Discover Fascinating Vintage Maps From National Geographic’s Archives

Cartography has been close to National
Geographic’s heart from the beginning. And over the magazine’s
130-year history, maps have been an integral part of its mission.
Now, for the first time, National Geographic has compiled a digital
archive of its entire editorial cartography collection — every map
ever published in the magazine since the first issue in October
1888.

The collection is brimming with more than
6,000 maps (and counting), and you’ll have a chance to see some of
the highlights as the magazine’s cartographers explore the trove
and share one of their favorite maps each day. Follow @NatGeoMaps
on Twitter^[1], Instagram^[2], and Facebook^[3] to see what they
discover. (The separate map archive is not available to the public,
but subscribers can see them in their respective issues in the
digital
magazine archive^[4].)

“It’s inspiring,” says Martin Gamache, National Geographic’s
director of cartography. “There’s tons of stuff in there that
struck me as being innovative and interesting.”

We’ll be digging through the collection as well to bring you
stories about some of the most intriguing maps we find. The gallery
above includes some tantalizing examples, such as the first
composite map of the United States created out of color satellite
photographs, and a clever way to get around Moscow’s ban on aerial
photography in order to create a birds-eye view of the Kremlin.

The very first maps published by National Geographic in 1888
depict one of the most severe blizzards to ever hit the United
States (below). Nicknamed the Great White Hurricane, the three-day
storm crippled the Atlantic coast from the Chesapeake Bay all the
way into Canada, dumping almost 5 feet of snow in some places and
creating 50-foot snowdrifts. National Geographic used a set of four
maps to document temperature, pressure, and wind patterns on
successive days as the storm lashed the coast.

The maps accompany a blow-by-blow description of the conditions
that fed the storm, written by Edward Everett Hayden, a
meteorologist and one of the 33 founders of the National Geographic
Society. Hayden’s article also included a gripping account of the
travails of one ship as it struggled to survive the violent
blizzard. “Just before midnight a heavy sea struck the boat and
sent her over on her side,” he wrote. “Everything moveable was
thrown to leeward, and the water rushed down the forward hatch. But
again she righted, and the fight went on.”

It was the start of a long tradition in National
Geographic magazine of enhancing storytelling with maps. The
maps of the storm were likely made by the U.S. Navy Hydrographic
Office, and the magazine continued to work with various outside
mapmakers like the U.S. Geological Survey until it established its
own cartography shop In 1915. Over the next century, the National
Geographic cartography department made thousands of maps for the
pages of the magazine and hundreds of poster supplement maps.

The goal of the cartography team, Gamache says, is to capture
readers’ imagination by conveying a sense of place, to give the
viewer an idea of how a place might look and feel. “I think when
we’re successful, it resonates with people,” he says.

It took months to extract all the maps from the magazine’s
digitized back catalog and compile them into a separate collection.
Gamache says the resulting trove will help the current staff
cartographers connect to the magazine’s legacy as they continue to
try new things. “It’s always good to look at what we’ve done in the
past on any subject,” he says. “It gives us ideas.”

As they share a curated selection of maps from the archive, the
cartography team will be highlighting some of the maps that have
served as inspiration for new maps, says research editor Irene
Berman-Vaporis.

One of the things that defines National Geographic
magazine’s cartography is the way it is integrated into the rest of
the magazine’s editorial process. Each map tells its own story, but
also works alongside text and photography to bring another
dimension to the article, Gamache says.

“A map is able to connect with somebody in a different way than
a text will or a photo will,” he says. “They engage with a
different part of our psyche or our brain.”

Stay tuned for more stories about National Geographic’s
editorial map archive here on All
Over the Map. And see a different map from the archive
every day by following @NatGeoMaps on Twitter, Instagram,
and Facebook.^[5][6][7][8]