Leading the Way

I started Prelude with this story from “Leading the Way: To Go Where There Is No Road and Leave a Path” by Joan Chittister. 

In the mid-17th century Spanish seafarers sailed up the west coast of the Americas to what is now known as the Baja peninsula. The cartographers of the time, aware of the drake expeditions and good Cartesians as well simply drew a straight line up from the strait of California to the Strait of Juan de Fuca between Vancouver Island and Washington state.

Consequently, the maps that were published in 1635 show very clearly that California was an island.

Now that might be only a quaint story if it were not for the fact that the missionaries of the time were using that map to travel inland.

So, given the information on that map, they developed the first great pre-fab boat construction project in human history. They cut their flatboats in Spain, shipped them over in pieces and then, on the shores of Monterey, California put them all back together again. To be transported on the backs of mules to the other side of California. Then they carried those boats 12,000 feet up the Sierra Nevada Mountains for passage across the great strait which the map showed ran from the Baja to Puget Sound.

But, lo and behold, the other side of those mountains was no seashore at all. It was what is now the state of Nevada and the beginning of the great American desert. California was the mainland!

It would be a rather funny story except for one thing that makes it tragic: when the missionaries wrote back to tell the cartographers and the crown that California was not an island no one — no one — believed them. In fact, they insisted that the map was certainly correct: it was the missionaries who were in the wrong place!

What’s more, in 1701, — almost 70 years later — they reissued an updated version of the same map.

For fifty years, then, — the years of the most constant, most crucial explorations of the California coastline — those maps went unchanged because someone continued to work with partial information, assumed that data from the past had the inerrancy of tradition and then used authority to prove it.

Finally, after years and years of new reports a few cartographers — the heretics, the radicals, and the rebels, I presume — began to issue a new version. And in 1721, the last mapmaker holdout finally attached California to the mainland.

But — and this is the real tragedy perhaps — it took almost a hundred years for the gap between experience and authority to close. It took almost a hundred years for the new maps to be declared official, despite the fact that the people who were there all the time knew differently from the very first day.

Point: Vision is the ability to realize that the truth is always larger than the partial present.