktion, 1999), 125–32.

15 On the distinction between ‘modes’ of mapping, see Matthew H. Edney, Cartography: The Ideal and Its History (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2019).

16 See Sara Caputo, ‘Human Tales on the Pathless Sea?: Imperial Subjectivities and Exploration Ship Tracks in European Maritime Mapping, c.1500–c.1800,’ The English Historical Review (forthcoming).

17 Richard Sorrenson, ‘The Ship as a Scientific Instrument in the Eighteenth Century,’ Osiris 11 (1996): 221–36; Bruno Latour, ‘Drawing Things Together,’ in Representation in Scientific Practice, eds. Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1988), 19–68.

18 For a more detailed discussion see Caputo, Tracks on the Ocean, chs 3 and 5.

19 See, e.g., the central legend in Matthew Flinders, ‘General Chart of Terra Australis or Australia … ,’ in Matthew Flinders, A Voyage to Terra Australis, 2 vols. and Atlas (London: G. and W. Nicol, 1814), Atlas, viewable at ‘Encounter 1802–2002’, State Library of South Australia, https://encounter.collections.slsa.sa.gov.au/collection/B12985211_92.pdf.

20 Sara Caputo, ‘From Surveying to Surveillance: Maritime Cartography and Naval (Self-)Tracking in the Long Nineteenth Century,’ Past & Present (forthcoming).