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Suppose she has the brilliant idea of annexing all Prussia, for which there is really something to be said by ethnographical map-makers, Militarist madmen, and Pan-Slavist megalomaniacs?
It must be confessed that the historians and the map-makers did not always attach the importance that Smith did to the battles in which he was conspicuous, and we do not find the Land of Zarkam or the city of Regall in the contemporary chronicles or atlases. But the region is sufficiently identified.
The map-makers of that period continued, like those of the earlier Middle Ages, to base their work on mere half-mythical traditions, unrelieved and uncorrected by the results of actual discoveries. Their maps are still much like picture-books, filled with biblical and literary lore, indicating but a slight attempt to incorporate exact measurements and outlines.
Here and there the river was completely blocked by fallen trees. The guides called it bouchee, "corked," and leaped out gayly into the water with their axes to "uncork" it. We passed through some pretty lakes, unknown to the map-makers, and arrived, before sundown, at the Lake of the Bear, where we were to spend a couple of days.
For the man had been scalped and yet had escaped with his life. "Quelle barbarie! Oh, quelle barbarie!" murmured Odalie, wincing at the sight. Years ago it must have chanced, for the wounds had healed; but it had left terrible scars which the juvenile element of the settlement prized and loved to trace as one might the map of the promised land, were such charts known to mere earthly map-makers.
If navigation ever existed on the Moon's surface, it must have been of a singularly difficult and dangerous nature, and we can scarcely say which of the two should be more pitied the sailors who had to steer through these dangerous and complicated passes, or the map-makers who had to designate them on their charts.
Ignace to the iron ports on the Little Bay de Noquet, or Badderknock in lake phraseology, a hundred miles of nothing, according to the map-makers, who, knowing nothing of the region, set it down accordingly, withholding even those long-legged letters, 'Chip-pe-was, 'Ric-ca-rees, that stretch accommodatingly across so much townless territory farther west.
It is second among the world's rivers, and the dark detritus it carries to the Atlantic has been distinctly traced on the ocean bed for six hundred miles from the land. Some geographers still believed thirty years ago that all the waters of its upper basin might be tributary to the Nile. Map-makers have been kept very busy recording discoveries on the Congo.
It is a curious jumble that I have not been able to decipher; it occurs close to the mouth of the Swan River of modern charts. Later French and Dutch map-makers took it for the name of an island in that locality.
But Champlain's most conspicuous merit lies in the light that he threw into the dark places of American geography, and the order that he brought out of the chaos of American cartography; for it was a result of this and the rest of his voyages that precision and clearness began at last to supplant the vagueness, confusion, and contradiction of the earlier map-makers.
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