Off the map

My lunch out with a new lady pal at The French Market Creperie (more on this fab experience soon) ended on a high note yesterday. 

As I was driving us back from our long lunch, J, who attends the University of Tennessee as a full-time student and who needed a drop off at class, told me to duck into a parking lot off Volunteer Boulevard. 

"Let's go to the museum," she said. I've decided that J specializes in surprising newcomers. How, I wondered, did she know the essential geekiness of my smart-girl heart? How had she picked up on my love of scholarly, bookish things? Oh, right, we'd spent the last three hours chattering away about current events, big ideas and writing. But still. A museum? J certainly knows how to court a new friend. 

Our destination was a mid-century modernist box of a building nestled into a decade's worth of vegetation. Students wandered by, but no one seemed interested in the Frank H. McClung Museum. Fine with me, although I had a moment where I wondered if we had descended into a new level of nerd.

Never mind that worry, though, because once we stumbled through the doors and oriented ourselves in the grand foyer complete with a gift shop and a bored-to-death guard who idly picked at her fingernails and barely registered our arrival, my blood was up. Through May 22 (2011), the McClung features an exhibit titled "Mapping the New World." 

The exhibit opens with an explanation of how geographers measure the Earth's space. What is longitude? Latitude? A sextant? (Just for the record, a sextant isn't something you send to your new sweetie on your cell phone.) We picked up a magnifying glass on our way in, and although we spent some time studying the explanatory information, the meat of the exhibit beckoned: maps. And lots of them.

The earliest example dates from 1493. As you might expect, the cartographer's understanding of the New World was hazy at best. Imagine the United States coastline run through a blender, and you'll start to get an idea of just how strange the map looked to us. As we moved through the gallery, the centuries passed, and cartographers' understanding of the world's geography expanded. 

One of the early maps we studied had a label that included reference to New York, Virginia, Maryland, and a place called "New Jarsey."  J and I, with our writer/editor sensibilities, looked at one another, and an unspoken moment of "see? this is why the world needs editors...how unfortunate to have such a glaring typo in an exhibit label" passed between us. Turns out, though, that the mapmaker was simply referring to New Jersey as New Jarsey, thereby leaving the McClung staff off the hook. (Editors! You really can't take them anywhere without having them judge, judge, judge all the words around them.)

By the time we reached the maps drawn in the mid-1700s, we could begin to see outlines of states and many cities that are familiar. We spent plenty of time using our magnifying glasses to study various places both of us have lived. There were the Finger Lakes in upstate New York, but where was Binghamton? Didn't exist until much later.

How about Philadelphia? Easy to find. Chicago? Didn't exist until much later than I expected. What about Madison, Wis.? In a map from the 1820s, the only big city in Wisconsin was Prairie du Chien, not surprising since the not-yet state had a long entanglement with French explorers.

My favorite map ended up being a delicate rendition of the southeastern seaboard. Titled "Map of the British and French Dominions in Western American," it was drawn by John Mitchell in 1755. In the center of Tennessee, approximately in the area of Knoxville, Mitchell wrote that this Cherokee land was "A Fine Fertile Country By All Accounts." To which I reply:

Dear Mr. Mitchell, wherever you may be these some 240 years after your death, please know that your observation matches my experience perfectly.

Another map not to miss is a world map from 1532, drawn by cartographer Sebastian Munster and intricately illustrated by Hans Holbein. Yes, that Hans Holbein. While images of human beings being hacked apart and roasted over open flames might not make anyone's day, the craftsmanship of the piece stands out as a high note in the exhibit and is worth a closer look.

The final portion of the exhibit deals with new mapping technologies, and I confess that we rushed through it to get to the Egyptian display. When mummified cats call, it's hard not to follow!

What you need to know:
Frank H. McClung Museum The University of Tennessee 1327 Circle Park Drive Knoxville, Tennessee 37996-3200			Phone: 865-974-2144 Fax: 865-974-3827 Email: museum@utk.edu			Hours Mon - Sat: 9:00A to 5:00P Sun: 1:00P to 5:00P