 Ian, we're here at the Ocean Map Library and the newest exhibition is Masterpieces at USN. Tell us a little bit about it. Well, this concludes our 20th anniversary here at the University of Southern Maine. So what we wanted to do was have an exhibit that showcased our finest pieces, some of the first maps to depict North America and the world, the best colored maps from our collection and also some of the most spectacular just in terms of size and engraving. And how were these divided up? How was the show divided up? It's divided up into a number of sections. The first section depicts the projection of the world, kind of how early peoples from the 15th century in the Western Hemisphere depicted a three-dimensional surface on a two-dimensional plane. The section section is devoted entirely to what are called double hemisphere maps, which are pretty easy to spot. They're the world in two little circles on a sheet. Then we move into the founding of North America and then conceptualizations of space, whether that's local space or a larger space. After that we have a small portion on Jerusalem and the mapping of the Holy Land. Then we move on to a guest curated portion, which was thought of by Merritt Carey, who works with us, where we have a number of representatives from the Maine legislature and also some fantastic writers represented. You have so many maps here in your collection. How do you go about choosing just the few that are here? It was a very fun project. I got to curate this exhibit. It was a lot of fun. I had a lot of input from all the staff. Basically it ended up with we've got way too many maps for this exhibit and there were some very blunt, well, that one's pretty black and white. How about this nice, pretty one over here? Maybe this first is more important than that first. It was a fun problem to have. These are truly the best of the best? These are the best of the best that you'll see anywhere. Let's take a look at the rest of them. The first stop on our tour is projecting the world. What are we looking at? Here we have two maps. We have the 1482 Ptolemy from the Olm edition and then we have the 1511 Silvanus. These are two very important maps, especially for the early part of projecting the world on a two-dimensional surface. This top map is probably the most recognizable map from the 16th century. As I said, it comes from the Olm edition of Ptolemy. Here we have the culmination of cartographic thought in the Western Hemisphere from the second century all the way up until the 15th. As you can see, we do not yet have the discoveries of the Dutch and the Portuguese around the Horn of Africa. We have India depicted as kind of a landlocked lake and we have information from the adventures of Marco Polo here in Asia with a very well-defined European Mediterranean here. This was what the world was thought of in the Western Hemisphere before the voyage of discovery into the Western Hemisphere. Down here, what we have is kind of how do we take this map, which is kind of very defined by its cosmography, and expand it to include the new world, which is depicted over here. This is also the first map to have ever been printed in two colors. You can see the wonderful blue and red with the very striking letter press here. Over here we have the Terra Sancta, which is the new world of South America and then the islands of the Caribbean depicted as well as the rest of Southern Africa and Asia. There's a lot of embellishments on these maps as well around the edges. Talk about those for a little bit. Yeah, so these are the winds. They're each named. You can see them on both maps. The northern winds were thought to be more fortuitous. The southern winds, especially this one down here in the middle, were thought to be less healthy. They were sometimes referred to as the death winds. Sometimes depicted with skulls as opposed to these wonderful cherubs. Here as well you have them circling. This goes back to the zonal idea from Macrobius. You can see these little lines separating the inhabitable world from the uninhabitable. There's a lot of mythology and faith mixed in with the geography of these maps. How do map makers of this time, how do they collect the information to make these maps? Do you have people collecting bits of information here and there? How does one person collect that information and put it into a map? There's a lot of different ways. But the primary ways were from travel logs and from explorers that came back. As I mentioned, Marco Polo up here. As you can see, once you get out of the Mediterranean on both of these maps, the geography becomes a little bit more suspect. This would be travelers who would come up through the Red Sea or the Nile. Obviously, the Mediterranean was well known. There was a lot of trade through a lot of different countries and a lot of different peoples there. But this is all pretty much kind of hearsay. It is on both these maps put onto a scientific basis, but the actual information that's presented there comes more from travel logs, mythology and kind of ideas about places as opposed to exact notions. Ian, we're now into the double maps, the world divided section, as you called it. What's significant about these kind of maps? These maps were a way to move away from the Ptolemaic idea, which we saw in the first part of the exhibit, into a new way of depicting both the eastern and western hemispheres. It also combined not only the geography, but also the science of the day with a highly artistic element. This top one, which is from the 1633 Mercator-Homdius Atlas, is one of the most sought after and most recognizable pieces from the apex of the Renaissance of Dutch cartography. This is from 1633, and as you can see just by looking at it, the colors are vibrant and it very much blurs the line between cartography and art. It's very desirable. And so not only do you have depicted on here the newest geography, as inaccurate as it may be, you can see California as an island on this one. But also the newest scientific achievements as well as ideas about the world formulated in a more artistic way. And what do these maps mean to convey to people who see them? What they were meant to convey was kind of an encyclopedic knowledge all in one place. So what they were aspiring to do is to present everything they knew all at one time. We have examples that are very large and really do try to display everything. And then some that have a more scientific bent such as this bottom one here. Here we have the zodiac, both the northern and southern hemispheres, as well as natural phenomena along the bottom and astral phenomena along the top. But at the same time on this top one, while we do have some of that up here, we also have the kind of classical depictions of the four elements, fire, air, water, and earth. So it kind of depends on what market they were going for. These were truly commercial objects. Even though on the lower map there's some science in there, there's some mythology as well with the cherubs and all that sort of thing. Yeah, it's interesting. We don't, we move away kind of the geography from the early maps, but we still keep the iconography. You can see the wind heads here. They're still, they've adapted some science to them, but they're still presented in that classical form. We have them over here as well with some lightning clouds and around the map. And at the same time we do have the order of satellites around the sun. So it is a very interesting combination. This is another map from the World Divided section. And this one sort of has additional elements. It sort of personifies the different continents. Talk about that for a little bit. Yeah, so this is DeFair's 1694 map. And going off of that encyclopedic idea that I mentioned earlier, this map contains so much information that it actually requires these panels of text around it to explain everything that's presented in it. And we do have the continents personified, especially along here at the bottom. And it's more detailed than it was in previous double hemisphere maps. Before you perhaps have one or two figures, some Florinfauna. Here we actually have exchanges. So here you can see the New World with the palm trees, some Europeans interacting with Native Americans. And then over on the other side we have depictions of the Holy Land and of Northern Africa. And then at the top of the map we have depictions of what's going on in the heavens, which is interesting. It's again a combination of this classical mythology, as you can see here, with modern science. Here we have a depiction of Jupiter with each of its moons depicted as Roman centurions marching into the center, which is a very nice touch. So these are a historical document, and a science document, and aren't all put together? They're everything all in one. And it's really great because you can look at them from any sort of perspective. You can look at the geography and see, well, what didn't we know? We only have half of Australia. We have, you know, nothing about the western portion of North America. You can look at it from a classic standpoint, see how these figures are portrayed. Or what kind of science did we have in 1694? And you can see that depicted all the way around the map. Also a wonderful example of the engraving abilities of the time. We've now arrived at the North America section of the exhibit. What are we looking at here? Here we have the first two maps ever made of North America of New England. At the bottom is the 1565 map of New England. This is the first that was ever made. And at the top here we have the 1677 foster map. This is the first map that was ever cut and printed in New England itself. And we can see kind of the expansion of knowledge between these two. The bottom one here relies primarily on the voyages of Cartier as well as Verrazano. And this kind of goes into what was going on with information received by the people who were making the maps. The person who made this combined the information from Verrazano and from Cartier. And thus the result was that there was no information between Narragansett Bay and the Bay of Fundy because they combined the two and confused what each one was talking about. So it's a very interesting map in that regard and very beautiful woodcut engraving. Also features a very early depiction of what would later become the Gulf Stream. They didn't know that's what it was at the time. They thought it was a river that ran through the ocean, which is pretty accurate. And the top here we have the first map of New England that was ever made actually in New England. Cape Cod's here so it's oriented north of this way. It's got a beautiful pictorial depiction. And we are actually on this map here in Maine. We're up in this section here. Here's Pemacwood Point all the way up here in Casco Bay. And it's a great map, it's a wonderful map to have and what I love about it is that he apologizes that the geographic information is not as great as it could be because the sources that he had weren't that good. We're looking at a depiction of Cadiz Spain here and it's supposed to be a map but it does look like a map to me. Why is it a map? It's a map. It's what's a part of cartography which is called City of Views. We have a number of them here in the places portion of the exhibit. And they are maps, they are geographical depictions. They were actually started being popular in the 16th century and were very popular again in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. So yes, here we do have Cadiz Spain. This is from Brandon Hogenberg's Cibitates ovis terrarum which was a book of views of cities in Europe at the time. And what Brogdon Hogenberg excelled at in certain of their views was adding in these kind of odd and mythological things here. So Cadiz was a fishing village and so not only do you have the depiction of the city with a nice little key down here telling you what all the buildings are but you also have depictions of the various Cadiz fishing styles. Here we have casting over on this end and here was a style that they I think invented or perfected which was high tide would come in and they would go out and build a wall of stone around an area and so then when the tide went out again the fish would be there ready to pick up and catch. And then we have some depictions of the various people around it. And what I love about these is they add things like this is a very large fish that was it's in Cadiz lore that was caught there at one point in time, a huge fish. And this is a leopard dog and then we have Hercules down at the bottom. So it's very interesting the elements that they add to these views. We've come to the oldest map in the collection. Tell us about this one. It's this map here. This is the 1475 Brandeis map of Palestine. This originally came from a Dutch Bible. It's a wood cut map. This is the original coloring. This has not been touched up. And what it depicts here in the center is the walled city of Jerusalem. And then around it we have various scenes from the Bible especially the Old Testament. Up here we have Moses receiving the tablets on the mount. We have the drowning of the Egyptians in the Red Sea. John the Baptist baptizing the Christ child up here. And then the crucifixion of Christ on Cavalry Hill just below the walled city. So it does have some geographic elements that could be considered correct for the time. It was much more of kind of a stained glass window in map form telling the stories from the Bible. And we've been looking at individual maps now but now we have a couple of atlases which contain many different maps. So talk about these. Well, two we have here. We have Abraham Ortelius's typus obus tererum from 1575. And Gerard de Herde's speculum from about three years later. These are the first two atlases ever made. Ortelius and de Herde here were the first two again in this rise in the low countries of cartography and kind of the commercialization of cartography to establish an order and an index and present all the maps in a similar size and in a uniform variety that was reproduced in volume after volume in addition after addition. Truly groundbreaking forms. And as you can see, they're also wonderfully colored. Ortelius was a much better salesman than de Herde was. The speculum is incredibly rare. And while many scholars of the time consider it to be the better atlas, Ortelius won out kind of with his better capitalist acumen. And how did they organize them in the atlas themselves by geographic region or how did they do that? Yes, Ptolemy, which we saw in the beginning of the exhibit, laid out kind of a prototype for ordering countries. And it started in Western Europe and moved to the Holy Land. But of course, at that point in time, there was no Western Hemisphere and not much was known about Asia. It's actually interesting because neither one of these atlases is actually complete in what they wanted the contents to be. They rely heavily on Eastern and Western Europe, some parts of the Mediterranean, Upper Egypt, where Turkey is today. But then after that, there's only a smattering of information, much heavier focus on South America, for instance, than there is on North America. And in between the two atlases, we have a globe, but not one that you'd expect. Yeah, this is a cute little globe. This is the Blau 1606 Celestial. This is one of the ones that we recently, through an NEH grant, were able to get conservation work done. So this is the best this globe has looked to in anyone's eyes in over 400 years. It's also one of the globes that we've digitized using our new 3D digitization technology that you can actually see, zoom in and spin on our website, as opposed to looking at the beautiful thing behind glass. And what does it depict? It's celestial, so it actually depicts the zodiac, as it was known at the time, again in 1606. It's got beautiful illustrations. There, it's more of a classical zodiac. So while there are some star signs, some constellations that we'd recognize today, there are also a few here that haven't made it through the centuries. And you've curated both of the maps in this exhibition here, but not these in the last few that we're gonna look at. Tell us about the one we're standing in front of now. Right here, this is a 1777 map of Penobskit Bay down east, and this was actually picked by Shelley Pingree, US representative from Maine. And this is part of the exhibit that was thought of by Dr. Matthew Edney and Merritt Carey here at the library. And in this portion, we reached out to the Maine delegation and also to wonderful writers from Maine, Susan Minnott and Monica Wood, and asked them if they would participate and not only pick a map from our collection of an area of the country that spoke to them, but then also write a short little essay about what the map means to them and what space means to them and what they feel when looking at the map and the responses that we got are amazing and beautifully written. When people go through the exhibition and they look at these maps, do you get a lot of people expressing feelings about what the map means to them as they go through? Yeah, it's one of the wonderful parts, especially the North America portion of the exhibit. We get a lot of people reminiscing about vacations they used to take with their loved ones or looking at some place and remembering something that's been buried inside for a long time. And I think the entire exhibit when put together really acts on that innate need to have an association with space and place and what that means for our self-identity. And where can people get more information about the exhibit and when does it end? You can get more information on the exhibit on our website, www.oshermaps.org, and the exhibit ends in March.