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On one of the old maps of Labrador this terse description is written by the cartographer: "Labrador was discovered by the English. There is nothing in it of any value"; and another historian enlarges on the theme in this fashion: "God made the world in five days, made Labrador on the sixth, and spent the seventh throwing stones at it."
Certainly Tokyo to Tijuana hadn't been a gentle transition with serendipitous fate disgorging onto a life the way that it did. The molten heat had changed the landscape of the self and as its only cartographer she, a divorcee who regretted having ever mixed with a man, was now beginning to map out who she was and it wasn't easy.
Good-bye, too, to my English comrades in a group at the doorway: to Robinson with his poise, his mellowness, his wisdom, his well-balanced sentences, who had seen the world around from mining camps of the west to Serbian refugee camps; to "our Gibbs," ever sweet-tempered, writing his heart out every night in the human wonder of all he saw in burning sentences that came crowding to his pencil-point which raced on till he was exhausted, though he always revived at dinner to undertake any controversy on behalf of a better future for the whole human race; to blithesome Thomas who will never grow up, making words dance a tune, quoting Horace in order to forget the shells, all himself with his coat off and swinging a peasant's scythe; to Philips the urbane, not saying much but coming to the essential point, our scout and cartographer, who knew all the places on the map between the Somme and the Rhine and heard the call of Pittsburgh; to Russell, that pragmatic, upstanding expert in squadrons and barrages, who saved all our faces as reporters by knowing news when he saw it, arbiter of mess conversations, whose pungent wit had a movable zero luck to them all!
The unpublished papers may furnish an answer to that question. Neither was the south coast of Australia explored. That great chance was missed. Some excellent charting which ten years later commanded the cordial admiration of Flinders was done by Beautemps-Beaupre, who was Dentrecasteaux' cartographer, especially round about the S.W. corner of the continent.
It is possible that Baudin or one of his officers saw some drawing made on the Lady Nelson. If they saw one made by Murray himself, it is not likely to have been a very good one. Murray was not a skilled cartographer.
All who watched the progress of African discovery were constantly reminded that geographical progress is usually made only by slow and painful steps. They saw an explorer emerge from the unknown with his notebooks and route maps replete with most interesting facts for the student and the cartographer.
The cartographer of the shop economically constructs his unreliable maps to supply a cheap demand; and strange to say, though the results of the government surveys are freely at his disposal, he rarely makes use of them. It costs too much to alter the old map-plates, and but few persons will feel sufficiently interested to criticise the faults of his latest edition.
Rayetaeh might be considered the earliest cartographer of this region, and some of his maps, copied from the sand, are extant to this day. Captain Demeré laid the papers of this unfinished task carefully aside, and by way of giving his hospitality more grace took the head of the table himself.
The famous Laurentian Portolano, a sailing chart constructed in 1351, was precisely such a map as Marco Polo, had he turned cartographer, might have drawn: the first map in which Africa appears familiar to modern eyes; with the point of the continent foreshortened, and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans joined at last, it held out to all future explorers the prospect of successful voyages from Venice to Ceylon.
In April 1802, after meeting Flinders in Encounter Bay, Baudin sailed west, and endeavoured to penetrate the two gulfs. The command of this boat was entrusted to Lieutenant Louis de Freycinet, the future cartographer and part historian of the expedition; and the charts of the two gulfs and Kangaroo Island were made by, or under the superintendence of, that officer.
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