Olivier Le Carrer likes maps and navigation. Sailing sailor he has travelled the world testing sailboats for French nautical magazines. He has for him a knowledge of the history of boats. Today he explains to us the history of nautical charts from ancient voyages to GPS.
This book is a reprint (first published in 2006). He manages to explain to us the layout of the maps and the readings when we only had a compass to navigate. Surveys of probes near the coasts, expeditions far away, deviations of road... all the discoveries of new lands and their flat drawing on a map are told.
Illustrated by beautiful nautical charts (which can be seen at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France) this book is in fact a history of nautical charts (like a novel) from Antiquity to the present day.
The globe as it is represented today with the 5 continents was not at all so designed at the beginning. The revelations were like pieces of a puzzle that gradually fit together to form it as we draw it today.
This book is full of anecdotes that explain how adventurers discovered the land and then listed it. Did you know that the Maori in Polynesia can feel signs indicating an island several tens of kilometres away? This sense no doubt led them to discover the immense archipelago to which they belong.
This beautiful book is also pleasant to consult"superficially" by turning the pages and discovering with pleasure the drawings of the maps coming from another time. The"enlightened" amateurs will find here a bible on the history of marine cartography, a good source to complete its knowledge.
Oceans de Papier - Olivier Le Carrer
- Editions Glénat
- 24 x 32 cm
- 128 pages
- 30 €
