Maps combine topography, history, and art. They are documents where people can express their cosmos and attempt to understand their worlds. By the time most PEI maps were drawn, cartographic conventions were firmly in place. Creative expression was still important in the creation of PEI historical maps, but in many ways it took a back seat to order and cartographic standards.
The Lake Map, Meacham’s, and other late nineteenth century historical atlases were designed in a time when recording names and property lines on a spatial grid were displays of both state power and scientific progress. Maps can be tools of persuasion and instruments of control, and in his book, Seeing Like a State, James Scott argued that the cadastral map represented a new stage in the state’s attempt to “measure, codify, and simplify” local knowledge (Scott, 36). The process of representing the Earth’s sphere on paper in two dimensions means that all maps favour a particular perspective or a view of the world as selected by the cartographer. In addition, there is no logical centre and no standard orientation on the globe that establishes the way a map should be drawn. These are human decisions, and although a certain levity is associated with calling a place like Stanley Bridge “the hub of the universe,” a person’s home or community is perhaps as valid as any other geographic starting place.
Cadastral maps were once limited to private land inventories, but in the sixteenth century they were increasingly used by national governments. By the nineteenth century, the United States, Britain, and the British colonies led a proliferation of statistical, land use, and property maps. For instance, the British Ordnance Survey created full cadastral maps of parishes in England and Wales in the 1830s and 1840s. And, in North America, cadastral maps went hand in hand with agricultural expansion, settlement, and the state distribution of land to individual and corporate owners (Hodgkiss).
Early land use maps were created in many European countries, and especially in the Netherlands, but the British were masters of the land use map beginning in the nineteenth century. In 1800, Thomas Milne created maps featuring seventeen different types of land use around London, and the first nation-wide land use survey since the Domesday Book was mapped in the 1930s for the Land Utilization Survey of Great Britain. By the second half of the nineteenth century, almost every feature of British population, society, economic development, and land use was being mapped by groups from the British Ordnance Survey to the Salvation Army. Efforts to map Britain’s colonies and plans for their orderly occupation were taken around the globe, and it was in this context that extensive surveys and large-scale PEI maps such as the Lake Map and Meacham’s Illustrated Atlas were created.