Reg Porter's Heritage Blog

The Eighteenth Century in Europe was one of the most exciting periods in the history of Western intellectual and scientific development. It is generally referred to as the European Enlightenment, born in the salons of France and spreading to other countries, most notably Germany, Great Britain and Italy. There was no uniform modus operandi in this burst of new knowledge based on rigid intellectual procedures and scientific progress that we can recognise by our standards. Even in France the Enlightenment manifested itself in a number of ways as different groups of intellectuals, called philosophes, met in different drawing rooms or salons to feast and push the boundaries of thinking to…

In this essay I have gathered together in chronological order all the maps produced in the Seventeenth Century that I could find in a year of searching that showed the existence – or not – of Ile Saint Jean. Because of its location, size and extensive sand banks on the side that faced the centre of fishing activity in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, it seems not to have been of any interest to France, or other European powers concerned with the extensive exploitation of the fisheries of New France. In my last post, based on very early portolans, I suggested that there was an island called Saint Jean somewhere…

Ile Saint Jean, correctly positioned in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, becomes a fairly certain feature in world mapping only in the 1630s. The maps that were being produced before that time were far more interested in creating a picture of the whole world, not a needle in a haystack of interest only to fishermen, and these came to be called mappamundi.   The Origins of the Mappamundi Mappamundi or maps of the known world, began to appear in ancient times such as this one, from the Sixth Century BCE, on a baked clay tablet from the Late Babylonian period and now in the British Museum. The known world at that time…

This is my last post on Acadia with its fascinating evolution and sad, tragic end. I have not tried to give a precise account of its history but rather explored, with pleasure, various aspects of its origins, its growing population of ingenious French settlers who soon took on the name of the colony in which they found themselves. I talked, in previous posts, about the nature of the topography of the Isthmus of Chignecto, which is the part of Acadia that most interests me because I lived there for fourteen years and had first-hand contact with the countryside and its features. For those wishing to have more specific historical information…

The earliest episode of people looking at landscape from on high as something significant, created and occupied by human beings, to my knowledge is the episode in Chapter 4 of the Gospel of Saint Matthew that tells the story of the Temptations of Christ by Satan. Its probably a later interpolation but even so in Verse 8 we find a wonderfully evocative moment where what you see from a high vantage point is impressive and significant: Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them … These words create a powerful sense of excitement…