THE NEVADA TRAVERSE - Nevada Association of Land Surveyors

Terra Incognita.. continued from page 5
Europeans were in the midst of discovering themselves, along
with new and exotic lands, in an explosion of geography.
Surveying was becoming an ever more accurate and reliable
science and in doing so it brought cartography along with it.
Thanks to rapidly improving printing techniques, map literacy
improved. Europeans visualized their changing world in new
and better ways. Still, until well into the 1700’s, and in some
places the mid 1800’s, maps of vast reaches of the Americas were
often more the product of fantasy than fact. The maps often
depicted imaginary lands, rivers and seas, or left large areas of
empty paper. Much of it remained terra incognita, an unknown
land, to all but its inhabitants.
During Spain’s 16th Century colonial expansion, her monarch
Philip II sponsored surveying and mapping projects in all his
realms, the Americas in particular. He recognized, as the British
later did in India, that cartography and imperialism go hand in
hand. To merely claim a territory, one can do without maps, but
to govern it requires knowledge and maps are the key. Philip’s
cartographers in Madrid requested information from colonial
and military officials regarding cities and towns, fortifications,
prominent features, measured latitudes, data from indigenous
peoples, etc. 6 Longitude however remained an unresolved
problem. But one of the cartographers, López de Velasco, sent
instructions to colonial officials in all of Spain’s territories to
observe the lunar eclipses of September 26, 1577 and September
15, 1578. It was an ambitious but perfectly functional plan to
determine longitudes around Spain’s far flung empire. They
were to observe the moon’s altitude above the horizon at the
start and end of the eclipses 7 together with local times of the
events, probably with a nocturnal. 8 Included in the instructions
were plans for making simple instruments to observe these
phenomena.
From a comparison of the colonist’s lunar observations, against
those he observed in Madrid, Valesco hoped to derive time
differentials and construct longitudes. He could then assemble
a great mosaic from the other geodetic and geographical data.
The information sent back by local officials was of value, but
the larger, state-sponsored surveys in New Spain were a
failure. These and later eclipse-observation experiments, were
inconsistent, 9 although longitude for Mexico City was finally
derived. But mistakes had consequences; erroneous longitudes
would effect the treaties of demarcation and could give Portugal
still more land in the Americas at Spain’s expense.
The tremendous flow of information, and continually updated
means of gathering it, brought the rise of a new kind of multidisciplinary
scientist, the Royal Cosmographer. Fusing all the
incoming data into a coherent picture, this surveyor, astronomer,
cartographer and general science advisor to the Spanish Court
turned the collected observations into a vast body of knowledge
which informed the King as he exerted his will over the empire.
Juxtaposed to this enormous acquisition of new data was the
intense need for secrecy. In 1481 the Portuguese monarchy
imposed a prohibition on the dissemination of nautical maps
and descriptions of explorations. Later it became illegal for
foreign pilots to own Portuguese navigational or “portolan”
charts. The Spanish Crown soon adopted the same mindset. The
maps and descriptions of the New World were of great economic,
strategic and political importance and as such became state
secrets. 10 Royal Cosmographers, already tied to the monarch’s
bureaucracy, were obliged to limit access to their work.
In 1572 a new wave of Christian missionaries arrived in
8 The Nevada Traverse Vol. 39, No. 2, 2012
New Spain, augmenting those who landed earlier with the
Conquistadores. Jesuit priests 11 from Europe began arriving in
large numbers and soon opened one of the first universities in
North America at Mexico City, sixty years before the founding
of Harvard. Charged with the conversion and welfare of the
Indians, they acculturated their system to the ways of those
they sought to convert, paying particular attention to native
languages. 12 They saw themselves as protection for Indian
cultures against the devastation that military and colonial
forces wrought on them during and after the Conquest. The
areas under Jesuit control became semi-autonomous regions,
independent of the secular government. This provoked tensions
with the Spanish military and civil authority, who sought the
continued exploitation of the Indian population as cheap labor
or worse. 13 Disputes between Franciscan missionaries and civil
government in New Mexico over the disposition of the Pueblo
population were a contributing factor in the 1680 Pueblo Revolt,
in which hundreds of Indians and Spaniards were killed.
More or less concurrent with the arrival of the Jesuits in New
Spain was the start of their efforts in China. 14 Accepted into the
country by the last rulers of the Ming Dynasty, they exchanged
information with Chinese scholars and demonstrated western
scientific theories and instruments. European mathematical and
scientific treatises were translated into Chinese and conversely,
Chinese works into Latin. The missionaries argued to their
western superiors that Chinese classics had core values and
tenets that matched those of Christian Europe. When Galileo
introduced his discoveries substantiating Copernicus’ heliocentric
theories, French Jesuits quickly introduced Copernican
theory to the Chinese and requested telescopes from Europe. 15
They conducted surveying, mapping and astronomical work,
including a 3900 mile traverse of the Great Wall, assisted in
updating the Chinese calendar and the precise measurement
of a meridional arc in an effort to better understand the shape
of the earth and derive a consistent unit of measurement based
on geodesy.
Later, the imperial court requested formal mapping of the
empire. From 1705 to 1759, the Jesuits engaged in three large
surveying projects, using rigorous survey procedures. 16 From
a prime meridian established at Beijing, a large triangulation
network was built from long chains of triangles. They were among
the first to adopt the use of triangulation rather than purely
astronomical methods as a means of high-order location. 17 Base
lines measured with long iron-wire chains, 18 while elevations
in mountain ranges were developed trigonometrically. All
the new field data, together with extensive existing Chinese
cartographic and geodetic data dating back centuries, were
rendered onto map projections. Maps were printed from wood
cuts and engraved copper plates. In nearly all respects, the
Jesuit’s rigorous surveys in China, conducted by about a dozen
priests and a corps of talented Chinese surveyors, were a great
success. 19
By contrast, Spain’s financial commitment to the missionaries
in New Spain was severely limited by ongoing fiscal crises. With
the Crown in no position financially to support their work, the
Jesuits resorted to private donations to fund their efforts. 20
Particularly on the northern frontiers and the rugged Baja
peninsula, early efforts to make their work among the Indians
sustainable were difficult and expensive. In terms of exploration
and surveying, theirs would have to be a reconnaissance at best.
That would be adequate for the purposes but well below the skills
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