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Christopher Columbus erroneously believed he could sail around the world and reach India’s east coast, but it was instead Portuguese captain Vasco da Gama who, in 1498, sailed around the southern tip of Africa and reached India purely by sea.
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This led to a drive to find a purely sea-route to India (Davies 40). Travelers to India originally followed ancient or medieval land trade routes through Arabia or through northern Africa if they traveled by water bridging the eastern Africa coast and the west coast of India. In the 15th century, however, the Turks occupied key land routes to the East, making them unprofitable for merchants. India: From Portuguese Sea Routes to British Rule In India and Africa, however, the process of map-making closely coincided with the spread of European influence. In the Americas, colonialism did not maintain a long enough foothold for Europeans to explore all the land, and there was never a distinct colonial presence in Northern and Eastern Asia. As for Australia, the land of the Australian outback was too inhospitable for colonial explorers to consider it worth mapping (Ryan 101). Though colonial explorers were not responsible for the mapping of America, Australia, or most of Asia, this was due only to a lack of prolonged colonial presence in those regions. Their maps of Europe had developed as the people lived there, quite unlike the explorative impetus that drove map-making in India and Africa. Colonial powers had long since mapped their own continent before the age of expansion and had a detailed understanding of their homelands. The two main areas which Europeans mapped because of the colonial drive were Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Colonialism and the Development of the Modern Map Walter Crane map of the British Empire in 1886/public domain Accurate cartography, however, did not come until much later, when such precision was necessary for the management of colonial holdings. Over the course of several centuries of contact, a thoroughly detailed concept of the land emerged. The terrain became more detailed as they or those who came after them roamed further in the pursuit of new people with whom to trade. The development of maps of foreign lands typically began with merchants learning land or sea routes, but leaving all other areas empty (or illustrated with any variety of monsters and extravagant flourishes) (See Spice Trade in India). Rather, world maps developed slowly and interdependently, with explorers and traders from one region adding details known to local inhabitants of another, learning the lay of the land in stages. Of course, it would be inaccurate to think that the same map was used by all peoples across the globe. In one particular map, the further south one looks, the more deformed the people are depicted, until some at the edge of the map have dog-faces, eyes on their chest, or a single leg on which they hop (Friedman). In the border of the map, Jesus typically sits at the top, and various seemingly “less-civilized” peoples are depicted in the southern lands. Often such maps existed for the purposes of national or religious propaganda, such as the well known mappa mundi (Latin for “map of the world”), which aligned the top of the map with east, the direction of Jerusalem. Ancient and Medieval Mapsīoth in content and accuracy, the map of the world, as created by pre-Renaissance Europeans, little resembles maps seen today in geography books. As the needs of European cultures changed, so did the details on the maps. Indeed, the height of European colonialism saw some of greatest developments in map-making techniques and actually led to the development of what we conceive of as the modern map (See Geography and Empire).
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Unlike modern maps, which focus on the exact lay of the land, the creations of ancient European mapmakers emphasized roads, cities, rivers, and safe harbors, since other details were not as important to travelers and traders at the time (Madan 25). Maps as we know them today are the result of millennia of study and observation.