All summer long, we will be offering you forays into Quebec libraries to discover their little-known treasures, on unusual themes. This week, a look at the map library of Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec.
On the map that Alban Berson unfolds before us at the National Library, Quebec appears as an archipelago. It is located under Greenland, but we recognize the name Labrador, which is derived from Portuguese and means “the ploughman.” This map is probably an interpretation of a Portuguese source, explains the cartographer. The Portuguese, he specifies, explored the coast of Labrador at the very beginning of the 16th century.e century. “This design [du Québec sous forme d’archipel] “existed,” says Alban Berson. “We see it appear on a few handwritten maps. But no one ever printed it except this Dutch cartographer, Johannes Blaeu, who finally changed his mind at the end of his career and realized that the Quebec peninsula was not an archipelago.”
He who comes from far away can lie well…
Further on, a map of New France bears a vignette showing giant beavers working wood like men. While Nicolas Guérard’s drawings that illustrate the map are very beautiful, they are at least imaginative: the beavers, located at the foot of Niagara Falls, are anthropomorphic, and play in turn lumberjacks, carpenters, porters, masons, moving mortar on their tails, under the direction of an architect. The map is by Henri Abraham Chatelain. It was published in Amsterdam and is dated 1719. In reality, it plagiarizes a larger map, by Nicolas de Fer, from 1698, and known in only three copies.
According to Alban Berson, these images are inspired by a passage from Nicolas Denys’ book, Description géographique et historique des costes de l’Amérique septentrionale, published in 1672. He gives, he says, “a long description of a beaver dam construction site where the beast is overly anthropomorphized, in a way that is too similar to that of the thumbnail on the map not to be the source”. For example, Denys describes beavers as being “about the size of a sheep”. He who comes from far away can lie well. Having settled in New France, Nicolas Denys had every interest in exaggerating his stories to sell more books…
The map library of the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec contains some 200,000 maps, a large portion of which are digitized and accessible to all. They are kept upstairs at the Rosemont site, in large filing cabinets kept at 17 degrees Celsius and 40% humidity.
A labyrinth strewn with precipices
On another table, Alban Berson shows a large 19th-century map that goes up the St. Lawrence to the Lower North Shore, signed by Henry Wolsey Bayfield. The St. Lawrence, as we know, is one of the most dangerous waterways in the world.
“There is a French pilot from the 18the century which says that the Saint-Laurent is a labyrinth strewn with precipices”, reports Alban Berson. Also, throughout the regime of New France, handwritten maps of the river circulated without being published, for strategic reasons.
“Under the French regime, the Saint Lawrence was fairly well known to French pilots,” he says. “But this knowledge was not necessarily translated into printed maps, because they did not want to inform foreign powers, particularly England, of the best route to Quebec. So, during the French regime, the published maps were not up to par with the handwritten maps, which remained between French pilots. Moreover, the English, when they wanted to invade Quebec, made several mistakes. We must not forget that there is a geostrategic aspect to cartography.”
No wonder that at the time of the Conquest, the French were required to leave all their maps in British hands.
But at the beginning of the 19th centurye century, the English were well established in America. And when the British Admiralty commissioned Henry Wolsey Bayfield to map the St. Lawrence in detail, there was no longer any question of keeping secrets. At that time, the opening of the Lachine Canal led to an increase in boat traffic on the river. Montreal was no longer a terminus but a place of passage.
“Here we are really in a commercial perspective,” says Alban Berson. “We must give everyone the best route because there are many issues at stake.” Some routes are already known and safe for navigators. But the boats that frequent the river are much heavier and much larger than before. “They cannot necessarily take the passages of the sailing ships of the time of the French regime.” And the risks of shipwrecks are high.
“We need a cartographer, to possibly look for other passages. It is becoming urgent to know the river in its smallest details and to identify the sandbars, the reefs.”
It must be said that the river, at that time, was already a ship cemetery. And other shipwrecks would follow. That of theEmpress of Irelandfor example, which, sinking in the St. Lawrence estuary, near Rimouski, caused 1,012 victims on May 29, 1914. It is the biggest shipwreck to have occurred in Canada and one of the biggest, along with those of the Titanic and Lusitaniain world history. Henry Wolsey Bayfield’s work aimed to prevent shipwrecks, even though he himself came close to disaster on a few occasions, says Alban Berson.
The condition of the Bayfield maps shows that they were used a lot. “For 70 years, we used these maps, until we invented technologies like sonar, which allows us to detect the bottom. And like all maps, they became obsolete.” Today, researchers consult these maps to study how the landscape has changed over the years, he notes. “It’s important to have a history of the territory. It’s very useful for environmental studies.”
Cards and postcards
Alongside BAnQ’s immense collection of geographical maps, there is another, which in some way completes it: the tens of thousands of postcards carefully preserved in its archives.
The postcard was invented in Austria, about fifteen years before it appeared in Quebec, in 1897. “And then, in the 1990s, with the Internet, it began to die out quietly. Our collection therefore gives us a panorama of a century of Quebec,” says Alban Berson. Also, on the backs of the photos that illustrate, for example, Lafontaine Park in the last century, or a group of men visiting a sugar shack in suits and ties, we discover a thousand stories of daily life at the time: loves thwarted by the vigilance of parents, the boredom that a man experiences when he is away working far away, or the complaints of a young girl exiled to a convent.
For Alban Berson, postcards are a complement to maps because the photograph details specific places: that of a convenience store, for example, on a street corner in Montreal. “The producer of photographs was also a producer of postcards. Montreal was photographed from all angles. Then we edited the photos in postcard format. People could buy them, then send these photos easily.”
In 2017, BAnQ acquired a major collection of Quebec postcards. Today, around 33,000 postcards from its collection are digitized and accessible on the BAnQ website. “The most recent ones cannot be digitized for legal reasons,” he says.