THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 5, 1995 TAG: 9502070501
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 8 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY MASON PETERS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 171 lines
Nobody knows whose hand first reached out at least 6,000 years ago and grasped the mystery and magic of mapmaking.
Archaeologists believe one of the first maps was a sun-baked brick found where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers converge in Mesopotamia, ``the Land Between The Waters'' that nurtured some of the earliest civilizations of crop-growers and city builders.
On the old brick, the ancient cartographer had scribed two lines, believed to represent the life-giving rivers, and a cross-hatching that probably indicated irrigation canals that created the Fertile Crescent.
Humans ever since have been fascinated by artfully drawn charts of where they are, where they've been, and where they want to go.
The influence of maps on history - and vice versa - is brilliantly shown this week at the Outer Banks History Center, just over the bridge to the Elizabeth II ship berth on the Manteo waterfront.
Four hundred and eleven years years of exploration and settlement of coastal North Carolina are traced in the 47 maps, nearly all originals, put on exhibition by devoted volunteers of the Outer Banks History Center Associates. Drew C. Wilson, a North Carolina coast history buff and prize-winning photographer for The Virginian-Pilot and The Carolina Coast, is president of the group.
The exhibit will remain in place for the remainder of this year, said Wynne C. Dough, curator of the Outer Banks History Center, part of the North Carolina Division of Archives and History. The map display opened Feb. 1, but a formal ceremony to present the display to the public will be held on Wednesday.
Hidden within the allure of the brightly colored old charts are charming mysteries that have no answers.
In the context of the present, each map is a puzzle where the known is often surreal and the unknown a nagging little hole in history.
Why?
Who told the mapmaker that vast lakes existed in the Appalachian regions behind mountains that run east and west? Where are all those wondrous rivers shown flowing uphill toward the sunset? Or vanished Outer Banks inlets called Musketo, Old Currituck, Carthys and Roanoke? They were once thriving ocean passages between modern Corolla and Nags Head.
And, indeed, where are the ghosts of those brave lost women and their men who left signs of love on Roanoke Island four centuries ago and then walked or paddled off the very maps that guided those who later came to look for the Lost Colony?
To find the future Carolinas on Map No. 1, which was printed by the Flemish cartographer Ortelius between 1570 and 1592, you must locate an area metrically labeled Wingandekoa.
The name Wingandekoa bothered David Stick, a proper Outer Banks historian who is more than occasionally nettled by doubts.
Stick discovered and reported in his book ``Roanoke Island: The Beginnings of English America'' that the earliest English explorers thought Wingandekoa was the name applied to the Outer Banks by the original native Americans.
It turned out, Stick found, that the Indians were just being polite. But by the time the English discovered that Wingandekoa meant ``you wear fine clothes,'' they had already renamed most of the land Virginia after their spinster sovereign, Elizabeth I.
Nearly all of the displays at the Outer Banks History Center are maps from Stick's own collection.
``I started buying old maps many years ago when they weren't so expensive and I could afford them,'' Stick said.
Each in its way, the old charts demonstrate the slow progress of mapmaking that followed early explorers seeking their fortunes under half a dozen flags. To these Europeans, good maps were dreams of riches worth dying for.
But a truly accurate map, then and now, is hard to come by.
Not until 1852 did the U.S. government begin ``triangulating'' the Outer Banks to provide charts that could be trusted. The principle involves using benchmarks linked by a series of accurately surveyed triangles. Once the benchmarks were precisely located, smaller and smaller triangles were used to map reference points on the coastline.
One such map, triangles and all, is on display.
But even finding the coast of the then New World was a chancey process 400 years ago. It was nearly 150 years before a self-taught English carpenter named John Harrison, trying for a 20,000-pound government prize, invented the first successful seagoing clock-chronometer that allowed navigators to determine their longitude.
If a ship's clock can accurately keep the time of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, where the zero meridian of longitude is located, then the vessel's position east or west of Greenwich can be determined by the position of the sun at a given moment.
The earth's rotation makes the sun appear to move across the sky from east to west at a constant speed of 15 degrees of arc an hour (about 1,000 mph). If a navigator notes the moment when HIS sun is overhead he can read the time on his chronometer, and that will equal the sun's distance from Greenwich - the longitude of that particular point on the earth.
Success of the first chronometer in 1714 caused contemporary astronomers to calculate the sun's instantaneous position all over the world, and soon these tables traveled with sailing ship navigators to all the seven seas. East and West were no longer fearful areas of the unknown ``where ye sea serpentes live.''
Harrison's wonderful chronometer, ticking the time of home away from home, was soon used to locate accurately the coast of Carolina a little more than five hours sun-time west of Greenwich. That's 75 degrees, 40 minutes of arc west longitude. Before that most navigators seeking the New World simply sailed west and hoped for the best, like Columbus.
Sailors knew how to determine latitude long before they learned to find longitude. To find a distant port, many navigators simply sailed down a latitude line on which the port was located.
It was particularly easy in the northern hemisphere: If you measure the angular height of the Pole Star at night, this is very close to your position north of the equator in degrees, minutes and seconds of latitude.
Soon tables giving the sun's annual declination, or apparent seasonal tilt above or below the equator, made it possible to also determine latitude by measuring the height of the sun from a ship at apparent noon using a primitive sextant-like instrument.
All of these refinements, including modern satellite radio location calculators, contributed over time to the burgeoning science of mapmaking as wonderfully displayed in the exhibit at the Outer Banks History Center.
Today thousands of maps in all of the world's languages make everything easy.
A modern navigator, checking his chart and the readout of his Global Position Indicator, can precisely locate the History Center at 35 degrees, 54 minutes and 30 seconds North Latitude and 75 degrees, 40 minutes, zero seconds West Longitude.
An out-of-town tourist visiting Roanoke Island will find it easier to buy a road map and follow instructions to ``take U.S. 64 east to Roanoke Island and then make a left on N.C. 400 and keep going until you cross the bridge to Ice Plant Island, where the History Center is located.''
But wait a minute.
None of the instructions or descriptions convey a sense of tangible reality without a map.
From the time the first cartographer by the Tigris or Euphrates made his brick, humans have had a deep-seated need to point, to put their finger down on some kind of a map before saying ``I am here!''
Without a chart, no place seems as real as anyplace.
Long-forgotten details on old and newer maps at the History Center emphasize the transience of history in the appearance and disappearance of ocean inlets.
Outer Banks chronicles in a sense begin with the ocean inlets that let the early explorers breach the dangerous sand dunes and sail into the calm New World waters of Carolina sounds and rivers.
Once there was a marvelous ocean inlet almost due east of Manteo where the sun rose in summer.
It was called Roanoke Inlet, not far from where Jockey's Ridge is now, and it may have been the passage that the first English settlers of 1584-1585 sailed through on their voyage of mystery. Like the colonists, the inlet is long gone; shoaling closed the entrance by 1811, according to one of the maps.
But the impermanence of inlets is nothing compared to what will eventually happen to the presently westward-migrating Outer Banks. Enjoy the wonderful map show in Manteo while you can.
In some future millenium, a cartographer-to-come will soar over a rearranged North Carolina coastline with his automatic laser-surveying machine zapping the terrain below.
He will discover that an ancient landmark called Jockey's Ridge has migrated with the eons westward to a place where Manteo used to be.
And deep beneath that inching, wind-driven dune will be a long-forgotten place called the Outer Banks History Center.
No pharoah, nor even Wynne Dough, will ever have a better bier under a sandy pyramid. ILLUSTRATION: Photos of maps on display
The Carte Generale de la Caroline, circa 1696...based on 1685 chart
Cartouche from an atlas published in 1640...
...Western Hemisphere dating from 1592...
Gerardus Mercator-Jodocus Hondius map of 1606...
La Florida chart...1584...
KEYWORDS: OUTER BANKS MAPPING CHARTS by CNB