Mapping Travel

More often than not, readers of travel narratives expect to find one or several maps showing, as English privateer William Dampier wrote, “the Course of the Voyage,” that is, where the author-traveler went and, implicitly, a sense of what was seen and experienced. Dampier used a now-common cartographic strategy to tell the story from beginning to end as well as focus on significant places on the way by marking the journey with a “pricked” line. Despite the lines’ popularity and present ubiquity, the complex intellectual processes of considering travel as a continuum rather than as a series of stops and of plotting a journey onto a map have attracted relatively little academic attention. Drawing on a thousand years of European travel writing and map-making, this work suggests that in fifteenth-century Europe, maps joined text-based itineraries and on-the-spot directions to guide travelers and accompany reports of land and sea travel. Called in subsequent centuries “route maps,” “itinerary maps,” and “travel maps,” often interchangeably, what are defined here as journey maps added lines of travel. Since their emergence, most journey maps have taken one of two forms: itinerary maps, which connected stages with line segments, and route maps, which tracked unbroken lines between endpoints. In the seventeenth century, journey mapping conventions were codified and incorporated into travel writing and other genres that represented individual travel. With each succeeding generation, journey maps have become increasingly common and complex, responding to changes in forms of transportation, such as air and motor car “flight” and print technology, especially the advent of multi-color printing.