How close the past
The last blog post was about buildings of the future, but this one is about maps from the past. And how well old fashioned cartography stacks up to today's technology, actually.
There are plenty of places where you can find old and unusual maps (Strange Maps is an in house favourite at Nestoria), but the collection put together by David Rumsay and Co. is possibly one of the largest offline – he has about 150,000 – just a selection of which he also makes available online as well. His site offers not just the ability to browse old maps, it also layers some of them over Google Maps maps and Google Earth maps, allowing you to see just how closely the old, hand drawn maps match up to the satellite versions. In order to position the maps properly they go though a process called geo-referencing, where the main cities and landmarks are all lined up, and the older maps are, only if necessary, skewed slightly so that they can be laid on top, but the four available for Australia are all quite close to spot on – when it comes to the coastline at least. It's still worth twiddling with the transparency though so you can get a better look at the differences. And taking a moment to consider how big and abstract a task this must have seen to the early cartographers.The first Australian map is of NSW and south eastern Australian, drawn by John Arrowsmith in 1844, and is based on the latest accounts from returning explorers. This was one of the most accurate maps of its time: There's also a 1840 map of maritime Adelaide, which shows tide conditions: And a 1843 map of Western Australia showing the new settlements and the very square way the region was broken up: The last map is of the whole country, drawn in 1842, and coming with extensive notes regarding recent discoveries:
There are about 17,000 maps online at www.davidrumsey.com, and about 120 that have been overlaid onto the Google Maps maps. Her'es where you can find them:
Comments (0)
Posted
by Kat Parr Mackintosh
