"Maps show dragon-filled oceans, imagined boundaries" by William
Tuthill, Lancaster Intelligencer Journal, February 19, 1993,
"Happenings," pp. 8-16.
 
     Almost as much as the explorers' ships and weapons, maps
were powerful tools of conquest between the 13th and 17th
centuries.
     An exhibit how at Millersville University shows how Europe-
ans used maps to support their adventures in the Americas during
that time.
     Following Christopher Columbus' voyages, maps were used to
justify imperial and evangelistic ambitions in a land thought to
be devoid of civilization and religion.
     European names and symbols were attached to the New World,
helping to make the native cultures seem like aliens.  Some maps
show monsters and boiling ocean water, drawn to discourage other
explorers and protect trade routes.
     The exhibit, called "Maps and the Columbian Encounter," also
shows how native societies were drawing their own maps of the
world.  These were based on cosmological space rather than
realistic depictions of land.
     The exhibit, part of the university's commemoration of the
500th anniversary of Columbus; arrival in America, is on display
at Breidenstine Hall through March 1.
     Instead of the maps themselves, facsimiles are displayed,
making the exhibit relatively easy to transport and mount.  The
text, though dense and sometimes hard to see, is well-written and
worth the effort.
     What the exhibit shows is a clash between cultures and
ideologies that followed Columbus's landing, and a picture of the
cultures' imaginations, stereotypes and world views.
     Most of the maps would not help the navigator get from one
point to another.  Instead, they are pictorial depictions of how
the world was thought to be at the time, or how it ought to be.
     "When I was a kid drawing maps, I designed them the way I
thought the land should be," said Thomas C. Tirado, a history
professor at MU who specializes in Latin America and colonial
American history.
     The Europeans in America tried to fit what they had discov-
ered into what they imagined the place to be, Tirado said.  Their
early maps shoe lands of lush beauty, with gardens and unspoiled
rivers alive with jumping fish--in contrast to the despoiled and
plague-ravaged land they left behind.
     "When the Europeans arrived in the Caribbean, that was about
the closest anyone would come to Paradise," Tirado said.  "They
thought they were on the doorstep of actually finding the Garden
of Eden.  That's how active their imaginations were."
     But trying to fit the New World into the European mind
proved challenging, Tirado said.  "They found a whole race of
people not accounted for in the biblical scheme of things," he
said.  "They had a hard time fathoming it."
     Like 13th-century Christian maps with Jerusalem at the
center of the world, Meso-American depictions were similarly
egocentric.  The exhibit includes an Aztec view of the world,
called the Codex Fejervay-Mayer.
     The Codex shows the Fire or Year Lord at the center of the
universe. Around the center is a complex system of knowledge and
belief.  It is the cosmos of a people who saw themselves at the
navel of the world.
     There is a scarcity of maps by North American Indians, a
fact that Tirado attributes to their unawareness of civilizations
beyond their shores.
     "They had very limited ideas as to what was beyond their
immediate region," Tirado said.  "They were content with what
they had."
     Charles Geiger, chairman of Millersville's geography depart-
ment, said that although people are more objective today than 500
years ago, maps are still used to get across certain ideas.
     The maps in the "Columbian Encounter" exhibit were geared
toward religious and political beliefs of the time, Geiger said. 
But the contemporary viewer can learn from it, he said, and
always be aware of the mapmaker's point of view.