The Historical Map as Geodatabase: Creating a Geographic Information System (GIS) from a Data-Rich 17th-Century Map

This poster presentation documents the process of creating a geodatabase from a data-rich seventeenth-century map of Quebec and environs. In 1685 Sébastian Le Prestre de Vauban, the master engineer of the French state, sent the ingénieur du roi Robert de Villeneuve to map the colony of New France. Villeneuve’s most impressive work, “Carte des Environs de Quebec en La Nouvelle France Mezuré sur le lieu très exactement en 1685 et 86,” (Fig. 1) measured roughly five by five and a half feet. It depicted the St. Lawrence River from Cap Rouge to the tip of the Isle d’Orleans, including the city of Quebec. Villeneuve densely inhabited the map with representations of forest, cleared land, elevation, cemeteries, rivers, roads, gardens, walls, fences, more than one thousand buildings, and a massive table explaining who owned what.

The map, which included information superfluous to defense planning, reflected the goals and aesthetics of state cartography during the era of Louis XIV. In the early years of his reign, the powerful finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert implemented a state culture of intelligence gathering that privileged maps accounting for economic, demographic, and natural data. After Colbert’s death, Vauban continued building upon this legacy. Famous for designing structures of unprecedented geometrical complexity suited to challenging terrains, Vauban also revolutionized military matters by incorporating the geographical bearings of political economy into defense planning. Vauban relentlessly sought information about population and natural resources for, as geographer Jean Gottman has explained it, “Vauban felt deeply the intimate link between the number of the population and the economic power and military might of a nation.”[1]

In this poster presentation, I will explain the technical aspects of creating a geodatabase from this geographical census, from archival research and conceptualization (Fig. 2) to execution, analysis, and visualization (Fig. 3). This will include discussion of the georectification process in which computer software contorts the historical map to fit a present-day map as well as the creation of the various data layers using Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Access, and Esri ArcGIS. I also highlight the payoffs of such a project, which include 1) greater insight into how Villeneuve modeled the terrain that he mapped, 2) a more legible version of his map, and (most significantly) 3) a map and data set that can be interrogated. In regards to the last point, the geodatabase approach allowed me to assess the spatial distribution of building ownership and quantify the rate of forest clearing in the territory around Quebec. Finally, I describe the ambitions of my larger project, which will employ the geodatabase model to draw together hundreds of manuscript maps to create a geographic portrait of North America during the period of European colonization (i.e. c.1492 to c.1800).

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[1]  Jean Gottmann, “Vauban and Modern Geography” American Geographical Society 34:1 (January 1944), 120–128, quote on 124.

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