Slide Sets

Usually, advances in the human condition result from discovering truth. Sometimes, however, misunderstandings can have a powerful impact on human endeavors over time. Misconceptions in early cartographic efforts concerning the Great Lakes area are cases in point.

In the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, French and English explorers diligently searched for a North American water route from the Atlantic Ocean to Asia by proceeding up the St. Lawrence River and westward through the Great Lakes. The cartographic record of the westward reconnaissance was often starkly at odds with geographical reality. Working with scanty and often conflicting information, primitive instruments and misplaced hope, in many ways it is to the credit of early map-makers that they did as well as they did. It may even have been that cartographic misconceptions encouraged more rapid and thorough European exploration of the Great Lakes region than would have otherwise been the case. The most important of these misconceptions derived from the long-held hope for an all-water route affording passage through North America from the Atlantic Ocean westward to the East Indies.

This slide set includes six representative printed maps that portrayed feasible water routes from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean through the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes. Though often based on the best available information, these maps show that geographical exploration was facilitated not only by truth and accuracy, but also by reasonable fallacies.

Toward the end of the 15th century, European exploration was prompted by the goal of finding suitable routes to Asia and its rich trade goods. The Portuguese achieved the first success by rounding Africa to the south and thence to East Asia via the Indian Ocean. Envious competing maritime nations tried other ways of attaining routes to the riches of the Orient. Going to the East by traveling west was an idea that predated Columbus. But of course his voyages succeeded only in establishing the existence of a previously undiscerned barrier. The cartographic record reveals that, once initial contacts had been made with this "New World," Europeans struggled to comprehend its shape and extent. At first, they believed that the "American" land barrier consisted of a series of separate islands, thought to be rather limited in size and quite close to the Asian continent.

Further exploration quickly led to the realization that this barrier was a vast one. Still, it was believed that passages existed through which ships could navigate successfully to the East Indies. Much of this New World was also though narrow enough to allow the overland portage of supplies and even boats over relatively short distances between the oceans or waterways draining into them. Balboa's crossing of the Isthmus of Panama in 1513 established the existence of at least one such potential portage route.

The Florentian Giovanni da Verrazano was employed by the French to find a water route to Asia five years after Balboa's discovery. A scouting party of his men crossed the peninsula between the Chesapeake and Delaware bays and mistook it to be an isthmus to the Pacific Ocean similar to that of Panama. Cartographers, relying on charts made by Girolano Verrazano, brother of Giovanni, placed a sea extending from the Pacific Ocean just to the west of this peninsula (Slide 1). French exploration of North America in search of an all-water link to this sea or some other like it proceeded to the north. Two approaches to the Indies were tested. First, there were those who ventured into the Arctic. This northwest passage unfortunately proved to be ice-choked for most of the year.

The second alternative was to explore the St. Lawrence westward to its source. The broad estuary of this river seemed to imply excellent possibilities for a water route to a western sea. It was Jacques Cartier (in 1534) who noted the possibility that the St. Lawrence estuary would provide the elusive water passage to India (Slide 2). The later discovery of very large bodies of water far upstream (the Great Lakes) seemed to bear out these conjectures and led to expanded efforts to explore and map the region. One of the most influential maps of the region at this time was that published in 1612 by Samuel de Champlain (Slide 3).

Explorations to the western part of Lake Superior (the largest and westernmost of the Great Lakes) revealed that another river system was separated by the westernmost heights in what is now Minnesota and Manitoba, Canada. Where did this watershed system drain? Clearly the possibility existed that this mysterious river system might provide a passage to the Pacific Ocean. Further exploration revealed that these rivers just west of Lake Superior did not, in fact, lead to the Pacific Ocean. Some ran north to Hudson's Bay and the Arctic Sea. Most ran south into the Mississippi River watershed and the Gulf of Mexico.

That these rivers ran south via the Mississippi was obscured for some period of time by information that discouraged the idea of a large river emptying into the Gulf of Mexico (which is the outlet for the Mississippi). The map published by Nicolas Sanson in 1650 is a case in point. The conventional belief for over a century was that a group of smaller rivers were surrounded and hemmed in by a semicircular mountain range arching from the southern Appalachians to what is now Texas (Slide 4).

When Louis Joliet and other explorers were finally able to trace much of the route of the Mississippi River nearly to its mouth, one of the participants in this saga was a Roman Catholic priest, Louis Hennepin. Hennepin's missions, explorations, and capture by Native Americans, his torture and eventual rescue were described in a book, Nouvelle decouverte d'un tres grand pays situé dans l'Amérique (Utrecht, 1697). Hennepin's book included an influential map (Slide 5) that misplaced the course of the river hundreds of miles to the west and placed its source too far north.

Shortly after Hennepin, Baron Louis de Lahontan published a journal, Nouveaux voyages de Mr. le Baron de Lahontan dans l'Amerique Sepentrionale (The Hague, 1703), with a map showing a long western river system linking the two westernmost Great Lakes (Superior and Michigan), via minor portages, to the Pacific (Slide 6).

Half a century later, the passage to India was still beckoning explorers to the western regions beyond the Great Lakes. In 1756, one James Maury made plans, never realized, to explore westward with a group working for the Loyal Company of Virginia for the purpose of determining whether or not the Missouri River could form a "communication" with the Pacific Ocean. Maury was also tutor to ten-year-old Thomas Jefferson, who, as President of the United States in 1804, sponsored the expedition up the Missouri that realized his tutor's dream. We know this as the Lewis and Clark Expedition. One of its main objects was to determine whether or not there was a water route to Asia located west of the Great Lakes. When Lewis and Clark crossed the Rocky Mountain Divide, the centuries-old dream was finally laid to rest. The height of these Rockies and lack of any low pass made it evident that there was no water route, or anything like it, across the North American continent.

Among the earliest maps of America to be widely distributed was Sebastian Münster's map of the "New Islands," which first appeared in his 1542 edition of Claudius Ptolemy's Geographia. This copy is from the 1550 edition of Münster's general encyclopedia, the Cosmographia universalis.

The map shows a number of features instantly recognizable to modern eyes. North and South America are shown as separate continents and connected by a narrow isthmus. The Pacific Ocean (Mare pacificum) and the Strait of Magellan (Fretum Magaliani) at the tip of South America are marked. But so is a South American "Region of Giant" (Regio Gigantum) south of what became named as the Amazon River. In the eastern part of what is now Brazil, a cannibal (canibali) food cache complete with severed head and leg, adds a discomforting touch. A Portuguese standard waves to the right, seeming to point at the gruesome scene.

Columbus operated on the assumption that the west coast of Europe and the east coast of Asia were temptingly close to each other. By extension, post-Columbian cartography conceived of America either as Asia itself, as a previously unknown part of Asia, or as a near neighbor of Asia. The Münster map repeated this last view. The western shores of North America lie supposedly close to a rectangular Japan (Zipangri), set, following Marco Polo's description of the east coast of Asia, in an archipelago of thousands of islands. India and Cathay are likewise nearby to the west-in fact, nearer to America than Ireland (Hibernia) and Spain (Hispania) are to the east.

But how to get to Asia from Europe? Going west, a European explorer would bump into North America. According to Münster, only a narrow isthmus separated the "Terra Florida" part of North America from the French portion ("Francisca"). This isthmus appears on the map as a result of the 1524 explorations of Giovanni da Verrazano, an Italian in the service of the French, as he searched unsuccessfully for a western route to China along the North Atlantic coastline. One dark night, as his ship plied north along the Virginia shores, it passed across the Chesapeake Bay mouth without anyone on board seeing it. Further up the coast Verrazano anchored offshore and sent an exploratory party to scout what was actually the peninsula between the Atlantic Ocean and Chesapeake Bay. When his astonished men came onto the large seawater estuary with no other land in sight in all directions, it was decided that this constituted the western sea leading to the East Indies.

Verrzano felt that he had made a discovery equivalent to Francisco Balboa's 1513 crossing of the isthmus of Panama. Verrazano's brother Girolamo quickly put the "Sea of Verrazano" on his world chart ca. 1529. Münster's map popularized their mistake. The idea that North America narrowed in places or even allowed an all-water passage to Asia spurred explorers for centuries.

Though Giovanni Verrazano was killed by Carib Indians in 1528, his exploratory replacement soon arrived on the scene. Jacques Cartier brought excellent navigational and cartographic skills. Starting in 1534, this French adventurer explored the coastline of what is now eastern Canada and the northern United States.

During Cartier's second voyage in 1535 (which was expressly to find a water route to the East Indies), he found and explored the St. Lawrence probably as far was what now is Montreal. Cartier's orders were specific and designed to further France's goals. France was eager to compete with the Spanish in exploring and colonized promising lands on the route to the Far East.

The known water routes to the Spice Islands and the Orient were long and arduous. The key passages to East Asia were very inconveniently located. Worse, from the French point of view, they were in enemy hands—specifically the Portuguese and Spanish. Finding a warm water route in the middle portions of America was seen as the key to French success.

To get funding and advancement, explorers had to show positive results. Cartier knew this. He also had a flair for accentuating the positive. Though the French explorer noted that the bare and rocky hills of the north must have been "the land God gave to Cain," he also noted hopefully that a harbor he came upon "is in my opinion of the best in the world."

During his search for a strait providing passage through to the Pacific through the St. Lawrence, Native Americans provided Cartier with information that he interpreted in a hopeful way. Indians living along the St. Lawrence near what is now Montreal told Cartier that spices such as cloves and cinnamon could be obtained less than a month's distance by water to the west.

Though Cartier did not publish a map upon his return, accounts of his explorations and his journal materials were subsequently made public. These published accounts of Cartier's were combined with maps. Yet the journal accounts of Cartier were for many years not translated into maps that reflected the discoveries or information from his explorations.

The map published by the Venetian Giovanni Battista Ramusio to accompany a relation of Cartier's voyages in Delle navigationi et viaggi is typical. First published in 1556, the map was still in use in the 1606 edition from which our slide is taken. None of the harbors and geographic discoveries Cartier wrote of in his journal are shown here in any detail. Newfoundland and New France are named, but the St. Lawrence is not named. Inland water passages that end uncertainly to the north and west might be taken to suggest routes to Asia, but it is hard to know whether Ramusio or his readers would have interpreted them as such. As much as anything, the failure of the map—even in an edition published 50 years after the first—to shed any new light upon the continental interior tells us that the French had been slow to publicize and follow up on Cartier's discoveries and theories.

After Cartier's explorations, it would be another 60 years before France would make further attempts at exploring and colonizing the St. Lawrence area. The arrival of Samuel de Champlain on the scene, however, brought dramatic change. Variously known as a geographer, explorer, and the "Founder of New France," Champlain's vision of developing this portion of the New World surpassed that of the typical colonizing mercantilist.

Champlain was responsible for the publication of three influential maps between 1612 and 1632. Champlain's maps are highly regarded because he was not only the compiler of map information, but also the author and designer of the map accompanying text. Thus, his work was less subject to misinterpretation by others. His first map, published in 1612, is eye-catching and quite artistic. It is also a charming and attractive propaganda piece. It possesses all the characteristics of an advertising broadside promoting colonial enterprise.

In many ways, Champlain's 1612 cartographic effort is a map of its time. It possessed the usual "windroses" (compass diagrams illustrating prevailing wind directions), varieties of marine animals, and prosperous sea vessels sailing about. Two of the ships sport flags which appear to be St. George's crosses—the English flag prior to the Act of Union with Scotland—perhaps a grudging recognition of the rival English presence in the area designed to spur French action.

The propagandistic aspects of the map lie in several areas. First, the eye is drawn to the four native figures at the left. They are young, appear healthy, and wear exotic and scanty clothes while retaining essentially European facial features. Below and stretching of the full breadth of the map are lists and illustrations of a variety of edible and medicinal plants, including squash, plums, red currants, chestnuts, grapes, and beans—a catalog of the natural riches awaiting potential colonizers.

The map illustrates what was known of New France, stretching from Newfoundland, proceeding along the St. Lawrence and west across two Great Lakes. Lake Ontario is fairly accurately depicted, with Niagara Falls appearing at the western edge of the lake. The lake at the western margin of the map labeled "Grand Lac" is sometimes taken to be Lake Superior, but of course the French term "large lake" could apply to any of the other four Great Lakes. Whatever the real "Grand Lac" actually designated, it beckons the viewer to a conclusion that there is much more beyond. A boat is being poled toward the west. A sturgeon-like fish swims toward the Niagara River, ready to be caught as a food delicacy. This large lake to the west could easily be taken as another sea with great possibilities for being the water strait to the East Indies.

If Champlain had intended that his maps encourage exploration to the west for a water route, he was successful. His and other explorers' later maps proceeded ever further through navigable waters toward the west. Surely the western sea to Asia must be close at hand!

One of the most persistent geographic misconceptions about the North American heartland was the notion that a ring of mountains surrounded the southern part of what is now the United States. This idea held that the southern Appalachian Mountains turned west in a great arc plunging towards the Gulf of Mexico in the vicinity of modern Texas. This misconception went hand-in-hand with the parallel fiction that southeastern North America was drained by four radiating rivers that ran into the so-called "Bahia del Spirito Santo." It also meant that the watershed of the areas to the north of these mountains—that is, the Great Lakes and Northern Plains—had to drain either to the north, west, or east, since this imagined mountain blocked passage to the Gulf of Mexico.

In 1650 Nicolas Sanson d'Abbeville, then the most renowned of French cartographers, published the first map of North America in which all five of the Great Lakes are represented. Because of Sanson's reputation, this 1650 image of North America had a strong influence on other map publishers and explorers for decades. Sanson's placement of Lake Erie's latitude at about 39º north, however, was about three degrees too far south, and Lake Superior's latitude at over 50º north was about two degrees too far north. More importantly, it seems a bit puzzling today that the "Father of Waters," the Mississippi River, was not immediately recognized by explorers who plied the Gulf of Mexico as the mouth of the largest North American river system. Why was it necessary to make explorations proceeding down (and not up) the river to eventually disprove the cartographic misconception of the existence of a southeastern ridge of mountains?

Geologic land forms coupled with characteristics of fluid hydraulics provide answers as to why the true Mississippi River mouth (or rather delta) was not only unknown for over a century but repeatedly missed by searching explorers. Rivers, when slow moving, often meander and fan out into broad triangular deltas at their mouth. Like the river Nile, the Mississippi, in its natural state, branches out into many small water courses, much as the root system of a tree branches out from its trunk. Much of the river silt brought down in the current is caught in the river delta marshes. The relatively straight and clear Mississippi outlet we know today was largely the result of constant river dredging. For seventeenth-century explorers operating in the Gulf of Mexico, however, the great river outlet was disguised behind a mask of countless low-lying islands and insignificant-looking river channels.

Maps of the time reflect this misunderstanding of the Mississippi River system. Lacking contrary information, it was plausible to geographers that the Appalachians took an immense detour approximately where the Ohio River Valley should be. It was also plausible therefore that nothing more than medium-sized rivers emptied into the Gulf of Mexico.

For those searching for a water route to the East Indies through North America, the influential Sanson map, however, was most encouraging. Lakes Superior and Michigan/Green Bay—(the latter termed the "Lake of [bad] Smell" ("Lac des Puans")) lie open-ended to the west. This reflects some cartographic restraint on the part of Sanson; since he did not have information about the two lakes' western shores, he left the details blank. For those hoping for an Asian water route, however, these incomplete margins left room for conjecture about western river and lake systems. A place-name at the northern edge of western North America refers to the mythical city complex of Cibola, providing another tantalizing goal for western exploration.

Sanson's depiction of rivers and his placement of interior settlements encourages skepticism about their veracity. River meanders are frequently irregular. On Sanson's map, rivers oscillate in regular patterns and branch out like painted vines. The helter-skelter placement of cities and towns also suggests that, even though many of these were based on current European and native information, the cartographer acted on the human urge to fill in space.

A generation after Sanson's map of North America appeared, the French explorers Louis Joliet and Père Jacques Marquette were the first to assert with some authority that the Mississippi River flowed all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, after having, in 1673, navigated it as far as the mouth of the Arkansas River. Their discoveries first appeared in cartographic form in a map by Melchisédech Thévenot appearing in his Recueil de Voyages de Mr Thevenot (Paris, 1681). Joliet's own maps were never published in the 17th century.

It was the cartographic and self-promoting skills of the Roman Catholic cleric Louis Hennepin that spread the new revelations about the Mississippi Valley around the world. Hennepin had come to the New World to spread his religious faith along the frontier. He became the chaplain and traveling companion of René Robert Cavalier, sieur de la Salle. His resulting capture by and rescue from Indians as well as other exciting tales were published in his Description de la Louisiane (Paris, 1683). The map appearing in this popular, widely distributed, and influential work included many definite improvements in the cartographic representation of the Great Lakes and, of course, the Mississippi.

Still, there were problems. Here Hennepin's map from his revised Nouvelle decouverte d'un tres grande pays situé dans l'Amérique (Utrecht, 1697) illustrates how improvements in maps that solve one misconception can spawn others. Hennepin's Mississippi River mouth, for example, is located in modern mid-Texas, hundreds of miles west of its true mouth in what is now the state of Louisiana. Moreover, the Mississippi's source is placed much too far to the north. This latter error had a bearing on the drawing of the future boundary between the United States and British America (Canada) and would cause complications long after a U.S.-British peace treaty was signed. That treaty assigned the United States all of the Mississippi River Valley as it was then understood, whose true northern reaches in modern Minnesota were about 60 miles south of the eventual international boundary. The United States received territory that it might otherwise not have received had the maps used been more accurate.

The Baron Louis de la Hontan (Lahontan) began his explorations from New France toward the Mississippi in 1688. Only 22 at the start of his explorations, he returned with a memorable journal of most unusual discoveries about the fabled river to the western sea that so many others had unsuccessfully searched for in over a century and a half. In 1703, he published a lively and popular book relating his travels that was translated into both English and German. Lahontan's accounts were supplemented by a map suggestive of tantalizingly simple routes to the Pacific via a series of river showed to him by unknown bands of Indians Hennepin called the Eokoros, the Esanapes and the Gnacsi. With these people he proceeded from the known areas of the Great Lakes to point far to the west.

Lahontan's map is really of two parts. The first shows Lake Superior and "Lake Illinois" (Lake Michigan) with rivers flowing into them that enabled travel to the west. Short portages ("land carriages") from each river, marked with maltese crosses on the map, took the intrepid explorer to rivers flowing into the Mississippi. Lahontan's map asserts that a Mississippi tributary (probably the Minnesota River) led straight west (the "River Longue").

Lahontan did not profess to have traveled all the way up the river, but instead drew a second map (separated from the first map by a vertical line) derived from a "stag-skin map" purportedly drawn for Lahontan by a "Gnacsi" Indian. Disturbingly, this waterway was also called the "River Morte" (that is, the Death River). This waterway proceeded west to a range of mountains-the Rockies. The broad lake at the edge of a western mountain range collected water from sources from the range's eastern slope. According to Lahontan, sources of a river flowing to the Pacific lay just over the crest of the mountains via an easy portage from the River Morte's sources. Here, of course, for Lahontan, was the long-sought waterway to the west and ultimately to the Orient.

Visual representations on the map offered enticing "proof" to the observer of the veracity of Lahontan's assertions. An engraving of a huge 130 foot-long vessel supported the belief that large bodies of water, including a huge salt lake, were to be found: all by going west. At bottom left a drawing of "A Medal of the Tahuglahuk" describes a medallion made from a metal of "a red colour not unlike copper." It bears a certain similarity to the famous Puget Sound Potlatch "Coppers" that Native Americans in Western Washington used in ceremonies of conspicuous generosity called potlatches. At these ceremonies, in order to gain honor and esteem, a person would give away most of his possessions or even destroy them. This had the effect of redistributing wealth among tribal members and acting as a social safety valve through generous ritual. These coppers were symbols of vast wealth given to obtain and display. The reverse of this medal bore mysterious markings that vaguely resemble Arabic lettering.

The perceived association of this symbol of Pacific-coast Indians and peoples of the Far East would, of course, increase speculation about a water passage to the Orient. A number of other cartographers incorporated Lahontan's River Longue in their maps for over half a century afterwards. An occasional map with such a western river continued until after the United States gained its independence.

Lahontan's imperfections as an explorer and map-maker are striking. Still, as in all human endeavors, people have to make decisions based on inadequate and less than correct information. That Lahontan picked up more than his share of such data came out well, in the end, for the Great Lakes area. It was explored earlier and more thoroughly because of that golden idea that a water route existed through the North American continent, beginning with the St. Lawrence and proceeding west of the Great Lakes.

1. Sebastian Münster, "Tabula novarum insularum quas divertis respectibus Occidentales Indianas vocant," from Cosmographia Universalis (Basel: Heinrich Petri, 1550).
2. Giovannia Battista Ramusio, [Nova Francia], from Delle navigationi et viaggi, vol. 3 (Venice: I. Guinti, 1606).
3. Samuel de Champlain, "Carte Geographique de la Nouvelle Franse," from Les voyages du sieur de Champlain Xaintongeois (Paris: Jean Berjon, 1613).
4. Nicolas Sanson, "Amerique Septentrionale" (Paris: Nicolas Sanson and Pierre Mariette, 1650).
5. Louis Hennepin, "Carte d'un tres grand pais nouvellement découvert dans l'Amerique Septentrionale," from Nouvelle decouverte d'un tres grande pays situé dans l'Amerique (Utrecht: G. Broedelet, 1697).
6. Louis de Lahontan, "A Map of ye Long River and of some others," from New Voyages to North America, vol. 1 (London: H. Bonwicke, 1703).

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