New McClung exhibit tracks history of mapmaking

Photo by MCCLUNG MUSEUM

Ptolemaic World Map (Secunda etas mundi) is a woodcut dating back to 1493. Creatures on the left were thought to inhabit the furthermost parts of the Earth.

Photo by MCCLUNG MUSEUM

A Louis XIV Terrestrial Globe from Paris, 1700.

Photo by MCCLUNG MUSEUM

The earliest separate map of the Americas (novae insulae) dates back to 1540.

Maps dating to Christopher Columbus's time and today's latest global positioning devices show the range of a new Frank H. McClung Museum exhibit that Museum Director Jeff Chapman calls both educational and interesting.

"Mapping the New World" opens at the University of Tennessee museum Jan. 15 and continues through May 22. The exhibit focuses on maps and how they were made and used for hundreds of years.

"Maps are, I think, something that fascinate the public," says Chapman. "I've always noticed that people will look at an old map and try to identify places."

By showing how maps developed over 350 years, the exhibit illustrates how man's perception of the world has changed.

Twenty-nine original maps dating from 1493 to 1847 are the focus of "Mapping the New World." Nineteen of the earliest are on loan from renowned map collector and New York resident W. Graham Arder III. Most, once bound as part of atlases, are small.

Another 10 maps depict Tennessee and parts of the Southeastern United States and come from the UT Libraries' Special Collections. They include a 1657 map of what is now the southern part of the United States, 18th-century diagrams of the Cherokee nation and a 1847 map of the state of Tennessee.

The exhibit's earliest map is a 1493 illustration of how the world was viewed during the Middle Ages. This hand-colored map shows only a fraction of the Earth's surface and doesn't include the land masses of North or South America. A series of seven creatures, including a six-armed man and a half-serpent, half-man monster, are illustrated along one side of the map. These beings were believed to live in the furthermost parts of the Earth.

But soon what map-makers created would change as explorers found other worlds. Just 20 years after that earliest map, other maps depict large, mostly undefined masses of land west of Africa. And by 1570, world maps illustrated what was called the New World and detail the shape of Florida's peninsula and North Carolina's jagged coast.

"Mapping the New World" doesn't only show what was once part of atlases. The exhibit also introduces the concepts of making and using maps and carries navigation into the 21st century with a section about satellite and global positioning.

Early navigational instruments loaned from the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History's Kenneth E. Behring Center include an early sextant, chronometer and compass. They contrast with today's Garmin navigational devices shown in "Mapping the New World." The nine Garmin instruments are displayed to help illustrate what exhibit developers call today's "geospatial revolution" that includes satellite and global positioning systems.

Amy McRary may be reached at 865-342-6437.

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