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FeedSense of Direction
For Villanova’s John Smith, maps are more than just a way to help us get around.
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n addition to settling Jamestown and, according to lore and Disney, romancing Powhatan princess Pocahontas, Capt. John Smith surveyed the Virginia landscape and left history a road map. His 1612 rendering, the earliest of the Old Dominion State, served as a template for 17th-century Dutch mapmaker Willem Blaeu, whose more sophisticated version mixes topography with the pop art of the day (witness Native Americans smoking pipes in their thatched longhouse). It was the Golden Age of Cartography, and the world was charting its future.
Blaeu’s conception resides with a latter-day John Smith, who freely navigates paved pathways like Lancaster Avenue, and has compiled a rich collection of historical maps that, sheathed in Plexiglas, animate the walls of his Villanova home and reflect our urge to portray the planet. They trace or anticipate the ocean voyages of chaps named Columbus, Cook and Magellan.
“I’m trying to kick the habit,” says Smith, a map enthusiast and attorney for Reed Smith. (For the record, his lineage is connected to neither his international law firm nor Pocahontas’ beau.)
No 12-step plan has yet been devised to wean a person from antique map collecting. With their symbolic flourishes, crisscrossing lines and evocative names, these intricate works of art engage the eye as well as the brain.
“They convey information and are heartbreakingly beautiful,” says Smith, who treats his hobby with the same respect he gives his clients.
The beauty is in the detail. German cartographer Sebastian Münster’s “Die Nuw Welt,” the first independent depiction of the New World, shows North and South America connected by a wide isthmus, and offers a sketch of the Victoria, the ship that took Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan and his crew through the straits that bear his name and around the world. Smith acquired the map, which dates to 1550 (some 30 years after Magellan’s voyage), from the Philadelphia Print Shop.
Another Münster map presents the world as it was perceived during the first millennium A.D., based on the work of the Egyptian geographer-astronomer Ptolemy. The gods of wind are blowing up a storm in this world of antiquity, which is noticeably absent in the Western Hemisphere.
The charm of inaccuracy is part of the appeal of vintage maps. Smith’s collection includes a depiction of the Western Hemisphere marked by an additional lush landmass below South America, a notion dispelled by 18th-century English Capt. James Cook, who braved the base of the hemisphere and found only Antarctica. And in an Italian mapmaker’s distortion of the New York Bay explored by fellow countryman Giovanni da Verrazzano, the area representing today’s Manhattan is the size of a polyp.
The mystique of maps gripped Smith as he was growing up in New York’s Hudson River Valley. He’d head down to the water to see the Liberty ships pass by, then hike the highlands, armed with a “sweaty, folded map in my back pocket,” he says. “I fell in love [with maps] as a teenager, backpacking and orienteering.”
After graduating from Princeton University, Smith served, appropriately, as the navigator of a naval destroyer during the Vietnam War. His next stop was Yale Law School, where alumnus Richardson Dilworth, the former mayor who had put progressive politics on the map in Philadelphia, helped recruit him to the firm then known as Dilworth, Paxson, Kalish, Kohn & Levy. Smith stayed at Dilworth Paxson for 21 years and joined Reed Smith in 1991. In addition to his busy caseload, he heads Reed Smith University, which boasts 300 courses and 3,000 students among partners and employees.
Smith’s education in map collecting began in earnest during a 1989 vacation to Barbados, where he came across some striking old maps of the island. “I took out whatever traveler’s checks I had left [to buy them],” he says. “From there, it was like eating peanuts.”
