The impact of canals on geography occurs at many scales, from the alteration of the physical environment along their routes (from aqueducts to the movement of soil and rock), to the construction of locks, to impacts on cultural geography, through immigration of canal workers and though economic changes in their regions and indeed globally. The impact also spans temporal scales, from the immediate time of construction to the present day.
Serious canal building began in the late 1700s, usually sponsored by local merchants, manufacturers, or mine owners needing to ship goods—the first canal promoters were actually the pottery manufacturers of Staffordshire, England. The Duke of Bridgewater’s canal, built to ship coal from Worsley to Manchester, in central England, cost a great deal, but because it reduced the price of coal in Manchester by 50 percent, it touched off a “canal building frenzy” in areas of the world where capital could be raised and where the physical geography allowed canals to be constructed. By 1793, Parliament had authorized 20 canal projects, and the United Kingdom became the first country with a nationwide canal network.
Perhaps because it was built during the above-described era when many canals were being constructed, the Erie Canal is one of the most famous. Due to physical geography—namely, the Appalachian Mountains—transporting goods from the East Coast of the United States to the interior was an immediate challenge, beginning in the colonial days. The idea for the Erie Canal first appeared back in 1724, but it seemed a daunting task. Even President Thomas Jefferson called it “a little short of madness” and rejected it; but flour merchant Jesse Hawley was able to interest New York governor DeWitt Clinton in it in 1807. Much opposition ensued, with the project ridiculed as “Clinton’s folly” and “Clinton’s ditch.” In 1817, however, Clinton received approval from the legislature for $7 million for construction. Its construction, through limestone and mountains, challenged the workers but developed key engineering skills that would aid other aspects of the Industrial Revolution. The Erie Canal’s sides were lined with stone set in clay. Its bottom was lined with clay. The stonework on the canal required the work of hundreds of German masons, who, after the canal was completed, built many of New York City’s buildings. Immigration from Scotland and Ireland helped widen the labor pool. The canal required the use of the best surveying equipment and mapping of the time. Aqueducts were also required to divert water; one was 290 meters long and crossed the river. Eight years later, in 1825, the canal was completed; it had 36 locks and an elevation differential of 172 meters, running 584 kilometers from Albany to Buffalo, New York. It provided a critical link from the Hudson River to Lake Erie, which gave the canal its name, and from there, to the other four Great Lakes and the cities and natural resources that could be accessed from those lakes. In the early days of this and other canals, before the mechanization of shipping, canal boats were pulled by horses and mules on the adjacent towpath.
Some early spatial thinking was important to the day-to-day operation of canals: Who had the right of way? The Erie Canal had one north-side towpath. When two boats met, the boat closest to the towpath side of the canal was considered to have the right of way. This one remained there, while the other boat would steer toward the berm (or heel path) side of the canal. The “hoggee” (pronounced HO-gee), or driver, of the privileged boat with the right of way kept its towpath team near the edge of the towpath. Meanwhile, the hoggee of the other boat moved to the outside of the towpath and stopped his team. Next, the towline was unraveled from the horses and let slack, and as it fell into the water, the boat decelerated. The privileged boat’s crew would cross over the other boat’s towline, the horses pulling the boat over the sunken towline without the need for stopping. Once clear, the other boat’s team would continue on its way along the canal.
The Erie Canal is now part of the New York State Canal System, which was completed in 1918. By that time, the Erie Canal was long out of date with modern shipping, and so its width and locks were modernized and, in some cases, widened. Even so, the canal had outlived much of its usefulness. Thus, most of the Erie Canal’s traffic is now oriented toward recreation and tourism, with only 12,182 tons of cargo reported shipped through it in 2004. This was due to changes in global commerce, namely the rise of railroads in the late 1800s, the rise of truck transport in the 1900s, and the rise of ever-larger commercial ships, which the canal could not support. These ships, in order to reach the Great Lakes, move through the series of natural channels, larger locks, and canals that make up the St. Lawrence Seaway, rather than through the Erie Canal. And unlike the Erie Canal, which only operates from May through November, the Seaway, completed in 1959, can operate all year long.
Canals had great impact on the cities that were adjacent to them, the regional economy, the national economy of the countries that contained them, but also the global economy. It all had to do with the reduction in “cost distance” between regions—a principle of economic geography. For example, the Erie Canal, immediately upon its completion, made New York City the Atlantic seaport for much of the Midwest and the Great Lakes. The cost of shipping decreased, and volume increased; because of its newfound connections, New York would become known as the “Empire State.” Buffalo, at the other end of the canal, soon surpassed other, competing towns, growing from 200 people in 1820 to 18,000 by 1840. Competition soon ensued, with other cities constructing canals and railroads, such as the Main Line of Public Works project from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, and the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad from Albany to Schenectady, New York. Due to the immigration of workers who built the canal, ethnic communities formed in some towns. The canal bound the United States even closer to Europe and to Canada through increased trade. In some ways, it contributed to the United States Civil War, because the Erie Canal helped transform the northern states into an economy and a social system quite different from the southern states.
Other canals had an even larger impact on the physical and cultural geography of their regions and of the entire planet, but they occurred after the great canal building era of 1790 to 1840. The Panama Canal, completed in 1914, for example, greatly changed the speed and manner in which people and goods could be transported between the Atlantic and Pacific basins, saving 13,000 kilometers and a dangerous voyage through the Strait of Magellan. The same can be said for the Suez Canal, connecting the Indian and Mediterranean basins, saving 9,000 kilometers by avoiding the Cape of Good Hope, completed in 1869. They brought important sources of income for the countries collecting fees from ships passing through, strengthening their economies. Each of them altered the political geography of its region and of major sea powers in important ways as well; in the case of the Panama Canal, this included the separation of the country of Panama from Colombia, and in the case of the Suez Canal, it cemented the rise of Great Britain as a major sea power. More recently, they aided the development of global trade and the “interconnected planet” (see Supply Chain Management).
The first ship to pass through the newly completed Panama Canal, the SS Ancon, in the Panama Canal on August 15, 1914. The construction of canals around the world had an impact on the surrounding physical geography, but more importantly, on the global economy and the way in which people thought about altering the environment. (Bettman/Getty Images)
The rise and fall of canals as a geographic theme reflects changes in economic and cultural geography. Only the largest canals, and ones that continued to be enlarged, survived to the 21st century in terms of remaining viable for shipping. In 2012 alone, 17,225 vessels traversed the Suez Canal, and the capacity was expected to double after the August 2015 opening of the “New Suez Canal” with its widening of the Ballah Bypass. Many other canals around the world, as in the case of the Erie Canal, because of the rise of railroads, highways, container ships, and even air cargo transport, have been reduced to small and local traffic and shipping. In many cases, they have been abandoned. The preservation of historical canals beginning in the 1970s reflects the environmental and historical movement, including the rise of urban greenways, and they have become an important part of the growing network of urban and rural trails (see Environmental Movement; Land Protection).
But the largest impact of canals was what they represented in human thought: that the world could be transformed by human action and “progress” could occur if physical barriers could be changed through canals, bridges, roadways, and tunnels. This would be a concept studied extensively in geography to the present day, beginning with George Perkins Marsh’s studies focused on humans as change agents (see Marsh, George Perkins).
See also: Bridges and Tunnels; Environmental Movement; Land Protection; Marsh, George Perkins; Roads, Ports, and Railroads; Supply Chain Management
Hofstra University. 2013. The Geography of Transport Systems. https://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/index.html.
Rodrigue, Jean-Paul. 2013. The Geography of Transport Systems. New York: Routledge.
How can the number of human settlements, as well as their sizes and locations on the landscape, be understood? German geographer Walter Christaller’s (1893–1969) central place theory states that settlements began in the locations that they did and grew to the sizes that they are today by functioning as “central places” providing services, such as the distribution of food and other products, to surrounding areas.
Like all models describing our complex world, Christaller’s model, first published in 1933, had to make some assumptions. In a location exhibiting all of the characteristics of the central place, the terrain would be flat and homogeneous. For example, consider the flat but not entirely homogeneous Llano Estacado in Texas and New Mexico, including the towns of Clovis, Hobbs, Lubbock, Amarillo, and Tucumcari. The population and resources would be evenly distributed, and all sellers would seek to maximize profits. Furthermore, consumers have similar purchasing power and shopping behavior, seeking to minimize the distance traveled. There is only one type of transport in any direction, with the cost of the transport proportional to the distance traveled.
The central place theory predicts that, over time, a system of centers, or towns, of various sizes will emerge. If the settlements are larger in size, there will be fewer and they will be farther apart; a greater number of smaller towns will exist than larger cities. Each center will provide specific commodities, which will establish a hierarchy. For example, lumberyards will not exist in every small community, only in larger ones. The threshold population for a lumberyard might be 5,000 people, for a food store, 500, and for a gas station, 250. When a settlement gets larger in size, the number of services also increases, which in turn leads to a greater number of specialized services. Thus, here, as a town such as Hobbs grew, it at first attracted a few general-practitioner physicians; later it attracted pediatric physicians, and still later, sports medicine specialists. To give an example from another field, at first Hobbs had contractors offering their services for general residential work. Later, it attracted contractors specializing in driveway concrete services. Still later, it attracted those who could do specialized outdoor concrete and tile for residential patios. It is unlikely that Eunice, a smaller town to the south of Hobbs, contains tile specialists or sports medicine specialists. The higher the order of the goods and services (taking into account durability, value, and variety), then the larger the range of the goods and services and the longer the distance that people are willing to travel to acquire those goods and services. Thus, people in Eunice might be willing to travel to Hobbs to see a sports medicine specialist or to contract with someone to lay tile for their new patio.
Furthermore, the size of many stores is in proportion to the size of the city that it serves. A hardware store in a small town might be 6,000 square feet, while a “big box” home improvement store typically occupies 100,000 square feet and is found only in larger cities, serving a market that is larger geographically and in population. Further, consider the threshold for a city’s size to attract national and international chain stores. How high a population does a city need to have to attract a specific store brand? It may be 5,000 people for a Dairy Queen restaurant, 50,000 for a Panera Bread café, and 250,000 for a Ruth’s Chris Steak House.
Christaller’s layouts make extensive use of hexagons, which he believed were shapes that best explained the evolution of trade areas and settlements. The layouts contain something known as “K-values.” The K-value specifies exactly how much the “sphere of influence” of the central place encompasses. In the K-values, the central place counts as a value of 1, and each portion of a satellite or ring contributes its own portion. The first principle for Christaller is the marketing principle. This is marked as K=3, where K is a constant. In this system of spatial organization, in the hierarchy of central place, market areas at a specific level are three times larger than the next highest one in the hierarchy. Other levels that may be present follow this same progression of threes. Thus, as one moves through the order of places, the number of the next level goes up three times. For example, in the case where two cities exist, their total number of communities would include 6 towns, 18 villages, and 54 hamlets, where hamlets are the smallest of the village sizes.
The principle of transportation, shown as K=4, maintains that an area in the central place hierarchy is four times larger than an area in the next highest order. According to the principle of transportation, the market area of a place in a higher order includes half of the market area of each of the six neighboring lower-order places. This is because they are located on the edges of the hexagons around the high-order settlements. Christaller’s system therefore generates a hierarchy of central places. This hierarchy results in the evolution of the most efficient transport network possible.
In the administrative principle, shown as K=7, the variation between the lowest orders and highest orders is by a factor of seven. In this administrative principle, the highest-order trade area completely covers that of the lowest order. In other words, the market for the higher-order trade area serves a larger area. According to the marketing principle K=3, the market area of a higher-order place (which is called a “node”) occupies one-third of the market area of each of the next largest place (node) that is its neighbor. The smaller nodes will be located at the corners of a large hexagon around the high-order settlement. Tributary areas must be allocated exclusively to a single higher-order place, because they cannot be split administratively. The control principle in this hierarchy is efficient administration.
Christaller’s theory and model have limits. The Earth is a complex place. Factors such as topography, climate, the history of development in a specific place, changes in technology, transportation costs, and personal consumer preferences prevent the “ideal” central place pattern from emerging. Market areas are shaped by land use, accessibility, competition, and technology. Furthermore, consumers’ economic status in a given area is important to the process. Consumers that have a higher economic status are more likely to bypass centers that provide lower-order goods, as they are more mobile and have the means to do so. Population density affects the spacing of centers as well as the hierarchy. For instance, a grocery store is a lower-order function, and with a sufficient density, it can survive even in a more isolated area. The enormous increase in online purchasing through such mechanisms as Amazon also affects the number and location of many physical retail stores providing goods. With online services also proliferating, will this affect traditional physical service providers as well? One might argue, for example, that while Web sites offering medical advice are fine, ultimately many people still need to see a physical doctor. On the other hand, the combination of maps and location-based services that allowed for the spread of citizen driving services through such companies as Uber are causing longstanding taxi services to change or go out of business.
Critics have said that the central place theory is static and that it neglects to incorporate reality into it. Also, while the central place theory makes sense in agricultural locations, it does not hold up well in industrial and postindustrial areas. This is because there is a more varied nature and distribution of resources. However, more recent theories, such as those of Openshaw and Veneris (2003), have shown that the theory can account for change. The theory has also been criticized because some historical factor prevents cities from naturally emerging on the landscape. For example, in many parts of the American Midwest and West, towns founded by the railroad were often 12 miles (19 km) away from each other, which, in the 1950s, was the distance of track that a section crew could maintain. Larger towns were founded around 60 miles (97 km) apart, which was how far a steam engine would travel before it needed water. And the placement of the railroads themselves was affected more by the distant cities that they connected, rather than by local needs or considerations.
Central place theory has been used in modern decision-making, such as when planning locations of retailers. Furthermore, the hierarchy of shopping centers from the theory’s framework has been used effectively within communities that have been planned as “new towns.” The theory has been used to delineate medical care regions in California. To accomplish this, a hierarchy was created that took into account the population, size, and income of care cities and determined what was needed to support them. Cities were described as primary, secondary, and tertiary. Central place theory has been tested in areas that come moderately close to the “ideal surface”: the Netherlands’ recently reclaimed polders. These areas provide an “isotropic plane” on which settlements have developed. In specific areas, there are six smaller towns that surround a larger town, such as in the regions of Noord-Oostpolder and Flevoland. The Fens of East Anglia in England also represent a large expanse of flat land that doesn’t have any natural barriers to settlement development. A good example of the K=4 transport model central place, often cited by scholars, is the city of Cambridge, although it is surrounded by seven settlements instead of six. Each satellite lies on a major road that leads out of Cambridge, and each is 9.9–14.9 miles (16–24 km) from Cambridge.
Christaller’s theory was revolutionary for several reasons. First, the two concepts underlying the theory—threshold and range—not only are fundamental to the understanding of the theory but also are important to all of geography. In the theory, the concept of “threshold” is the minimum market, such as income or population, needed to sell a good or service. “Range” is how far a consumer will travel in order to acquire the good or service. There comes a point at which the cost or inconvenience will outweigh the consumer’s need for the good or service. These concepts have been applied to other areas in geography, from wildlife habitat studies to population pressure. They form the algorithms behind some spatial analysis techniques used in GIS (see Spatial Analysis).
Second, central place theory, along with spatial interaction models and other theoretical frameworks, helped geography to be viewed as a systematic study with organizing principles, a science in its own right. Geography came to be seen not only as something that can help people understand their surroundings, but also as something that can be used to plan better communities for the future. Lastly, Christaller’s theory was barely a decade old when it was already being tested and modified (Losch 1944/1954). It is still being modified and tested today; it is a lively part of the geographic dialogue. Thus, it has an enduring legacy in geographic thought.
See also: Spatial Analysis
King, Leslie J. 1984. Central Place Theory (Scientific Geography Series). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Inc.
Losch. 1944/1954. Die raumliche Ordnung der Wirtschraft, 2nd ed. Jena, Germany: Fischer, 1944. (English translation by W. H. Woglom and W. F. Stolper. The Economics of Location. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.)
Openshaw S, and Y. Veneris. 2003. “Numerical Experiments with Central Place Theory and Spatial Interaction Modelling.” Environment and Planning A 35(8): 1389–1403.
Citizen science, also known as crowdsourcing, is scientific research that is conducted partly or wholly by amateurs, nonprofessionals, or ordinary citizens, usually in cooperation with or under the direction of professional scientists or scientific institutions. Volunteers, who may or may not have prior expertise in the mission of the project, acquire new skills and a deeper understanding of the work being conducted as a part of the project but also about science in general. The information that they gather impacts the project in a positive way in terms of the quantity, and often the quality, of the project’s data holdings. The result is that wiser, more efficient, and more sustainable decisions are made from the data gathered in part or in whole by the citizens. Citizen science represents an open networking environment, a win-win scenario, beneficial to the project and to the citizen scientists, that is often multidisciplinary in nature. Ideally, the interactions between science, society, and policy are strengthened, leading to more democratic research, based on evidence-informed decision-making (Socientize Project 2013).
The gathering of ordinary people, or non-scientist citizens, to gather and investigate scientific data was an outgrowth of a more educated and literate population from the 19th century onward, from the realization that scientists and government fieldworkers were in short supply, and from a rising concern about the increasing changes on the planet (see Environmental Movement). Its roots extend back to the late 1800s with bird phenology sponsored by the U.S. National Audubon Society, including the Christmas Bird Count that began in 1900. The GLOBE program (focused on soils and weather), Project BudBurst (phenology), and Project NOAH (various topics) in the 1990s were three citizen science projects with an education focus.
Gathering water quality data with probes and GPS receivers in the field, Costa Rica. Citizen science—the gathering of scientific data by ordinary citizens—is transforming geography through data collection, mapping technologies, and geographic literacy. (Joseph Kerski)
Citizen science represents a revolution not only in biological and other sciences, but also in geographic science and geographic thinking. The reasons? Most citizen science projects are based in specific places or regions and thus take advantage of local people’s strong ties and deep knowledge of their local environment. With the advent of geotechnologies and the advent of high-precision GPS, satellite images, and Web-enabled geographic information systems, citizen science has greatly expanded in the 21st century. Its expansion was enabled and hastened by the Internet of Things that began to geo-enable everyday objects and phenomena (see Geographic Information Systems; Internet of Things), including, in particular, the smartphone. The smartphone can also incorporate many data-gathering functions, such as capturing images, audio, video, and text, with a time, date, and location “stamp” enabled by GPS for each observation. Because of the strong ties between geography and some citizen science efforts, the results are often referred to volunteered geographic information (VGI), because they can be mapped and analyzed spatially.
Citizen science through Web mapping technologies allows people to see their results immediately as mapped phenomena, greatly contributing to their sense of empowerment, and this engagement encourages them to gather other data (see Web Mapping). The gathering of mappable data by the public represents a major shift in the centuries-old paradigm of mapping. For many years, national mapping agencies were the only organizations large enough and with enough capital to fund and staff mapping efforts. These organizations still exist, and they remain a valuable source of data to geographic research, but that data is being greatly augmented by the data collected by individuals and organizations working outside national mapping agencies or private mapping companies. This will have continued implications on what gets mapped and studied, who studies it, and what is learned from those studies, in geography and in many other disciplines concerned about the “where” question.
Today’s citizen science projects vary greatly in geographic scale from local to global to the universe; in time scale, from past to present to predicting the future; and in theme, from invasive weeds to animal habitat to social behavior. Yet each of them has a geographic component. For example, Old Weather is a citizen science project seeking to recover weather recorded from historical voyages of ships to improve knowledge of past environmental conditions. Whale FM’s goal is to match and organize thousands of recordings of orca and pilot whale calls. Galaxy Zoo’s mission is to organize and classify 1,000,000 galaxies from Hubble space telescope images. CrowdMag seeks to use smartphones to create near-real-time models of the Earth’s changing magnetic field, while Marine Debris Tracker’s name makes its mission self-explanatory. Ancient Lives invites people to transcribe and catalog fragments of text authored by ancient Greeks, including a few that are included in this book (see Strabo).
The citizen science community has organized itself into an increasing number of organizations, including the Citizen Science Alliance, which brings together scientists, software developers, and educators, and the Citizen Science Association, which held its first conference in 2015, attracting 500 people. Some citizen science projects are funded or supported by governments, universities, nonprofit organizations, or the private sector. The National Geographic Society supports BioBlitz events in U.S. national parks, in which thousands of people, including students, gather data over a 24-hour period, contributing 395 new species of invertebrates and fungus previously unknown to Saguaro National Park, for example. The GAP2 Project was supported by the European Commission (gap2.eu), and it focused on planning for sustainable fisheries in the Baltic Sea and other waters around Europe. The Tomnod (www.tomnod.com) citizen science community was begun by students at the University of California, San Diego, in 2010 and is now supported by the remote sensing company DigitalGlobe. It asks people to identify objects on the company’s satellite images that can help those in emergency situations. One of its projects asked the public to identify damaged buildings and impassable roads in the Valley Fire near Middletown, California, which affected thousands of evacuated people and destroyed over 1,750 structures. A similar effort for the Butte Fire resulted in 60,000 square kilometers searched in 3 days by 148 people. Another effort to identify illegal burning in Indonesia attracted 1,333 people who searched 410,841 square kilometers in 7 days. Over one million buildings were searched for damage following the 2015 Nepal earthquake, and other efforts focused on locating refugee camps. The search on Tomnod for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 attracted over 8 million people, with 100,000 visits per minute in the 2 days following its disappearance.
BioBlitz
One way to capture a large amount of data in a short amount of time in a small and specific geographic area is through a BioBlitz. A typical BioBlitz brings volunteers and scientists together who record information about all the living species (plants, animals, macroinvertebrates, insects) they can find over a 24- or 48-hour period in a single park, nature reserve, or segment of a riparian zone along a river. The connection to geography is that all of the data, including photographs and video, is geolocated through GPS technology, mapped using location-based apps on smartphones, and stored and analyzed through Web mapping services. BioBlitz efforts can result in the identification and mapping of thousands of species, sometimes including species that had been unknown in that study area. To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service, over 100 BioBlitzes were held at national parks across the United States, in an effort that brought government agencies, the National Geographic Society, private companies such as Esri, scientists, community leaders, and citizens together to gather needed data and to enhance geographic and scientific literacy.
Citizen science is having a great impact on mapping technologies, including GIS and mobile applications. In the past few years, citizen science has caused the number of apps that take advantage of the smartphone and GIS to rise sharply. These apps allow citizens not only to collect data, but also to upload it directly into Web-based GIS databases, where it can be mapped and visualized in real time. This allows the project leaders but also the data collectors to immediately see the results of their data collection on a map on their smartphone—and the results of other citizen scientists working in the field as well. For example, National Geographic’s FieldScope was one of the first Web-based mapping, analysis, and collaboration tools. The Crowdsource Reporter by Esri allows citizens to upload observations, and the Crowdsource Manager presents one or more maps that can be used to review those problems or observations, and thus it allows for the examination of patterns or clusters, the management of quality control, and the assigning of tasks to reduce fieldwork redundancy. Social media texts, videos, audio, and photographs can be immediately posted and mapped (see Social Media).
Citizen science is also contributing to digital base maps. Thousands of people contribute daily to the Open Street Map project, mapping streets and filling in gaps that no government agency or private company has collected. Locations and types of buildings are being gathered by the USGS National Map Corps project (see National Mapping Agencies). Citizen science is also fueling the development of multimedia mapping tools, including StoryMaps, which allow for the incorporation of narrative, audio, video, and other multimedia with live Web mapping services. Through its ability to report issues and problems to local government, such as a downed tree branch, broken streetlight, or damaged pavement, but also highlighting local issues through the election process, citizen science also has the potential to increase community engagement. Through the use of maps and data, citizen science also has the potential to increase geographic awareness and literacy. Geographers, always reflective, ask about and consider the privacy implications and the data quality of crowdsourced information (Goodchild 2007).
Through citizen science’s ability to engage vast numbers of people, it has the potential to greatly increase the amount of scientific data—all with a geographic component. Thus it can enable a better understanding of the planet and, as a result, wiser and more sustainable decisions.
See also: Environmental Movement; Geographic Information Systems (GIS); Internet of Things; National Mapping Agencies; Social Media; Strabo; Web Mapping
Goodchild, Michael F. 2007. “Citizens as Sensors: The World of Volunteered Geography.” GeoJournal 69: 211–221. http://web.simmons.edu/~benoit/infovis/Goodchild.pdf.
Socientize Project. 2013. Green Paper on Citizen Science: Citizen Science for Europe—Towards a Better Society of Empowered Citizens and Enhanced Research. European Commission.
Stelle, Lei Lani. 2015. “GIS Makes Citizen Science More Accessible.” ArcNews. Summer. http://www.esri.com/esri-news/arcnews/summer15articles/gis-makes-citizen-science-more-accessible.
So much is known about Christopher Columbus (1450 or 1451 to 1506) that it may be difficult to separate his exploration fame from the impact his voyages had on geography. But the impacts—both positive and negative—were far-reaching and indeed continue to this very day.
Hailing from Genoa, Italy, Columbus completed four voyages from Europe west across the Atlantic Ocean and back. He completed them under the auspices of the Catholic monarchs of Spain. Leif Eriksson (see Eriksson, Leif) had visited North America nearly 500 years before, but he left no permanent settlement. Columbus’s voyages, by stark contrast, initiated Spanish colonization of large parts of both North and South America, followed closely by other European colonizing nations, including Portugal, the United Kingdom, and France.
Map used by Columbus, drawn circa 1490 in the Lisbon workshop of Bartolomeo and Christopher Columbus. Christopher Columbus’ four voyages to the Americas from Spain forever altered geographic thinking, trade, and the relationships of people around the world. (Roger Viollet/Getty Images)
As the 15th century drew to a close, European powers sought to expand their influence, as well as to bring wealth to their nations by obtaining products, such as spices, that were far away. These leanings, coupled with a growing familiarity of sailing and trade winds, along with improved maps (see Henry the Navigator), ushered in the age of oceanic exploration. In his 1828 biography of Columbus, Washington Irving proposed that Columbus struggled to gain the support of Spanish rulers because the prominent theologians of the time contended that the Earth was flat. In fact, since Aristotle, and certainly by Ptolemy’s time, the majority of theologians, along with the general public, held the belief that the Earth was spherical. What wasn’t agreed upon was the exact size of the Earth’s circumference. In the first century BCE, Posidonius confirmed the results of Eratosthenes by comparing observations of stars at Alexandria and at Rhodes. However, Ptolemy’s models shrank the accepted size of the Earth—and the width of the Atlantic Ocean (see Eratosthenes; Posidonius; Ptolemy). From the Imago Mundi, Columbus learned of the estimate by Alfraganus that 1° of latitude (or one degree of longitude along the Equator) spanned 56⅔ miles. However, he was unaware that this referred to the Arabic mile (between 1,800 meters and 2,000 meters) rather than the shorter Roman mile (1,480 meters). As a result, he wrongly estimated the circumference of the Earth at 30,200 kilometers—about 10,000 kilometers smaller than the true circumference. He also wrongly accepted accounts that the Eurasia landmass spanned 225°, leaving only 135° of water. Thus, Columbus estimated the distance from the Canary Islands to Japan to be 3,000 Italian miles (3,700 km); the true figure is 12,500 kilometers. Columbus also erroneously believed that Japan was much larger in size, farther east of China, and closer to the Equator than it is in actuality.
Adding to the urgency of finding a sea route was that under the Mongol Empire’s hegemony over Asia, Europeans had for centuries enjoyed a long but safe land passage to Asia. But after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in the year 1453, the land route to Asia became increasingly treacherous. By 1488, Bartolomeu Dias had reached the Cape of Good Hope. Columbus proposed to reach one of the desired locations for spices—the East Indies—by sailing westward across the “ocean sea,” thereby (it was thought) reducing the distance traveled and more efficiently reaching these desired commodities. His tenacious efforts resulted in twice being rejected by King John II of Portugal, as well as by Genoa and Venice, and his brother Bartholomew’s entreaties were rejected by Henry VII of England. Ironically, much of this rejection was due to the ruler’s belief that he was grossly underestimating the distance. Finally, after two years of lobbying, the monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile, who had united several kingdoms on the Iberian Peninsula by marrying, gave him funds, permission, food, lodging, and guarantees of being governor of and receiving royalties from lands he might discover.
During Columbus’s first voyage in 1492, instead of reaching his intended destination of Southeast Asia, Columbus landed in the “New World”: He first landed on an island in the Bahamas archipelago that he named “San Salvador.” Ironically, Columbus may not have known that he had happened upon a fully new continent, one previously undiscovered by Europeans. He named the inhabitants of the new lands indios (Spanish for “Indians”). Writer Kirkpatrick Sale contended that a document in the Book of Privileges indicates that Columbus knew he had found a new continent, and that his journals refer to the “land of Paria,” a “hitherto unknown” continent. Yet in other documents, Columbus still refers to “Asia.” Amerigo Vespucci, who sailed to America after Columbus, was the first to hypothesize that the lands were not Asian but rather were part of a previously unknown and entirely new continent. In further irony, just as Columbus’s reputation is strained today, it was strained beginning in his own lifetime: In 1500, Columbus was arrested and dismissed as governor, and later he became involved with a protracted legal dispute over the benefits that he and his heirs claimed were owed to them by the Spanish crown.
Like many other explorers (see Marco Polo), Columbus started his explorations early. In one of his writings, he claims to have gone to sea at age 10. At 19, he was on a Genoese ship to support an attempt to conquer the Kingdom of Naples; by 27, he had sailed to England and Ireland before settling in Portugal, from where, during the 1480s, he traded and sailed along the coast of Africa down to Guinea. Like other geographers, Columbus became fluent in several languages, including Latin, Portuguese, and Castilian. He was also well-read: he had read the bible, astronomy, geography, and history, including Claudius Ptolemy and Pierre d’Ailly’s Imago Mundi, which included 16 treatises on geography and astronomy. He read of Marco Polo’s travels, Pliny’s Natural History, and Pope Pius II’s Historia Rerum Ubique Gestarum, a compendium of geographical and scientific knowledge as of 1477.
Though wrong about the distance, Columbus did know a good deal about trade winds, which proved invaluable for his fleets during each ocean crossing. In fact, during the first voyage in 1492, using these winds, his three ships landed at the Bahamas in five weeks. The Santa Maria was a merchant ship of 400–600 tons, 75 feet (23 m) long, with three masts and three sails; the others were two smaller caravels, the Pinta and the Santa Clara, nicknamed the Niña (or “Girl”). After encountering the Taino (or Arawak) people in the Bahamas, Columbus visited Cuba and Hispaniola. Upon the return, he followed the curving trade winds north in order to catch the “westerlies” back to Spain. He made observations of seas, winds, flora, fauna, and native customs; he also recorded the variance between true and magnetic north, and he even correctly predicted a lunar eclipse. Luck was a factor, too: They avoided tropical storms, though part of their travels spanned the hurricane season.
Soon he was back on the water, leaving Cadiz in 1493 with 17 ships, 1,200 men, and supplies to establish permanent American colonies. With a more southerly route, they landed at Dominica, Guadeloupe, and other Caribbean islands on the way to Puerto Rico and back to the original Hispaniola landing, where many who had been left there had died. In 1498, a third voyage with six ships left to discover a passage to Asia, touching the mainland of South America at Venezuela. Once back at Hispaniola, his arrest and humiliation commenced: He was accused of tyranny and incompetence. Allowed to return for a fourth voyage not as governor, but instead as explorer, in 1502, with four ships, he stopped at Martinique, Hispaniola, Jamaica, and Honduras, encountering two hurricanes along the way; then he went to Panama, the Cayman Islands, and Jamaica, where he was stranded for a year. He died at the relatively young age of 54 or 55 from a variety of illnesses.
Columbus forever altered cultural geography: the relationship between Europe and the Americas, and trade routes, both of which had impact far beyond these continents to a global scale—affecting the development of languages, customs, religion, clothing, and more. In terms of food alone, the “New World” foods and flowers brought back to Europe included corn (maize), tomatoes, potatoes, chili peppers, vanilla, tobacco, beans, pumpkins, cashews, avocados, peanuts, cacao, squash, dahlias, marigolds, and black-eyed Susans. Columbus influenced hundreds of names still in use today, including things he named and things named after him. He also was the reason for the enormous World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, commencing in 1893 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of that first landing and attended by 27 million people over 6 months (see Burnham, Daniel), which influenced architecture and urban geography. Columbus’s voyages made extensive use of navigational aids and mapped much of the coast of the Caribbean Sea (see Cross-Staffs, Astrolabes, and Other Devices).
Columbus experienced an adventure-filled but difficult life of rejection, triumphs, battles, illness, and shipwrecks. But especially during the past half-century, historians have made the case that much of Columbus’s impact was negative. First, America was not “discovered” by Columbus but rather by its indigenous population, of whom there was a great diversity. For many of them, the arrival of Columbus spelled doom. Columbus and his men, for example, initiated the genocide of nearly the entire native Taino population of Hispaniola, estimated at 250,000 people. He was also responsible for the initiation of the transatlantic slave trade, and he implemented the feudal-like encomienda system, including forcing natives to collect gold, even when none was to be found. If these hardships did not kill the native people, the diseases that followed, for which they had no immunity, killed the remainder.
Thus Columbus altered global relationships—of knowledge of the world, of trade, of relationships with native people, and much more. The world’s cultural geography would never be the same again.
See also: Burnham, Daniel; Cross-Staffs, Astrolabes, and Other Devices; Eratosthenes; Eriksson, Leif; Henry the Navigator; Magellan, Ferdinand; Marco Polo; Posidonius; Ptolemy
Columbus, Christopher. 1992. Textos y documentos completos, nuevas cartas, edited by Consuelo Varela and Juan Gil. Madrid. Alianza Editorial.
Henige, David. 1991. In Search of Columbus: The Sources for the First Voyage. Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press.
Phillips, William D., Jr., and Carla Rahn Phillips. 1992. The Worlds of Christopher Columbus. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Knowing the location of things—and what direction those things are from one’s current position—has always been important not just in geography, but also in everyday human experience. For their survival, early hunter-gatherers had to understand where a productive fishing hole was or the location of wild berries, and how to reach them. During the great age of sea exploration, mariners’ lives depended on being able to navigate around known rocks and being able to reach their destination before they ran out food and water. Today’s transportation, water, energy, and other human-created systems all depend on accurate locations and directions. And the apps that we’ve come to depend on for everyday navigation in vehicles, when aboard buses, and when hiking on trails all depend on direction, location, and orientation.
Orientation is the position of something or someone relative to something else. This includes concepts such as left and right, above and below, and parallel and perpendicular. But more important, in terms of the positions of objects on the planet, are the cardinal directions—north, east, south, and west, and the subdivisions of those units, such as northwest and north-northwest. On a diagram that shows directions, called a compass rose, the azimuth is typically true north, or 0 degrees. The angles increase clockwise, so that east is 90 degrees, south is 180, and west is 270. For cardinal directions to mean anything requires a system where an origin of direction can be agreed upon and then reliably measured from anywhere on the planet. Both of these requirements took centuries to develop, and they hinged in part on other discoveries revolutionary to geography.
Once the notion of space and the Earth’s position in it was proposed by Anaximander and further developed by Eratosthenes, Copernicus, and others, it became logical to point to north as the “top” of the planet and the direction that all others would be measured against (see Anaximander; Eratosthenes). As people came to understand that the sun appeared to rise in the east and set in the west because the Earth rotated in the opposite direction, cardinal directions became not only a part of everyday speech but also, through surveying of property boundaries, an imprinted part of the human-build landscape. The sun’s angle throughout the year could be used to determine one’s latitude. Residents of the northern hemisphere could see Polaris sitting conveniently over the North Pole—a reliable guide for determining direction on clear nights. But despite these advancements, a method of determining one’s direction of movement over land and sea was still needed.
Fortunately, as early as the fourth century BCE, the Chinese had noticed that lodestone, a naturally magnetized ore of iron, had a very curious property: When suspended in a liquid, its ends were always aligned north and south, no matter what direction the user moved the object containing the compass. Because of this, the Chinese invented the compass for divination by the time of the Han Dynasty (206 BCE); they later adopted it for navigation (Song Dynasty, 1000 CE). The compass was in use in Western Europe and in Persia by 1200 AD. Yemeni astronomer Al-Ashraf not only referred to it in 1282 but he also used it for astronomical purposes. During the 1300s, Arab navigators introduced the 32-point compass rose.
The compass needle proved to be more accurate than sighting angles on a wooden or brass instrument, conveniently pointing to the North Magnetic Pole in the northern hemisphere or the South Magnetic Pole in the southern hemisphere. The compass thus provided the heading, or the direction in which a ship was traveling, and could be used to determine where the ship should be traveling, or the bearing. Mariner’s maps in the “golden age of exploration” often showed these headings between key ports, and these heading charts and maps were therefore understandably jealously guarded by their owners and their nations. Developments in navigation had to wait in part for the standardization of latitudes and longitudes as the addressing system for the planet (see Latitude and Longitude).
As the magnetic system was discovered and the understanding of it evolved, the compass evolved along with it (see Magnetic Field). For centuries, the compass was composed of lodestone floating in liquid, and later of iron needles that were magnetized by striking them with a lodestone. Dry compasses appeared around 1300 CE; and by the 1500s, the compass’s simple magnetized rod had been replaced with a soft iron wire bent into the shape of a lozenge and attached to the underside of a circular compass. This was suspended at the center on an upright needle. A lodestone was necessary for a ship to carry in order to re-magnetize the wire when it inevitably weakened. Early compasses were attracted by large landmasses, but this problem was resolved by the early 1600s. By 1900, the liquid-filled magnetic compass was common. Beginning at the end of the 20th century, GPS receivers could be used as compasses, through the use of two or more antennae mounted separately, with data blended with an inertial motion unit inside the GPS (see Global Positioning Systems). These devices determine the latitudes and longitudes of the antennae, from which the cardinal directions can be calculated.
The magnetic compass, including this model from the 1800s, was a revolution in geography, influencing navigation, trade, construction, industry, and surveying. (Joseph Kerski)
Billions of people now walk around with a compass. How? This is made possible through the use of compasses in smartphones. Beginning in 2009, the price for three-axis magnetometers for smartphones dropped significantly and began appearing in the phones and in many GPS and location-based apps for those phones. The three-axis magnetometers are important for use in phones because they are not sensitive to the tilt (or how the phone is held) or to elevation.
The magnetic poles are the points on the Earth’s surface where the magnetic field points vertically downward. The North and South magnetic poles are not directly underneath the North and South poles: The North Magnetic Pole currently is located at 86.3° North, 160° West, 965 kilometers from the true North Pole. In fact, the North Magnetic Pole was not reached until Ross’s expedition in 1831; and the South Magnetic Pole may not have been reached until Shackleton’s expedition of 1909, though some doubts remain as to whether the expedition truly did reach the magnetic pole.
Magnetic declination is the angle between magnetic north (or south) and true north (or south). By conventional use, declination is positive when magnetic north is east of true north, and it is negative when magnetic north is west of true north. The presence of iron ore and magnetite also affects the behavior of the compass needle. Magnetic declination does vary from place to place. Magnetic north also varies with the passage of time, sometimes as little as two degrees every century, but for a location nearer the pole, as much as one degree every three years. The poles move due to movement of viscous iron-containing fluid in the Earth’s outer core and from disturbances of the geomagnetic field by charged particles from the sun. The North Magnetic Pole is now moving at 32 miles (52 km) per year. Magnetic declination is included on many topographic maps, such as those from the U.S. Geological Survey.
Despite these challenges associated with the magnetic poles, because the magnetic poles were close to the true poles, the compass proved to be revolutionary to geography. Beginning in the 1200s, its use went hand in hand with improvements in dead reckoning methods (calculating one’s current position by using a previously determined position plus course and speed), and Portolan charts (navigational maps based on compass directions and distances observed by sea pilots in Italy, Spain, and Portugal, from the Italian portolano, “related to ports or harbors”). This enabled ships to navigate in winter, when skies were cloudier, and this prolonged sailing season led to the expansion of trade and additional land discoveries. The use of compasses ensured that absolute location, not just relative location, would be valued in society, leading to the eventual invention of highly precise surveying instruments and GPS. The use of compasses influenced the orientation of newly constructed buildings and the forms and shapes of cities that grew around them, such as Paris and Washington, D.C.
The cardinal directions even became the basis for some national boundaries and the division of land in the United States, Canada, and other parts of the world (see Northwest Ordinance). The use of the compass for finding direction underground and to survey mining claims aided in the extraction of minerals, thereby influencing trade and the Industrial Revolution. In the 20th century, compasses on board aircraft improved safety but also made possible the planning of precise flight lines that were fundamental to all aerial photography. Today, it is difficult to imagine everyday life without being able to accurately determine compass directions. It is fundamental to surveying and to modern societies (see Surveying). Yet behind the scenes is something even more revolutionary—every modern system, from the shipping of freight to the routing of local bus and train networks, is based on determining distance, direction, and position, which are all made possible by the magnetic compass. It truly was, as writer Amir Aczel (2002) wrote, the “invention that changed the world.”
See also: Cross-Staffs, Astrolabes, and Other Devices; Eratosthenes; Global Positioning Systems (GPS); Harrison, John; Latitude and Longitude; Magnetic Field; Northwest Ordinance; Surveying
About.com. “The Compass and Other Magnetic Innovations.” http://inventors.about.com/od/cstartinventions/a/Compass.htm.
About.com. “History of the Compass.” http://geography.about.com/od/historyofgeography/a/The-Compass.htm.
Aczel, Amir D. 2002. The Riddle of the Compass: The Invention That Changed the World. Boston: Mariner Books.
MacDonald, Fraser, and Charles W. J. Withers. 2015. Geography, Technology, and Instruments of Exploration. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
British explorer James Cook was rather a latecomer to the Age of Exploration. However, he made revolutionary contributions to geography—particularly the physical geography of the Pacific Ocean and its islands and surrounding coastlines, and of the southern latitudes. He also documented cultural geography as had never before been done, including the native peoples who inhabited the places he discovered.
James Cook was born in 1728 in northern England, near the Scotland border. In fact, his father was a farmworker from Scotland. When James was 18, he served as an apprentice on boats that carried coal, learning about math and navigation and eventually becoming a ship’s mate. Following the Seven Years’ War, Cook’s skills in navigation and astronomy helped him in 1766 to gain an appointment to command HM Bark Endeavour. In 1768, the Royal Society and the Royal Navy chose him to lead an expedition to Tahiti in order to observe Venus passing across the face of the sun, a rare occurrence. He also charted New Zealand and the eastern coast of New Holland, known today as Australia. He then moved on to the East Indies (known as Indonesia today) and across the Indian Ocean to the Cape of Good Hope, arriving back in England in July 1771, the first circumnavigation of the Earth at such a high southerly latitude.
Following his return, the Royal Navy promoted him and assigned him the mission of locating Terra Australis Incognita, the unknown southern land. His two ships, the Resolution and the Adventure, departed for Cape Town in July 1772 and then proceeded south, turning around after they encountered a great many large chunks of ice. He was approximately 75 miles away from Antarctica, further showing that the southerly latitudes are not occupied by a large landmass.
On Cook’s third journey, he was given the mission of locating a northwest passage that would allow ships to travel between Europe and Asia in the northern reaches of North America. As the Declaration of Independence was being signed in Philadelphia in July 1776, Cook set out, rounding Africa’s southernmost tip and moving eastward across the Indian Ocean. He continued farther east, sailing between New Zealand’s North and South islands (now named the Cook Strait), and he went even farther east, toward the Pacific Northwest of North America. He traveled northward along the coasts of today’s Oregon, British Columbia, and Alaska. He approached the Bering Strait but turned around due to impassible Arctic ice. Captain James Cook then became the first European to land on Hawaii, which he named the Sandwich Islands. He left, and upon his return the next year, in February 1779, tensions mounted with indigenous Hawaiians, and he was murdered in a fight over one of his boats. At only 50 years old, he had accomplished much.
What caused Cook to be so captivated by geography and exploration? Like others in this book, he may have loved these topics from an early age but was encouraged by the physical geography that surrounded him: At the age of 16, Cook apprenticed in a shop in the northern England fishing village of Staithes. Some have speculated that by gazing out of the shop window, Cook felt the lure of the sea, which drove him to spend most of the rest of his life on it.
Captain James Cook filled in many gaps in the world map, as well as contributing to knowledge of the Earth’s physical and cultural geography. (Time Life Pictures/Mansell/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)
Cook’s contributions were revolutionary for geography for several reasons. Through his travels, Cook was able to greatly expand Europe’s knowledge of the world. He was an expert cartographer and a highly capable captain, and he sailed thousands of miles, filling in many gaps on world maps but also regional maps at more detailed scales than ever before. Cook’s contributions to 18th-century science and geography were immense, and they encouraged exploration and discovery for many generations to come. He mapped much of the Pacific islands, Australia, and New Zealand, along with parts of Canada and the United States, most of which had never been visited by non-Europeans. Over his lifetime, he solved several mysteries of the South Pacific, North Pacific, and Indian Ocean, and he provided valuable information to those who were perfecting navigation instruments (see Cross-Staffs, Astrolabes, and Other Devices). Cook’s second voyage marked the successful use of Kendall’s copy of John Harrison’s marine chronometer (see Harrison, John). This enabled him to make much more accurate maps that were used even as late as the mid-1900s.
Cook lost only a few men to scurvy over all of his voyages because of his admonition to his sailors to eat fruits and vegetables. Through his seamanship, courage, and strong leadership skills, Cook was able to help his men cope amid the adverse conditions. As a geographer, he was a highly adept surveyor and cartographer. He paid as much attention to native people as he did to documenting landscapes, climate, vegetation, and other aspects of physical geography. Ironically, it was a skirmish with native people that ended his life.
Cook’s final and fatal third journey in search of a northwest passage connecting the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean encountered the Hawaiian Islands in 1778. The opening of Hawaii to the outside world led to its colonization by America, eventual statehood, and development of tourism. This has caused great alteration and harm to the endemic life there, but it also brought attention to the unique environment there, exemplifying the classic geographic tension between exploration and overuse.
Cook really revolutionized surveying, first using it to map Newfoundland’s uneven coastline in the 1760s. Using local shipmen to call out rocky and dangerous spots along the coasts, he was able to produce the first large-scale, accurately drawn map of Newfoundland. His scientific, large-scale hydrographic surveys were the first to use precise triangulation in order to draw outlines of landmasses.
In 1758, he was sent to map the waters and lands surrounding the Saint Lawrence River in what would become the province of Quebec, Canada. The British had been embroiled in the Seven Years’ War against the French at this location. Using Cook’s detailed maps, the British fleet was able to capture Quebec City, allowing General James Wolfe to carry out the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. The British won this battle, leading to the war’s end and the subsequent transfer of most of the continent from France to Great Britain.
Cook’s contributions also extended beyond the planet. He made observations of the transit of Venus across the sun in the sky above Tahiti, which aided in accurately measuring the distance from the Earth to the sun.
Cook impacted history through his discovery of Australia. A decade after Cook filed his report, Australia became a destination for inmates from Great Britain’s overcrowded prisons, forever altering the cultural geography of that continent.
Cook’s voyages led him to circumnavigate the world at one of the most southern latitudes, and he became the first person to cross the Antarctic Circle. He reached 71°10’ South on January 31, 1774 (see Antarctica). During his second voyage, Cook forever changed the global map by proving that no large landmass (Terra Australis) existed at the southern latitudes. Based on the amount of ice that he observed, Cook did hypothesize that there must be some sort of landmass from which the icebergs calved.
Cook was also known for establishing contact with the many indigenous peoples of the Pacific; he was one of the first Europeans to do so. He was correct in his theory that these groups of people shared common ancestry, despite the vast ocean stretches separating them, in part based on his observation of Malayo-Polynesian languages. Like other geographers and explorers detailed in this book, Cook’s expeditions brought together a diverse group of scientists, who made numerous discoveries. Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, botanists on one of his first expeditions, collected over 3,000 species of plants. Long before today’s focus on the addition of the “A” for “arts” in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, Cook brought artists on his voyages. Sydney Parkinson, for example, completed 264 drawings of the abovementioned plants on the first voyage, and these proved to have immense scientific value. William Hodges, a painter, joined Cook on his second expedition, and he created paintings of the exotic landscapes of Tahiti, Easter Island, and other Pacific islands. Lieutenant Henry Roberts, from Cook’s third journey, prepared detailed charts for Cook’s atlas, which was published posthumously in 1784.
Unlike some other notable geographers in this book who were not fully appreciated until after they died, Cook was well known around the world during his own lifetime. In fact, Benjamin Franklin alerted warship captains in 1779 that if they came across Cook’s ship, they should “not consider her an enemy, nor suffer any plunder to be made of the effects contained in her, nor obstruct her immediate return to England by detaining her or sending her into any other part of Europe or to America; but . . . treat the said Captain Cook and his people with all civility and kindness . . . as common friends to mankind” (Franklin 1837). Franklin did not know that Cook had already died just a month before he urged captains to heed this advice.
Another unusual first occurred during Cook’s voyages: A goat traveled around the world on HMS Dolphin and was later Cook’s milk provider on HMS Endeavor. It was the first animal to ever traverse the globe.
Cook did more than explore, map, and study—several times during his career, he proved that something did not exist; for example, Terra Australis and the Northwest Passage. He contributed a vast amount to knowledge of global and regional cultural and physical geography. After Cook mapped Newfoundland, he declared that his intention was to go not only “farther than any man has been before me, but as far as I think it is possible for a man to go” (Williams 2002). Indeed.
See also: Antarctica; Cross-Staffs, Astrolabes, and Other Devices; Harrison, John
Cook, James, and William James Lloyd Wharton. 1893. Captain Cook’s Journal During His First Voyage Round the World Made in H.M. Bark Endeavor, 1768–71. London: E. Stock.
Dugard, Martin. 2002. Farther Than Any Man: The Rise and Fall of Captain James Cook. New York: Washington Square Press.
Franklin, Benjamin. 1837. The Works of Benjamin Franklin. Boston: Tappan, Whittemore, and Mason.
Williams, Glyn. 2002. Captain Cook: Explorer, Navigator, and Pioneer. BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/captaincook_01.shtml.
The relationship between the Earth and the sun is one of the fundamental relationships of geography. Indeed, it drives a myriad of systems and cycles that affect the planet and its people, past, present, and future. These include the Earth’s climate, seasons, weather, ocean currents, biomes, energy budget, and magnetism, just to name a few. But to correctly understand how these systems interact required the correct placement of the Earth in the solar system in relationship to the sun. For centuries, the Earth was placed as it naturally seemed to the observer—at the center of the universe. Not until the 16th century did a radical change occur in that thinking, thanks to Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), who placed the sun at the center—a heliocentric model. In so doing, he caused a revolution in geographic thought and helped usher in the scientific revolution.
Copernicus lived at the time when it was possible to be a polymath—he obtained a doctorate in canon law and practiced as a scholar of classic literature, and as a physician, translator, governor, diplomat, economist, and scientist. In economics, he formed an influential quantity theory of money. He spoke Latin, German, Polish, Greek, and Italian.
Copernicus was born and he died in Royal Prussia—an area that had been a part of Poland since before he was born. His book that caused the scientific revolution, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), was not published until just before his death in 1543.
Like other geographers, Copernicus had key influences. Even his name was geographical: His region, and his father’s trade, focused on copper. Upon the death of his father, his maternal uncle, Lucas Watzenrode, oversaw Nicolaus’s career, preparing him for entrance to the University of Kraków, Watzenrode’s alma mater in Poland’s then capital. At the university, he studied math and science, and he began collecting a large library on astronomy. He analyzed the logical contradictions in two systems popular at the time: Aristotle’s theory of homocentric spheres and Ptolemy’s mechanism of eccentrics and epicycles. When he discarded these, he took the first step toward the creation of his own doctrine. While in Italy, three key events occurred: he met astronomer Domenico Maria Novara da Ferrara, he witnessed a lunar eclipse, and he attended a calendar reform conference. To create an accurate calendar and to calculate the length of the year required a completely different model than the Earth-centered one.
Nicolaus Copernicus statue in front of the Frombork Cathedral, Poland. Copernicus (1473–1543) revolutionized astronomical and geographic thought by placing the sun at the center of the universe, not the Earth. This had enormous impact on how the world was thereafter perceived and studied through geography and other disciplines. (Ysuel1/Dreamstime.com)
Like many other geographers, he was keenly involved in and influenced by the political geography of his day and region—the Kingdom of Poland, the Prussian Confederation, the Thirteen Years’ War, the Teutonic Order. In fact, he did more than observe the political system—he served as diplomat and even signed peace treaties.
At some point before 1514, Copernicus wrote a 40-page outline of his heliocentric theory, Nicolai Copernici de hypothesibus motuum coelestium a se constitutis commentariolus—the Commentariolus, or “Little Commentary.” After returning to Poland, he constructed a small observation tower at his home, from which in 1515 he discovered the eccentricity (variability) of the Earth’s orbit and of the movement of the solar apogee in relation to the fixed stars.
By 1532, Copernicus had completed De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, and against the advice of his colleagues, despite urges and pleas by his closest friends, he chose not to publish his findings. He admitted that he feared the potential ridicule “to which he would expose himself on account of the novelty and incomprehensibility of his theses” (Dobrzycki and Hajdukiewicz 1969). Nevertheless, by the next year, he had gained the interest of Pope Clement VII, several Catholic cardinals, and, by 1536, of educated people from all over Europe. Finally, in 1543, Copernicus agreed to give his manuscript to a personal friend, Tiedemann Giese, bishop of Chełmno, to be submitted for printing by German printer Johannes Petreius at Nürnberg, Germany. Legend has it that Copernicus was presented with the final printed pages of his book on the very day that he died—waking from a stroke-induced coma, looking at his book, and then dying peacefully. Whatever his last day was really like, his influence was just beginning.
In around 400 BCE, Philolaus described an astronomical system in which a “Central Fire” occupied the universe’s center. Ponticus (387–312 BCE) proposed that the Earth rotates on its axis. Aristarchus (310–230 BCE) was the first to theorize that the Earth orbited the sun; this idea was refined later by Seleucus. Despite these thinkers, the prevailing theory was the one postulated by Ptolemy in 150 CE in Almagest—namely, that the Earth was the fixed center of the universe, and the stars were part of an expansive outer sphere that rotated daily, with the planets, sun, and moon, all rooted in their own, smaller spheres. Accounting for the differing paths of these objects required a complicated geometric, circular system of epicycles, deferents, and equants.
Thus, in light of the prevailing Ptolemaic theory, Copernicus’s views were revolutionary. Copernicus’s Commentariolus listed the assumptions upon which the heliocentric theory was based: first, that there is no one single center of all the celestial circles and spheres. Furthermore, that the center of the Earth is not the center of the universe, the center of the Earth being only one center of gravity and the center of gravity for the moon. All the spheres, he said, revolve about the sun as their midpoint; therefore, the sun is the center of the universe. For Copernicus, the distance from the Earth to the sun was imperceptible in comparison with the height of the firmament (the stars); whatever motion appeared in the firmament came not from any motion of that firmament, but rather from the motion of the Earth. The Earth, together with its nearby elements, performs a complete rotation on its fixed poles in a daily motion, he maintained, while the firmament and highest heaven remain unchanged; what appear to us as motions of the sun arise not from the motion of the sun but from the motion of the Earth and our sphere, with which we revolve about the sun like any other planet. The Earth has, he concluded, more than one motion.
Copernicus’s theory simplified the universe and its motions in significant ways. For example, the periodic “backward” motion in the sky of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn was more readily explained by the idea that Earth “overtook” them, as the Earth circled the sun more rapidly than they did. Despite the fact that it would later be shown that the sun was not the center of the universe, but only of our own solar system, and despite the fact that Copernicus held that orbits were circular and not elliptical, Copernicus had it right on nearly every count.
Yet his theory was originally slow to be accepted. Perhaps this was because at the time, no instrument could observe a shifting, or parallax, of the stars that should exist if the Earth were revolving around the sun. Perhaps it was because Copernicus only added 27 astronomical observations during his lifetime. Perhaps it was because without a telescope (still 50 years away), he could not account for the phases of Mercury and Venus, which had to exist if his theory were true. Perhaps it was because in those early days of print, only a small number of his books could be reproduced. Perhaps it was because the Lutheran clergyman Osiander’s preface to Copernicus’s book stated that the heliocentric theory was not fact, but rather an abstract concept that allowed for more accurate calculations of planetary positions.
No matter. No great work was circulated less widely and read by fewer people than Copernicus’s Revolutions—it was reprinted only three times prior to the 20th century. However, Copernicus’s influence on thinkers and theories that followed after him was enormous: Johannes Kepler’s laws of planetary motions and Newton’s laws of gravity were directly influenced by his thoughts. But equally revolutionary was Copernicus’s reliance on scientific observations and mathematical calculations to support his ideas. Ptolemy bended the facts to fit into his theories; his teachings were largely accepted, without question, for centuries after his death. By contrast, Copernicus developed his theory to match observed facts. He thus ushered in the scientific method and helped overthrow the then-popular reliance on the unproven ideas of ancient Greek philosophers (see Ptolemy). And, contrary to popular belief, only mild controversy followed the publication of his book; the Catholic Church did not take any official action against it for 73 years, in response to Galileo’s teachings.
In the 10th chapter of his first book, Copernicus made a straightforward, revolutionary statement: “In the center rests the Sun. For who would place this lamp of a very beautiful temple in another or better place than this wherefrom it can illuminate everything at the same time.” Indeed, the understanding of the world and its place in the universe, and all that was to follow in geographic thought, would never be the same again.
See also: Ptolemy
Copernicus, Nicolaus. 1992. Minor Works, translated by E. Rosen. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press (originally published as volume 3 of Nicholas Copernicus: Complete Works [Warsaw: Polish Scientific Publishers, 1985]).
Copernicus, Nicolaus. 1992. On the Revolutions, translated by E. Rosen. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press (originally published as volume 2 of Nicholas Copernicus: Complete Works [Warsaw: Polish Scientific Publishers, 1978]).
Dobrzycki, Jerzy, and Leszek Hajdukiewicz. 1969. Kopernik, Mikołaj, Polski słownik biograficzny (Polish Biographical Dictionary), vol. XIV, Wrocław, Polish Academy of Sciences, pp. 3–16.
Gingerich, Owen. 1993. The Eye of Heaven: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler. New York: American Institute of Physics.
Grant, Edward. 1994. Planets, Stars, and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200–1687. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jardine, Nicholas. 1982. “The Significance of the Copernican Orbs.” Journal for the History of Astronomy 13: 168–194.
Accurately determining the locations of things and phenomena, as well as one’s own position on the planet, is fundamental to geography. Today’s mapping tools, satellite imagery, GPS, and geographic information systems make it easy to overlook the fact that determining one’s exact location on the planet was, until just a few years ago, a long and arduous process. Part of the challenge has always been because latitude and longitude are more than numbers—they are angles, measured in degrees, and they are measured off of an object much larger than ourselves—the Earth. Compounding the problem is that the Earth rotates on its axis rapidly: at the rate of 15 degrees per hour. Furthermore, Planet Earth is not a perfect sphere; rather, it is an oblate spheroid, wider around the Equator than it is around the poles. In addition, the Earth contains numerous anomalies—wrinkles and bulges, on and under the surface. Even the Earth’s magnetic poles do not sit exactly underneath the North and South poles—far from it, in fact, and they are continually moving (see Magnetic Field). For these and other reasons, determining the latitude and longitude of an object, phenomenon, or event to sub-centimeter accuracy did not happen overnight. It didn’t suddenly occur with the advent of computer-driven geotechnologies, either. Rather, it became possible through a series of inventions, each of which was a revolution in geography.
Long ago, in the third century BCE, Eratosthenes first proposed a system of latitude and longitude for a map of the world. Hipparchus was the first to use this system to uniquely refer to places on the Earth (see Eratosthenes; Hipparchus). Latitude and longitude evolved as an agreed-upon method of referring to Earth locations, enhanced over the centuries with improvements in measuring devices and by the International Meridian Conference of 1884, when the location of the prime meridian was agreed upon by the major powers of the world (see Latitude and Longitude).
The oldest “clock” is the Earth itself, turning as it does on its axis every day; the oldest means of keeping time came from observing changes in the sky because of the rotating Earth. For many centuries, determining one’s latitude was done by figuring the angle above the horizon of the sun or another known star. Before measuring, the sun’s or star’s declination was looked up in an almanac. The sun had to be measured at solar noon, when it was highest in the sky, and other stars had to be measured when they were on the same meridian as the person doing the measuring; that is, the positions had to be noted when they were due north or south of the person’s position. Then one’s latitude could be determined by simply by taking 90 degrees minus the measured altitude plus the looked-up declination. Thus, these measurements were dependent in part on almanacs. Early almanacs, besides containing events, also contained horoscopes and other means by which the future could supposedly be predicted. However, Solomon Jarchus in 1150 and those who followed began to create the first modern almanacs based on scientific observations. Modern almanacs can rightly be considered a revolution in geography, for they grew to include information about weather and climate (which was very helpful for farming) and the positions of the sun, planets, and stars (which was critical for navigation). Though the almanacs contained some inaccuracies, they improved over time. On land, referring to things in their relative positions suited most everyday use; however, for ships at sea, without the convenience of known landmarks, determining one’s location was even more important. In the northern hemisphere, the star Polaris, positioned above the North Pole, remained a useful nighttime navigation tool. With the advent of dependable celestial positions recorded in almanacs, measuring the angles was the trickiest part of the operation. This was done through a variety of instruments, but the quadrant, the cross-staff, and the mariner’s astrolabe were for centuries the most heavily used.
A sextant, used to determine the latitude of a ship at sea. The astrolabe, backstaff, cross-staff, sextant, magnetic compass, and the almanac, which recorded the position of celestial objects, were revolutionary inventions that enabled and encouraged navigation and exploration, and thus the beginnings of trade, colonialism, migration, and other global geographic forces that are felt down to the present day. (Joseph Kerski)
The backstaff may have originated with Thomas Harriott—an English astronomer, mathematician, ethnographer, and translator—during the late 1500s. It was developed further by English explorer Captain John Davis in 1594. Its name came from the way it was used: The user turned his back on the sun. Holding the instrument in front, with the sun at one’s back, one held the instrument so that the shadow cast by the instrument’s “shadow vane” fell on the “horizon vane” at the side of a slit in the instrument. One then moved the “sight vane” so that one observed the horizon in a line while maintaining the position of the shadow, permitting the reading of the angle between the horizon and the sun as the sum of the angle read from the two arcs. Improvements on this instrument included the demi-cross, the almucantar staff, the plough, and various forms of quadrants.
From about 1350 to 1600, the cross-staff was also used. The cross-staff was a piece of wood. One piece was the staff, and attached at its middle was a perpendicular crosspiece, able to slide up and down along it, in the manner of a mid-20th-century slide rule. A cross-staff could measure the angle between the directions of two stars or measure the angle of the noontime sun above the horizon, which allowed people to estimate their latitude.
A brass astrolabe, a medieval astronomical navigation instrument. (Brian Maudsley/iStockPhoto.com)
From about 400 to 1600 CE, the astrolabe was heavily used to determine the time of sunrise or sunset at one’s location, or the positions of the stars and planets. The most popular type was a planispheric astrolabe, on which the celestial sphere was projected onto the plane of the Equator. Most were made of brass, with some up to 6 inches (15 cm) in diameter. But a mariner’s astrolabe, used heavily from the late 1400s through the 1500s, was used to determine one’s latitude on the Earth. One did so by determining the position above the horizon of the sun or another star of known declination, or the angle above the horizon, using a brass ring, graduated in degrees, with a rotating alidade for sighting the sun or star. However, it was seldom that simple, due to waves on ships making it difficult to measure, cloud cover, and difficulty in reading the instrument. Still, for its time, the instrument was a tremendous leap forward in terms of determining latitude.
Another major development, the sextant, used adjustable mirrors to measure the exact angle of the stars, moon, and sun above the horizon. Its name derived from the Latin word for “one-sixth,” because the curved frame of the sextant represented one-sixth of a circle. From the measured angles and an almanac indicating the positions of these objects at different times of the year and for different latitudes, ship captains could determine their latitude in clear weather, day or night. Around 1730, John Hadley and Thomas Godfrey laid out the principles of the sextant, though later the principles were also found in earlier unpublished writings of Isaac Newton (1643–1727). More recently, scholars (Waley-Cohen 1999) have pointed out that navigational instruments were simultaneously advancing rapidly in China as well. Unlike the backstaff, the sextant permitted stars to be observed as well as the sun, and since it measured relative angles, it did not need to be held completely steady. These devices also used a Vernier scale, which allowed the user to conduct measurements much more precisely than measurements done by reading a uniformly divided straight or circular scale of measurement. The Vernier scale indicates exactly where the measurement lies in between two of the markings on the main scale; this is why it was used on sextants and on other mapping, measuring, and surveying devices. Sextants were widely used until rather recently. Charles Lindbergh, for example, used a bubble sextant on his record-breaking flights across the oceans. Radio navigation was developed during and after World War II, followed by GPS beginning in the 1980s and today’s global navigation satellite systems (GNSS).
The magnetic compass was another major revolution in geography (see Compass; Magnetic Field). The compass needle proved to be more accurate than sighting angles on a wooden or brass instrument, and it conveniently pointed to the North Magnetic Pole in the northern hemisphere or the South Magnetic Pole in the southern hemisphere. The compass thus provided the “heading,” or the direction in which a ship was traveling, and could be used to determine where the ship should be traveling. Mariner’s maps in the “golden age of exploration” often showed the headings between key ports, and these heading charts and maps were, understandably, jealously guarded by their owners and their nations.
All of these instruments provided a gradual improvement in the ability to determine one’s latitude. Determining one’s current longitude proved to be a much more vexing problem. Ship crews for many years sailed near coastlines to be within sight of known landmarks. When they began to sail more frequently out into the open ocean, they used a variety of techniques, such as observing ocean currents, clouds, birds, and other things. As navigation instruments improved in accuracy, crews and captains became emboldened to explore longer and farther, improving the knowledge of cultural and physical geography, and that knowledge became recorded in notes, books, and maps. Still, often ships would navigate to their desired latitude while repeatedly checking the instruments. At that chosen latitude, they attempted to steer due east or west, depending on their destination. While this method of sailing first to the desired latitude and then sailing to the desired longitude required more time than steering directly to a desired destination along a single straight line, it was often necessary. Determining longitude accurately was not achievable with any of the devices described here; it only became possible after the mid-1700s, upon the invention of an accurate shipboard clock (for further investigation, see Harrison, John).
Even in modern times, navigation and guidance systems have sometimes gone wrong. Amelia Earhart’s final flight and the failure of the Mariner I spacecraft are notable such failures, and stories of people driving off cliffs or into lakes by following errant GPS-based instructions fill current news bulletins. But the development of navigational methods and devices gave rise to mapping and exploration and provided the basis for the division of land use, the development of transportation systems, and other critical components of modern societies. Through these developments, they have had longstanding influence on the cultural geography of the planet, and conversely, the development of geographic content and tools has influenced the development of these navigational aids.
See also: Compass; Eratosthenes; Harrison, John; Hipparchus; Latitude and Longitude; Magnetic Field
Astrolabes.org. www.astrolabes.org.
Burch, David, and Tobias Burch. 2015. Celestial Navigation: A Complete Home Study Course, 2nd ed. Seattle, WA: Starpath Publication.
Johnston, Andrew K, Roger D. Connor, Carlene E. Stephens, and Paul E. Ceruzzi. 2015. Time and Navigation: The Untold Story of Getting from Here to There. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books.
Waley-Cohen, Joanna. 1999. The Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese History. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company.