MORE HISTORY
about Map MakingThe following
excerpts come from: The Story of the Windrose, Antique Maps, by
Carl Moreland and David Bannister, 1993, Phaidon Press Limited, ISBN .
Scanned images of maps come from: Decorative Printed Maps of the
15th to 18th Centuries, R.A. Skelton, F.S.A.,
Superintendant of the Map Room, British Museum, 1965, Spring Books.
"[Those] new to our subject may wonder about the significance of those figureheads
symbolizing the winds which frequently border fifteenth- and sixteenth-century maps.
In seeking their origins it soon becomes apparent that here, myth, legend and historical
fact intermingle and, as so often happens in studies of cartography, we have to start by
going back to the earliest days of the Greek world."
"In classical lore the names of the four principal winds - Boreas (north), Notos
(south), Eurus (east) and Zephyrus (west) are ascribed to Homer who told of Aeolus, the
son of Hippotes, the father of the winds. Aeolos, it was said, jealously guarded the
winds in a remote cave in Thrace, but was prevailed upon to release them as a gift to
Odysseus who had long awaited a favourable wind to take him on the next stage of his
Aegean adventures."
"Life for the peoples of the Mediterranean was inseparable from the sea; Minoans,
Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans all left their mark and all were dependent for survival at
sea on their knowledge of the winds. The Greeks - who deified the winds - developed and
refined the basic idea of the four principal winds by adding others adjusted to the summer
and winter sunrise and sunset, roughly equivalent to the north-west, north-east,
south-west and south-east."
"From the earliest times the 'winds' became synonymous with 'direction' and chart
makers must have soon found that it was convenient to combine indications of direction
with the names of the winds: in consequence, the windrose took shape. One of the
earliest, consisting of twelve winds, was set out by Timosthenes of Rhodes, a Greek
admiral of the third century BC on whose work Marinus of Tyre is said to have relied for
calculations of distances in the eastern Mediterranean. These in turn were accepted by
Ptolemy in compiling his Geographia."
[Click on thumbnail above to see Geographia map]
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"Charlemagne is said to have introduced new Frankish names for the 12 point
windrose and, centuries later, traders from the Low Countries started to use their
equivalent of the modern English terms North, South, East and West for the four principal
winds. About the end of the 13th century the discovery of the magnetic compass
finally enabled sailors to plot a more accurate course even if they were still reliant on
wind power. In the new era the windrose was combined with a compass card with as
many as 32 directional points but it seems that its use was not always welcome."
"Traditional knowledge of the winds gained over many centuries was not to be
discarded lightly and there was always suspicion of the accuracy of the compass itself
due, no doubt, to magnetic variation, then, of course, not understood. In fact, the
use of the wind names persisted for centuries and appeared on most of the first printed
world maps."
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"By the fourth quarter of the 16th century the classical 'wind-blowers' had
outlived their time and were giving way to other more abstract forms of decoration.
About the same time the compass rose, which of course had long appeared on portulan and
manuscript sea charts, finally displaced the windrose and for centuries became an
essential and highly decorative feature of printed charts and of many other maps which
included an area of sea." |
