later the cartographer Herman Moll (ca. 1654–1732) popularized
“embellished.” Colton’s Illustrated & Embellished Steel Plate Map
in A New and Exact Map of the Dominions of the King of Great
of the World on Mercator’s Projection was compiled, drawn, and
Britain on ye Continent of America, printed in 1715 and reissued
engraved by D. Griffing Johnson and published in New York in 1854
with minor revisions for decades afterward (fig. 9). These animals
by J. H. Colton, the founder of an American mapmaking company
were thought to possess a great intelligence and were considered
that was an international leader between 1831 and 1890 (plate 26).
models of hard work and natural skill, and that is why they appear
Cartouches interlaced by filigree frame the map, and as with Dutch
as a well-orchestrated group with each in charge of a task: felling the
map borders, cities and peoples are illustrated all around. At the
trees, cutting or carrying the branches, making mortar, and so forth,
top center the landing of Columbus is flanked by London and New
under the strict direction of the “commandant or architect” that
Orleans (left), and St. Petersburg and Paris (right). In the lower margin
gives instructions with its raised forepaw. There is even a beaver that
appear Constantinople, Naples, New York, Rome, and Canton. On
lies incapacitated from overwork, and two others are approaching it
the laterals there are different people: American Indian and Turkish
to inspect. As J. Brian Harley commented, this scene “might merely
(left), a nd Swiss, Circassian, Greek, and Mandarin (right).
Although stylistically these images are very far from those that
suggest an interest in natural history, or that the fur trade was a
source of wealth to some of the atlas patrons. Yet a closer look
framed sixteenth- and seventeenth-century maps, the same spirit
shows an absence of people and especially of the native Americans
that moved those cartographers to include marginalia in their maps
upon whom the fur trade depended. In the final analysis, unless the
seems to underlie the maps of the mid-nineteenth century. Not in
beavers are intended as symbol for the hard-working Europeans, it
vain, the subtitle of this world map, which reads Compiled from the
is just as likely that it was this negative aspect, the absence of people,
Latest & Most Authentic Sources Exhibiting the Recent Arctic and
which entered the reader’s consciousness … Such images, associated
Antarctic Discoveries & Explorations, seems to evoke Ortelius’s
with the representation of the territory on the map, and becoming
words in his 1564 world map, in which he included the images of
part of the process of persuasion and mythmaking, rendered
Cuzco and Tenochtitlan “as they have come to us and that we can
legitimate the holding of English colonies in America.”
consider as genuine.”
If in Châtelain’s 1719 world map it was the lavishly marginal
illustrations that made it “very curious,” more than a century
later, artistic marginalia again defined another map, this time as
21