How Maps helped in discovering Canada

1701

Canada’s discovery as a territory dates back to the time when people and maps played an important role in turning pages. The discovery and exploration of Canada have been an involved process, in which sailors, traders, scientists, and adventurers of many different nationalities were involved.

Several fascinating stories of people, their age-old beliefs, and maps have helped shape this nation as we know it today. Adam Shoalts, one of Canada’s principal explorers, tells stories behind these centuries-old maps, and how this mysterious land later came to be known as Canada.

Since every map tells a story and every map has a purpose, this article about Canada will take you somewhere you have never been before. It’s not only an account of what you know and what you have heard but also a trace of what you often look for.

It’s a story that will surprise readers, and reveal the Canada we never knew was hidden. It brings to life the characters and the bloody disputes that forged our history, by showing us what the world looked like before it entered the history books. Combining storytelling, cartography, geography, archaeology and of course history, this article has all the inputs from sources that show us Canada as if for the first time.

The Emergence Of Canada

Jacques Cartier generated geographical knowledge through his voyages. His expeditions led to the invention of world maps that not only showed the Old World continents of Europe, Africa, and Asia but much of northeastern North America as well. Cartier also showed ‘Canada’ on the map. This not only enhanced geographical knowledge but also helped in transporting Iroquoian people to France and spreading native geographic knowledge beyond boundaries.

By that time, the world was shrinking and the mysteries of what laid beyond the oceans were gradually being solved. This was illustrated in the new world maps in 1550 by the French cartographer Pierre Desceliers, perhaps forcefully. Desceliers’ major creation measuring 7✕ 4.5 feet, which was a special project made for the French king, Henri Ⅱ. Desceliers incorporated Cartier’s discoveries into his map and exhibited Canada in a global context for the first time. This map combined the latest in cartographic discoveries with fantastic illustrations of animals and sea creatures. The portion of the map showing the New World had ‘Canada’ prominently labeled.

Geography Behind The Map

The first look of the map can be somewhat confusing but the key to deciphering it is to flip it upside down. Unlike modern-day maps, this map has its south-oriented at the top and north of the map is at the bottom. Turning it upside down can help us recognize the blurred outlines of eastern North America from the Florida peninsula all the way up to Labrador.

Other aspects of the map appear more imaginative. There are unicorns roaming the wilderness, explorers hunting ostrich-like birds, palm trees, and strange beehive-like dwellings. In the sea is a fierce toothed whale with two blowholes spouting water. Labrador has more realistic bears, with two adrift on an ice floe and one on the shore.

David Thompson’s Crowning Achievement

In 1814, Thompson’s wide-ranging explorations in western North America found eloquent expression in what was regarded as one of the greatest maps ever made. Based on his years of exploration across a vast area, Thompson created an enormous, five-by-three meter map showing what is now western Canada. For this, there were thousands of painstaking astronomical observations taken under conceivable difficulty — swarms of blackflies and mosquitoes in summer, freezing gales in winter — and reports from other explorers and aboriginal guides.

To make this huge map, he glued together twenty-five separate sheets of paper, and with an ink, he drew the principal rivers, lakes, mountain chains, and canoe routes from Lake Superior to Hudson Bay and westward to the Pacific. The finished map, a prized possession of the North West Company, was by far the most accurate ever made of western North America up to that time and remained so for nearly fifty years.

Today it sits carefully protected in a humidity and temperature-controlled glass case in Toronto, one of the most treasured artifacts in Ontario’s provincial archives. Thompson drew on it a wealth of new geographic information — including remarkably detailed outlines of Lakes Winnipeg and Superior, the course of the Saskatchewan River snaking across the Great Plains, the forbidding Athabasca Pass that he charted through the Rockies, and a great river plunging through what is now the heart of British Columbia to the seacoast — what Thompson named the Fraser River, after his friend Simon Fraser, who had risked his life descending it in 1808.

Unfortunately, the time has not been kind to this more than two-hundred-year-old map despite careful preservation, it has faded and is now difficult to reproduce. But it would be unthinkable to write about maps in Canada and not include Thompson’s greatest accomplishment.

Mapping The Arctic Frontier

The adventures, follies, tragedies and heroic accomplishments of the first phase of this ‘golden age’ of Arctic exploration are told in a splendid 1828 map that accompanied the publication of Franklin’s account of his explorations. The map reveals the complete outline of Hudson Bay, including the westward indent of Chesterfield inlet, which geographers had earlier hoped might prove to be a passage straight across the continent to the Pacific.

To the west, across the barren interior, lie the vast inland waters of Great Slave and Great Bear Lake; traced on the map through these are Franklin’s exploration routes down the Coppermine to the Arctic Ocean, his overland traverse from the Hood River back to Fort Enterprise, and his later 11825 exploration down the Mackenzie River, along the Arctic coastline, and through Great Bear.

The map’s details, given improvements in the measuring of latitude and longitude, are thoroughly impressive.  Most strikingly, the Northwest Passage itself remains uncharted, the impenetrable ice having so far defeated all attempts to find a way through the ice from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

As for the Canadians who had accompanied Franklin and performed explorations never thought of these icy lands as part of Canada. To them, Canada was a land far away in the southeast: the forests and farms of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence corridor. And although by the time of Franklin’s journeys the Canadians had formed a strong sense of their own identity, with their own set of folk heroes, songs, customs, and even national symbol, they never thought that Canada would one day claim an empire of its own. However, in their journeys far beyond the country’s existing limits, these voyageurs and explorers were inadvertently planting the seeds of a new and greatly enlarged Canada—an idea that, in just a few generations, would germinate into Canadian Confederation. Alexander Mackenzie had earlier envisioned something like it, and by the 1860s his colonial successors spoke openly of building a transcontinental nation: an expanded Canada that would claim as its own the lands explored by generations of its explorers, voyageurs, and fur traders—including, ultimately, the farthest reaches of the Arctic. It’s a legacy that, for better or worse, created the modern Canada we know today.

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