(upbeat music) (projector clicking) - Have you ever wondered where the television signal you're watching is coming from?

♪ I love to go a wanderin' (projector clicking) ♪ along the mountain track - Welcome to True North.

(upbeat music) (mysterious music) - Good evening and welcome to Mainewatch (upbeat music) (projector clicking) Welcome to From the Vault, a celebration of 60 years of Maine Public Television.

Now, a common sight in many vehicles or coffee tables throughout the state is a tattered Maine Atlas and Gazetteer.

And while GPS and mapping apps on our phones are commonplace and useful, there is nothing like having an actual paper map in your hands.

On this episode, we are going back to look at the fascinating history of maps with the 1996 special "Maine on the Map".

We will look at some of the earliest world maps as well as Maine maps throughout the centuries.

Much of the program was recorded in the, then, just two year old Osher Map Library at the University of Southern Maine.

You will also go inside the, then, private collection of Dr. Harold Osher, of Portland with his rare and important maps.

He and his wife Peggy helped to create the collection at USM in 1989.

In 2018 Dr. Osher donated his private collection to the library.

Its value... over $100 million.

So you might want to hold on to your Gazetteer for a while.

And you can see the collection for yourself.

For more information go to oshermaps.org.

Now let's check out some amazing maps as we navigate to 1996 for "Maine on the Map".

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Maine Public Television's production of "Maine on the Map" is made possible by the Davis Family Foundation.

(upbeat music) Where are you right now?

Sure, there's the obvious.

You're looking at a television screen.

But beyond that, where are you?

Living room, bedroom, school room, house, office, car, maybe out on the street.

And where is that?

Is it in a town?

A city?

The country?

What county?

What state?

What country?

Where indeed are you?

(bright music) (bright music) (bright music) - Unless you have some kind of reference point, something you recognize, you're just in the dark.

And even when you have that reference point, you still really don't know where you are.

You'll need a bigger picture.

A map.

What if I asked you to make a map?

Where would you start?

What would you do?

Imagine starting from nothing.

Everything you see is something you have to identify, something you have to name.

Most of us could sketch a floor plan of where we live or the room we're in.

But what about the state of Maine?

Most of us could draw a rough outline of Maine.

Rough.

But what if that map or sketch were really important and we had to rely on it?

(bright music) Say our lives depended upon being able to navigate using this map.

What do we put in?

What do we leave out?

What could we use for a guide?

- [Narrator] How about an old map?

One we can get our hands on.

We could start at the University of Southern Maine.

There are map collections there, the Smith and Osher map collections, with some of the most significant maps ever made.

And what we may find is those maps reveal a lot more than we might at first think.

This, for instance, is a map of the world.

An old map.

Better than 400 years old, not exactly accurate by today's standards, but fascinating in its own way.

Kind of busy, too.

(gentle music) (keys tapping) Dr. Harold Osher added this map to his collection that he and his wife, Peggy, have given to the University of Southern Maine.

Their maps and globes join those already donated to the university by the late LMC and Eleanor Houston Smith.

- They are unique historical records.

They're like windows into history and civilization.

They tell us what people thought about the world that they lived in, the neighborhood that they lived in.

Through the centuries, they varied.

The very earliest maps are rather crude and they are more religious dogma even than they are actual maps.

They portray the world the way the Bible said it was supposed to be.

- [Narrator] Not every map has a compass rose or a cartouche or an inset.

And the maps were not all in color.

In fact, many were not even on paper.

- This is the portal and chart that we recently acquired.

It shows primarily the Mediterranean area with the Black Sea.

And extending westward to the Straits of Gibraltar and the Iberian Peninsula.

A paper chart would get wet with the rain and with sea spray and so on and would disintegrate.

So that a chart on vellum, which is a prepared skin of a goat or sheep, usually, would be much more durable.

You can see that this one actually was exposed to the elements.

It got wet.

And it is stained around the edges.

Although it remains remarkably bright, considering it's over 400 years old.

- [Narrator] But a lot of maps of this era, especially the maps commissioned for and by the kings and queens of Europe, had social, political, religious, scientific, astronomic, and other information prominently featured.

Again, with varying degrees of accuracy.

- We tend to sort of think now of, isn't it quaint old map?

But remember, at one point, this is state-of-the-art, fresh-off-the-press information that's a part of the whole printing revolution.

Which, of course, really sort begins, in many ways, sort of the whole age of science and the technology revolution that we think of today really, of course, begins with the printing press.

And without the printing press, you can't mass produce maps.

So there's a very close relationship there between knowledge and science and cartography.

- [Narrator] What we might think of as the busyness of maps, all that extra stuff, had a purpose.

Early maps were like textbooks in one sense, and a lot more.

Often what the map makers did not know, they approximated.

Which is a polite way of saying they made it up.

Or they diverted attention to the things they were sure of.

Regardless, especially for the non-working maps, it was done with a piece of fancy.

Art, even.

- Maps, for example, made in the 18th century tend to be a lot more sedate.

The icons are only really around the title statement.

In the map itself, there's not very much decoration.

The borders are not very decorative.

You compare that to, of course, the Dutch maps of the late 16th, 17th centuries and you have, well, you have phenomenally ornate Baroque images, where you have very, very complex bands going around the map.

So the margins to the map.

Which were often borrowed from other works of art.

There were some engraved versions of other people's pictures.

- [Narrator] Of course, you might like to keep in mind that the art and science of map making at least early on, follow no formal set of rules.

Some maps might have east at the top to be closer to heaven.

Some might follow the contours of the land and really not care which way was north or south or east or west.

Which was okay as long as every port was nearby.

The earth was flat and nobody sailed west to get to the east.

But expand the world, make it a globe, and some sense of order and consistency was needed.

Gerardus Mercator figured how to show a globe easily as a rectangle and changed map making forever.

- Mercator has a whole series of areas where he really influenced the development of map making.

The one that most people know him for today is because he created a map projection.

A way of structuring the shape of the earth, which is very useful for mariners.

On this projection, a mariner can just simply draw out a straight line between where he is and where he wants to go and measure the angle with the north-south running lines.

And that's his bearing.

He just follows that bearing and he will get from where he is to where he wants to be.

Assuming, of course, the map is correct.

And that's another issue entirely.

- And map making wasn't only about art or politics or conquest.

The need for accuracy linked to the interest in sailing to the New World, increased the demand for good measurement.

Accurate maps became very important.

And it wasn't just the depiction of land or ocean in final form that mattered.

The correct measuring of distances also counted.

And it wasn't just for navigation.

With countries competing for pieces of the New World, wars could start if the maps were wrong and the boundaries disputed.

So maybe having the right tools to do the job and knowing how to use them would help.

What we'd use today is far different from what was available in 1600.

(gentle music) - The instruments that they had were very simple ones.

And there was also the problem of being on a small boat.

The constant shifting of the deck, trying to maintain the celestial body that they were trying to observe within the sights of their instruments.

So navigation was a fairly, fairly crude thing.

Nonetheless, they achieved some remarkable results.

This is the mariner's astrolabe, which was used for determining the altitude of a celestial body.

The half moon here is not just a decorative addition.

It's meant to add weight to it.

So that, in combination with the articulation of the ring up here that can move in all directions, meant that when the mariner held the instrument up, that no matter how the boat rolled or pitched, that it would stay level to create a true horizon.

Then he would raise it and move this arm, which is called the alidade, so that he could sight through the two holes in the cross pieces until the celestial body he was observing, most likely'd be the sun, would line up in the holes.

Then it'd be possible to read the altitude of that body, its azimuth, from a scale on the perimeter of the disc.

- [Narrator] It only made sense for the captains at sea to sacrifice some mapping accuracy for the welfare of their ships.

The exhaustive work of counting, locating, and accurately depicting the many islands off our coast would have to wait for safe navigation, which itself relied on maps.

(gentle music) As we said earlier, in many cases, what couldn't be measured or calculated would be guessed at or imagined.

This was a good-faith effort for the most part, because no one wanted to have the work discredited.

The imaginative touches were usually found in the empty spaces around the map edges or in the ocean expanses.

But it wasn't just filling empty spaces.

Often early maps tried to account for the things the map maker couldn't or didn't fully see or things with which there was no previous knowledge.

This could be everything from land shapes and contours to plant varieties, strange animals, and even cannibals.

(bright music) - The cannibals are a wonderful image.

And, again, too, I think there's really two parts to that.

One is it's sort of the mystery of the unknown and the more sort of exotic and exciting the better.

I mean, if you're in the business of making maps, you're usually trying to sell maps.

And if you just make a really dull, boring map, it's not gonna sell anywhere near as much as if you have a couple of cannibals and sea serpents on it, regardless of how accurate the information is on it, right?

Certainly cannibalism was not practiced in Maine.

I mean, we don't know of almost of hardly any cases of cannibalism in the New World.

But we always hear of the English and French and Spanish explorers accusing the Native Americans of being cannibals.

- [Narrator] It didn't take long for the early mappers to realize that, in the New World, they had found something of grand size.

And frankly, something they could hardly describe fully or accurately.

Certainly by the year of, say, 1560, Europe was abuzz with speculation, rumor, and intrigue.

Part of it came from a man whose story could not be easily refuted.

- David Ingram was an English fisherman who was set ashore on the Gulf of Mexico on the coast of Florida in late 1560s.

And he will travel up the coast, east coast of the United States, for several years.

Traveling through Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, on up into what's now New Brunswick, where he is finally rescued by a French ship and goes back to home in England.

So he's one of the few people that we know of that really came through here in the 1500s.

And his account of the area was written down.

But it's one of the most spectacular accounts you'd ever wanna read because he talks about sheep being red-colored sheep and giant horses with horns and all sorts of fantastic things.

And the fun part about this is, of course, is that Ingram was trying to tell sort of tall tales.

Because when he went back to England, he really made his living going from one tavern to the other, getting people to buy him food and drink when he told his tall tales.

So, you know, whether you're talking about the 1590s or the 1990s, people love a good story.

So you have to be very careful when you look at what someone like Ingram or some of these early explorers are saying when they come back because, you know, a good story is always worth a good meal.

- [Narrator] Word of Ingram's adventure sparked the imagination and spawned feverish interest in the new land.

There had been stories, for instance, of a city of gold and diamonds.

A place called Norumbega.

And Ingram vouched that he'd seen it.

That it was up the Penobscot River.

The legend of Norumbega may have started with the explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano.

Landing at one point (bright music) near what is today Newport, Rhode Island, Verrazzano was met by the Narragansett Indians.

- The Natives seemed to him to be most civilized.

They helped them with their chores.

They played games.

They brought food.

And on top of that, they were gorgeous looking.

And he has a great description in his letter to the King of France about the sheer physical beauty of the Natives and what they wore and so forth.

And that story became the center of the myth of Norumbega.

The Verrazano story about this idyllic moment in Rhode Island.

It's unfortunate, we would've liked it to be in Maine, but it, you know, turned out to be in Rhode Island, probably.

Got meshed with the geography of the Penobscot River.

And from that point on, there was a belief that around the Penobscot was a kind of special civilized world.

A city.

- And I think clearly a lot of this has to do with the, probably I think it's the Native reaction to the Europeans in some ways, you know?

The Europeans say, we're here for the City of Gold and the Fountain of Youth.

And after a little bit, the Indians get rather tired of these fellows.

And they say, oh no, you've mistaken us.

That's two villages away.

Yeah, we've seen it.

And it's a really neat place.

And why don't you go there?

You'd like it.

(bright music) - [Narrator] By now, of course, a host of explorer-adventurers acting with various authorities had claimed the land that is Maine.

Mostly this came down to the French, such as Cartier and Champlain, who loved the land Acadia.

And the English, like John and Sebastian Cabot, who liked Newfoundland.

And named it that and claimed the entire coast to the west and south of it for England.

The seeds were thus sown for years of disagreement, violent disagreement, over who owned what.

And that assumed that those who already lived in the area didn't mind much having their land taken from them.

With concerns for control of the land, the waterway access to that land, and, likewise, the safety of the area's new residents, the new residents built forts.

Some of wood, such as Fort Halifax and Fort Western on the Kennebec River.

By the time of the American Revolution, Maine, the easternmost land whose people favored independence from the crown, was involved in conflict many times over.

In his historical novel, "Arundel," Kenneth Roberts wrote of Benedict Arnold's revolutionary expedition up the Kennebec River to Quebec City.

One of the few battles waged on Canadian soil.

It was supposed to have been a fairly easy waterway trip.

It went terribly wrong.

(dramatic music) And despite the courage of the colonial forces, the effort to capture Quebec failed.

(dramatic music) "As we went over the snow, and at night lying upon spruce boughs, I thought a thousand times, as I have thought 10,000 times since then, with all our labor and our anguish as we struggled along the same way upon the march to Quebec.

I thought of the groaning and sweating men of that little army, half dead with exhaustion and pain of torn and ailing bodies.

Starving and freezing, yet ready with heroic laughter and never stopped by what still seems to me the very incarnate demon of ill fortune.

I thought of the lost muskets, of broken bateaus, of torn fragments of tents down below us, frozen into the ice.

And more, I thought of terrible stark forms staring upward, eyeless, from deep beneath our feet.

And it seemed strange and like a dream that we should pass now so easily and lightly over the way that had been agony.

And in the murmur of the forest, it seemed to me always that I could hear, as I can hear in the woods of Arundel to this day when I go into them, the voices of the bateaux men, the cries of stragglers, the shouts of officers, all the voices of Arnold's army."

(dramatic music) Among the many difficulties for Arnold: no reliable maps.

Calculating land distances and divides and charting river flows precisely, all that would be accomplished later.

Disagreements would come from what measurements had been done and done wrong.

And for many years, there remained a question of who indeed controlled this wilderness.

(dramatic music) The English?

The French?

The transplanted colonists?

The Indians?

The tensions had to be resolved.

And a good way to begin the resolution was with agreements on what land and water was involved and under whose dominion it would be.

- If you have the power and you can give the names, then you can change the way people perceive what belongs to whom.

- [Narrator] What do we call something new or something sort of familiar or something we might have seen before?

Names become important.

They refer to something or someplace else and tell us where we are, as much as to let us know where we aren't.

It's a whose is whose and what's what kind of distinction.

- I think a large part, the thing about a map is, in some ways, it's a statement of ownership, isn't it?

I mean, whoever makes the map is usually making a claim over a piece of territory.

You usually don't make a map of someone else's land, right?

So this is...

I think it's, in many cases, when Europeans are making a map, it suggests this is ours.

- [Narrator] It mattered everywhere what the land was called.

For one, the definition of this New World was being communicated, often using only the commissioned maps to royalty and governments and families thousands of ocean miles away, treating this vast new wilderness as something akin to a real estate development.

Consider what we know today as New York.

Beyond the Dutch settlers buying Manhattan for beads and trinkets and maybe acknowledging that the city's professional basketball team is called the New York Knicks, short for Knickerbockers, we may not recall readily the Dutch history and what was, to them, New Amsterdam.

It was a rich history, complete with place names that would resonate with the Dutch influence and culture.

But when the English took over, the city was renamed New York.

And the place names were changed, as if denying the Dutch history and presence.

Little wonder then that, when the Dutch reclaimed the city, however briefly, they hurried to replace the names and redo the maps to reflect the original order of things.

- Well, I think the most striking thing was that they wanted to show off their colonies.

They wanted their own people and other people to know after all that they had owned Manhattan Island.

They had this large foothold in America.

When they regained it, even, it was only for a short period of time, 1673, they immediately issued a new set of maps.

There were four different Dutch map makers that immediately brought out a new map showing New Amsterdam, formerly named New York.

And captured, recaptured by their rightful owners, the Dutch.

And with a picture of the moment of victory with troops marching on the quays, on the docks, and with ships in the harbor.

And a title which said restitutio, restored to its rightful owners.

So it's quite, you know, it's, again, a very interesting and unforgettable way of documenting history.

You look at that map, you never forget that event.

- [Narrator] The Dutch intent to reclaim their rightful place in the new world of New Amsterdam was one part of the story.

We can see another in reading the various maps and deciphering how closely the English, French, and others tried to replace names or approximate spelling they heard from the Indians.

What resulted, especially in Maine, was a blend that stays with us today.

Sagadahoc.

Sainte Agathe.

Somerset.

Cobbosseecontee.

Calais.

Camden.

Piscataquis.

Presque Isle.

Princeton.

Daasqum.

Detroit.

Dover.

Mattawamkeag.

Monticello.

Manchester.

Main towns, such as Machias, Falmouth, and Castine have stories of conflict that involved who would control what, what country would make the ruling decisions.

Charting the water, particularly the ocean water, was pretty easy.

The sun and stars gave ready reference points.

But start dividing up property, especially land that has never, to your knowledge, been called anything and watch the fur fly.

One disagreement was settled peacefully under the Webster, as in Daniel Webster, Ashburton, as in Lord Ashburton, Treaty.

The argument arose between the British and the young United States over the boundary between the not-yet state of Maine and New Brunswick.

There was confusion over mountain ranges and rivers that led to skirmishes all along the border.

Things finally got so tense that both sides sent armies to settle the dispute.

- Troops were mobilized along the Aroostook River and in the counties, what we now call the county.

And, you know, they were ready to go to war.

And it's amazing with those troops a few yards from each other, a few hundred yards from each other, somebody didn't fire off, you know, a gun and start the bloodshed.

(jaunty militarist music) At that point, President Van Buren sent General Winfield Scott, who was a hero of the War of 1812 and later of the Civil War.

But obviously a very talented diplomat and a believer in avoiding war because he knew the Lieutenant Governor of New Brunswick.

Even though they were opposite sides of the War of 1812, they were good friends and they respected each other.

And he got the Lieutenant Governor of New Brunswick to agree not to start any hostilities if the Americans, if the Maine armies, would agree to do likewise and stand down.

- [Interpreter] I shall positively depart Monday morning, for I have much to do in the way of preparation for war if negotiation should fail to settle the boundary question.

Now, if that too could be left to my excellent friend, Sir J. Harvey, and myself, I am persuaded that we might settle it over the first bottle and exhaust a second in drinking to a perpetual peace between our countries.

- But back to our original dilemma of our discovery and drawing of a new land.

We have to call our newfound land something.

And that name is already taken.

Maine.

Why call it Maine?

Depending on who you worked for, the country you came from, who you met, what you saw, and what you might have already known, the land could be called anything.

Verdes-monts became Vermont.

That made sense.

Connecticut probably took some getting used to.

New Hampshire was comfortable for the English settlers.

But what of this place?

Norumbega.

New France.

Territory of Sagadahoc.

Province of Maine.

- John Smith's a wonderful character, of course, aside from the Pocahontas fame of late.

But Smith, of course, is less well known for his explorations along the coast of what he was the first person to call New England.

Smith sails the coast in 1614.

And is really impressed by the place and draws a wonderful map of New England.

And he calls the land New England.

He renames the land.

He's the first person to give it that name, really replacing that 16th century name of Norumbega.

Now, to me, that's really important because Norumbega, we think, is perhaps a Native name.

Certainly maybe a European version of a Native name.

But New England suggests a whole new name.

And it's a name given by an Englishman.

And it's suggestive, too, of ownership.

This is going to be a New England.

There's always been a real controversy and question mark over how Maine's name came about.

And we really don't have a definitive answer to it and probably never will.

Because it seems to be a name that just sort of arises out of the middle of nowhere.

In the early 1620s is the first time that it shows up in the documents.

It seems that the best interpretation of that is that the name refers to separating the mainland from the islands.

The first settlers who come to the coast are the fishermen who live on the islands.

Places like Damariscove and Monhegan and the Isles of Shoals.

And there would've been a real distinction in the 16teens and 20s between these people out on the islands and everything else going on on the mainland or the main.

And that's sort of a perfectly good turn back then.

John Donne, the poet, who dies in 1631 even uses it in one of his famous quotes.

He says, "No man is an island by itself.

Every man is a part of the continent.

A piece of the main."

- [Narrator] So if you have no objections, we'll just call it Maine.

A territory.

A province.

A subdivision.

A state.

And let's look at it in relation to its largest neighbors, the Atlantic Ocean, mer du Nord, and Canada.

(mysterious music) Even our friend, David Ingram, who traversed much of the Northeast coastline by foot, could tell that the relationship between the mainland and the ocean was special.

The fishing was part of it.

And still is.

So too was the abundant plant life.

Aromatic herbs, flowers, and, of course, trees.

Extending from the waters off Cape Cod down east to Nova Scotia, the Gulf of Maine beckoned.

Safely navigating the waterways was important.

Atlantic storms, then and now, can bring tragedy in an eye blink.

Knowing and charting the safe havens, the cozy harbors, the many islands, had to be done, whether it was Monhegan or Cape Cod.

As the ocean trade evolved, the settling of the land could proceed inland.

Particularly if the rivers could be followed upstream with the incoming tides.

The Piscataqua, Androscoggin, Kennebec, Penobscot, Machias, and St. Croix rivers were explored, much as the mighty St. Lawrence to the north.

And land along the rivers had value.

Huge tracts of it were bestowed, bought, or otherwise claimed or acquired by people with grand dreams and drive.

Family names such as Bowden, Knox, Waldo, Vassal, Hallowell, Gardner, Winslow, and Pitts became fixtures on land maps.

By the middle of the 18th century, the map of the province of Maine showed evidence of permanent settlements, prosperous trading, and, of course, politics.

The question of boundaries now took on a whole new meaning.

No longer were the new folks in town arguing about whose king, queen, or army ruled.

Instead, they wanted to know where their town and their property lines were.

Out of the wilderness would come a sense of order, a belief in ownership, an identification of place.

For a people who wanted to extend that order and secure a civilized society, accurate maps were needed.

- By now, everybody who even thought of moving to America at least had an idea, no matter how mistaken that idea was, of where it was and what it might look like.

Here we encounter an early form of marketing.

The English notion was to heighten interest by likening and naming the New World to what the people back home could identify.

Something to make them feel less apprehensive about making the trip.

Until now, we have looked at maps and the mapping process mostly from the viewpoint of someone traveling by water.

Other than walking, as David Ingram did, the principle means of getting anywhere was by water.

Water was the point of reference.

Water was a constant.

But the perspective changes as we go inland and begin moving overland.

We still want to know where the water is, but now we want to know other reference points to help us know where we are.

- [Narrator] Over time as transportation improved and the population grew, communities began to form.

As they formed, (bright music) so too did the need for government.

Rules to live by.

In this near wilderness, the most effective government was close by, local, and accessible.

The most direct unit with which the people could identify was the county.

Maine as a state did not begin with 16 counties.

In fact, it really began with one: the county of York.

As Maine grew, it made sense to divide the vast tracts of land into manageable parcels for localized government administration.

The people needed to agree on what those tracts would be.

They would need and use, of course, maps.

It is understandable that York, the first county, would have its boundary line drawn and redrawn and redrawn again.

Please note, we did not challenge you to draw a freehand map of your county.

Not many people could do that, even though county government has long been a part of Maine life.

Counties had county seats.

Shire towns.

Someplace where county records, most notably property records, were kept.

Much of Maine's early development relied on the county as the most effective form of government.

Just large enough to be inclusive, yet small enough to manage.

County seats were intended, from the outset anyway, to be the most accessible town in the area.

Towns were and are important in the development of any area and the administration of society.

Towns mean organization.

Which, in Maine, still measures less than half the land mass of the entire state.

A lot of people still live in and seek out what is, in essence, beyond merely rural life.

Something closer to wilderness.

In the order of things, this land is called unorganized territory.

People in unorganized townships receive services and pay taxes much as every other resident of the state.

And as citizens, they have the right to vote, which calls forget another map.

- Our form of government, like most others, wants an accounting at the state and national level.

A map really of where those people live.

That's one reason a census, a count of the people and where they are, is taken every 10 years.

From that census, congressional and legislative district boundaries are drawn and redrawn, if need be, to assure apportioning equal representational value to each citizen.

Simply put, Maine's two congressional districts are mapped according to where the people live.

The first district has a concentration of people in the south and west of Maine.

York County and Cumberland county primarily.

The second district has long been the largest geographical district east of the Mississippi River, simply because so few people live in Maine's northern and eastern areas.

Maine's own government works in a similar way.

The same census used to adjust the federal legislative districts is used to parcel out the districts of Maine's house of representatives and the state senate.

- [Narrator] As with most things political, however, the decisions don't spring merely from counting and dividing people.

Historically, the political party in power has used maps and census figures and voting records to enhance the chance of staying in power.

- Gerrymandering, I think that comes actually from the name of a politician in Massachusetts, whose last name was Gerry.

G-E-R-R-Y.

And how they set up a district there just for his party.

And so in Maine, one of the most notorious examples of that has been when Maine used to have three congressmen.

In fact, at one time we had as many as seven congressmen.

But when we went from three to two, the Republican Party was in control of Maine, as it had been ever since just before the Civil War.

And obviously wanted to keep that control.

But the Democratic Party was growing and there were some centers of Democratic strength, such as Lewiston, where many of the Franco-Americans were voting Democratic.

And Biddeford, the same thing.

So they decided to split those two areas up.

And so that's why our present congressional districts are drawn the way they are.

It didn't really work because what they did was they put a Democratic stronghold in each district instead of putting two of 'em in one district and having none in the other.

So, for many years, they lost that seat.

- Mind you, the redistricting of this place we call Maine might have been far different and our drawings of the state far different if the cloud that settled over the state's land mass had not gone away.

During the 1970s, using a little-known and long-forgotten treaty, the prominent Native American tribes, the descendants of the Abenakis, the Passamaquoddys and the Penobscots, laid legal claim to nearly half of what we call Maine.

- In 1790, the United States Congress passed a law which was called the Non-Intercourse Act.

And it said that any state that, subsequent to that law, signed a treaty with the Indians would have to have that law ratified by the United States Congress.

And it so happened that Maine, of course was then a part of Massachusetts, that the two treaties that we passed with our two major tribes, the Penobscots and the Passamaquoddys, were both passed after 1790.

But were never ratified by Congress.

And so years, many, many years later, a smart lawyer came across this and figured that the Maine Indians had a very legal claim that all of the treaties that had taken their land away from them were null and void.

- [Narrator] What the claim sought was much of what we still consider wilderness.

The minor civil divisions where the moose outnumber the people and the trees outnumber everything but the mosquitoes and black flies.

- Of course, that was a tremendous threat to all the landowners in the state of Maine.

And towns were not able to start floating bond issues.

And so it was a real crisis.

And it was eventually settled with a compromise.

And Maine was able to settle the case without having to come up with money themselves.

They got the federal government to put up the 80 plus million dollars that the Indians agreed to settle for.

But they could have, the Indians really could have held out for billions of dollars if they had wanted to.

- [Narrator] The resolution to the case allowed the tribes to buy some of that land, manage other parts of it, and have some cash reserve.

Maybe there were riches up the Penobscot after all.

In fact, let's go back a bit to the reference to Norumbega, the legendary city of gold on the river.

The truth is, as it turns out, the notion was not that far fetched.

Those who first sought the riches of Norumbega were deceiving themselves if they thought that the gold and diamonds lay atop the earth.

Any miner knows you have to dig.

And Maine, if you dig in the right spot, could yield more than clams.

It could yield the stuff of mineral riches.

Ores, precious metals, and gemstones.

But you have to know where to look.

And not merely for the buried treasure many believe was hidden around here and may still be here.

The hundreds of Maine islands provided havens for smuggling and for a bit of pirate activity, for example.

The treasure that might be stashed here, of course, is in addition to the shiploads that accidentally sank to premature graves.

- Yeah, the most famous pirate in Maine was a man named Dixie Bull.

And this was back in the 1600s.

And Dixie Bull came over.

He was from a very prominent English family.

And a lot of people back in those days that were coming over here to make their fortunes.

There is a legend, sort of a folk tale called "The Slaying of Dixie Bull," where there's a scene in which a fisherman by the name of Curtis from Bristol and Dixie get into one of these kind of Hollywood-type sword play things.

And Curtis ends up by running him through.

But that's just totally folk tale.

There is a rumor, I think, that Blackbeard, the pirate, buried some treasurer on it.

I'm not sure if it's Cushing Island or one of the islands right off here in Casco Bay.

And that people have been searching for that treasure.

There's even a story that somebody found it and then was murdered.

I mean, there there's a lot of romance about that, but people have gone out there from time to time looking for that treasure.

- [Narrator] The other buried treasure, the one that could naturally abound here, semi-precious gemstones, such as tourmaline, granite construction stone to be quarried, and metals like copper and gold, takes work to find.

Work and geology with maps.

Geologic maps are a modern variation on a cartographic theme.

The first maps of the continent and Norumbega, and even the province of Maine used guesswork, some logic, and the power of observation.

But a lot of what was depicted was never seen.

Mappers could show geographic features, such as Cape Cod, Nova Scotia, and the Gulf of Maine.

But interior work was, let's say, fanciful.

California, for instance, for a long time was considered to be an island.

- One of the reasons that these maps are so interesting, these early maps, is that you can sort of see how people are putting the world together.

Putting their image of the world together.

And it's always some combination of a world they experience, you know, actually see with their eyes and a world they are projecting.

- [Narrator] It was a balance between what was seen and what was projected.

And like Norumbega or the Fountain of Youth, or, for that matter, a Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, some things existed for a long time on faith alone.

A conviction that they had to exist without the proof to back it up.

Although a lot of topographical mapping occurred before aerial photography was possible, it was not until then that a truly comprehensive surface look of the state was feasible.

- Practically speaking, aerial mapping, as far as forestry and natural resources, started after World War II.

World War II was instrumental in using aerial photography for planning bombing runs and assessing damage after bombing runs.

When the early explorers ventured into the Maine woods, they climbed mountaintops.

Some of them even climbed trees to get a vista, to see where things were positioned.

Today, we have the problem on the other end of the spectrum, which is perhaps too much information.

We can see where too many things fit together.

- [Narrator] The aerial techniques brought greater precision to topographical maps, much as topographical renderings brought added depth to mapping.

- We can make sense of the spatial world because of our ability to utilize maps.

Our predecessors going back even 50 or 60 years, were just sort of stumbling along.

If you compare the measurements that were made then with the very accurate measurements that we make today, it's easy to appreciate the fact that they were dealing with state-of-the-art technology at their point in history.

We're dealing with state-of-the-art technology now that gives us the chance to shave finer than I can press my fingers together.

- [Narrator] With the ability to produce a complex street and roadmap and fill it in with a wealth of other information, the question you might ask is, where do we go from here?

The expanded ability to map more and to map better brings with it the other question of what to map.

- The map is something that exists kind of in a never never world.

And I have a little disc here.

And this could as easily be a map today as something that's graphically drawn or plotted onto either a piece of paper or a piece of Mylar.

We have to change our concept of the type of information we're dealing with.

We're carrying around so much information, we'd resort to things like this little computer map to help us keep track of the information, to make it easier for us to make better decisions.

- [Narrator] The development of mapping goes beyond and above an aerial survey camera to another, far loftier vantage point.

Try 23,000 miles in space, where satellites orbiting the earth travel at the same rate of speed the earth rotates.

Using techniques as varied as infrared photography, echoing radio waves, computer enhanced imaging, and ultra-high magnification and resolution cameras, new technologies give us views of the world we could only have imagined.

(uplifting music) - [Director] It's a long way from a map on a goat skin.

- A long way from a map on a goat skin.

And I think the more interesting part is really to see how far we've come in a relatively short period of time.

I've been involved in this business for 20 years.

And the changes that I've seen could not have been anticipated by myself.

If I were to look into a crystal ball, I guess I would expect that we'll find a better way to move this computer disc down to the level of the everyday citizen.

We've watched the James Bond years ago, maneuvering through Switzerland following a monitor inside his car.

That type of technology is gonna become much more commonplace.

We will be relying more and more on our ability to map or spatially attribute things to conduct our daily lives.

- [Narrator] As impressive as the technology is and the information it provides, so too is the way we see it.

We perceive the images that are supplied by satellites and then tweaked in any number of ways to highlight specific information.

But the demand on the map user at that point is to see the map and process the visual information, often in entirely new forms or representations.

Satellite technology even allows for a different vantage point.

One that, in its own way, brings the focus of mapping back to its roots.

One of the human conditions philosophers speak about is the notion of lost souls.

Lone travelers trying to figure their place in the universe, in the grand scheme of things.

From a psychological standpoint, we see the world from our eyes looking out and perhaps think of ourselves individually as being the center of our universe.

- One of the things that a lot of people like about maps is to show the inconsistencies and the mistakes.

Quote mistakes.

They're not really mistakes.

They're just, these are indications that maps are records, not just of what exists objectively, but of the objective experience of the world plus our subjective idea about how things are.

- I think that maps are one way, sort of a physical manifestation of a people suggesting, you know, this is us and this is where we come from.

That's very important, not just for perhaps political or geographical means, but also too really sort getting to the heart of that society and who they are.

And their sense of place and where their place is on the map.

- But what of maps?

What of the business of map making?

It is easy to see and easy to accept that people use maps for reference, to get their bearings, to know where they are, and perhaps which way they're going.

Maps, as we have seen, tell us that and so much more.

They provide recognition, a form of familiarity, and they define.

This is true whether someone is mapping a new land or an old culture.

Think about it.

What really is a society but people of different backgrounds living in a common space?

Barry Bergey, a folk arts expert with the National Endowment for the Arts captured the situation well.

"When you look at a specific place on a map," he said, "You can only determine direction when you identify two coordinates.

With local cultures, the past often serves as that second coordinate.

Indeed, the past is as real as another place.

For there is, in a local culture, a culture of memory.

There is a shared memory and that shared memory conspires to provide many different places within one place.

The town before the highway was built.

The neighborhood before the fast food restaurant came.

Main street before Walmart appeared.

And the farmland before the real estate subdivision was drawn.

It's all there.

It's in the map of memory.

The memory that tells you where you are and maybe who you are."

(gentle music) Bergey has a point.

Whether you live in Frenchville or Chinatown, Little Italy or Little Jerusalem, Indian Township or Munjoy Hill, it's a sense of place.

And that place may begin as a dot on a map we all may recognize.

But it is a map, ultimately, that is unique to every one of us.

So where are you right now?

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Maine Public Television's production of "Maine on the Map" is made possible by the Davis Family Foundation.

(gentle music)