Mapping the Gulf South

For those traveling over the holidays, you may want to visit the new Tampa Bay History Center. In September the interactive museum launched a major map exhibition, featuring over 150 atlases, maps, globes and other cartographic material dating from 1493 to 2013. It includes the Ptolemaic world map from the Nuremberg Chronicle, "La Florida" from Ortelius'  Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (detail above), a seventeenth-century Florentine chart of the Gulf of Mexico, Pierre Mortier's The Theater of War in America and more recent bird's eye view perspectives of the region. Current digital images taken by NASA and the Google mapping project round off the exhibit.

For more information about "Charting the Land of Flowers: 500 Years of Florida Maps," consult the museum's online guides. And congrats to map collector/historian Tom Touchton!

UPDATE:  The exhibit has now been extended through April 13 2014.

Image above: Gerónimo de Chaves (1524– ?). La Florida from the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of Abraham Ortelius, Additamentum of 1584 (1591 or 1592 Latin edition). Detail. Tampa Bay History Center.