Undoubtedly an example of accomplished craftsmanship, its lavish ornamental flourish, the purely fictional character of some of the map's topographical details and the extravagant use of colour, are all features that suggest that precise geographical information was not the map's principal objective. Both Boazio, the cartographer, and Elstrack, his engraver, are doubly present on the map: while two cartouches bearing their names signal directly their claim to authorship, a more imaginative but deeply colonial gesture transforms them into the toponyms Baptiste's Rock (off the Antrim Coast) and Elstrake's Isle (south-west of Tyrconnell). This inventive way of writing cartographer and engraver into Ireland's geography has led one commentator to suggest that the map "is not a good one, even by contemporary standards: obsolete before it was published . . . its geographical content is badly garbled and in places totally fictitious." Such a view, though factually correct, implicitly assumes that the gradual increase of cartographic accuracy should be seen as the guiding principle of map history. But what makes Boazio's map such an important example of the way 16th century Englishmen made spatial sense of the intractable and "barbarous" Irish territory is precisely its value as a decorative image of Ireland's geography fluctuating between fact and fiction. Its purpose was not accuracy but opulent display. Boazio's and Elstrack's names function as a kind of geographical signature, an eccentric gesture perhaps, but one that capitalises on Ireland's status as the property of those that give it visual and verbal presence in maps and texts.
See Boazio, Baptista, and R. Dunlop, “Sixteenth-Century Maps of Ireland.”, The English Historical Review, no. 78 (1905): 309–37.
