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48HISTORY
NORTHWEST
ORIENTATIONS
THE SURPRISINGLY BEAUTIFUL WORLD OF CARTOGRAPHY
by Tom Quinn
NCE UPON A TIME , THE MAKING OF MAPS WAS AS MUCH AN ART AS A SCIENCE .
In 1502 , Leonardo da Vinci drew a map of the city of Imola that was not only militarily useful for his client , Cesare Borgia , but was as beautiful as his finest drawings . Several of Vermeer ’ s paintings of middleclass Dutch homes include intricate maps , a popular decoration at the time . In “ The Art of Painting ,” a large map of the Dutch Republic hangs on the far wall , with the west coast at the top . Old even then , the map has a conspicuous crack running down the center , representing the division that occurred between the northern and southern provinces in 1648 .
The Pacific Northwest has been heavily charted since its earliest habitation . Even the indigenous tribes made crude maps , some of which were useful to Lewis and Clark . The first professional maps of the region were made by English cartographers in the 18th century . In 1778 , Captain James Cook sailed along the coast of what is today Washington State , hoping to find a passage said to have been discovered in the late 16th century by a Greek explorer with the Spanish name of Juan de Fuca . Finding no such passage , Cook concluded that it didn ’ t exist . But nine years later , a fur trader named Charles Barkley found a waterway there and named it after his predecessor . He was followed in 1792 by another explorer , George Vancouver , who surveyed the coastline and gave names to several geographic features , including Puget Sound , Mount Rainier , and Whidbey Island .
48 ART CHOWDER MAGAZINE