Sakhalin... a Long Island with a Long Story
I have always admired the artistry of older maps. The edges of these maps often contain engravings depicting local architecture or the real or imagined cosmos. One of the elements of traditional map making is the cartouche. Cartouches typically contain the name of the map along with other pertinent information like the date of the map and the name of the map maker. But some old maps turn the name into a short, visually elegant narrative of the place being mapped. If the maps were meant to be as accurate as possible, the cartouche is the one place where the map maker can show their creative side creating custom fonts and flourishes.

I try to spend some time on the cartouche whenever I am creating a map. At first, I tried to mimic some of the typographic flourishes. But recently, I have also started to explore the narrative side of cartouches... to use the cartouche to summarize what is interesting about a place. In my map of Sakhalin, I have tried to take this to it's ultimate end by making the cartouche overtake the map in importance.

The Island of Sakhalin lies North of Hokkaido, the northern-most island of Japan and East of mainland Russia. Overall the island is of limited interest. There is some oil but the climate is not great and there are no major cities. Despite the seaming lack of commercial interest, the island has been the subject of ongoing land disputes. It has a native population but was colonized by China, Japan and eventually Russia. In the 20th century, the island switched hands between Russia and Japan. A post-World War II treaty gave possession to Russia... the legitimacy of which is still disputed by Japan today. In researching the history of the island, I came upon a description in Wikipedia. Wikipedia summaries are particularly interesting in how much they pack into a paragraph or two usually with no one political or commercial agenda. The description also contains the name of the island in Chinese, Russian and Japanese so I decided that I would use these in my cartouche. The map is a "political" map in that the cartouche describes not only the evolving disputes over the island but the evolution of the name of the place in the various languages of its "owners". To highlight the dominance of the cartouche narrative and hint at the lack of interesting landmarks of the island, I left the map itself devoid of detail. The Island is surrounded by several bodies of water, several of which also have have multiple names given over the history of the island's discovery and history.