Atlas of the Gold Coast
Ghana · Gold Coast Survey Department · 1949
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National atlases: a summary
Yonge, Ena L. · 1957
This paper presents a comprehensive survey of national atlases produced worldwide up to the late 1950s. The author reviews the development, scope, and cartographic quality of more than two dozen national atlases, with an emphasis on those published after World War II. The study examines atlases across Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas, analyzing their thematic coverage, scales, symbolic innovations, and accompanying explanatory texts. Key findings highlight the leading role of European countries—particularly Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, and Sweden—in producing atlases that integrate physical, economic, and social geography with advanced graphic techniques. Outside Europe, emerging national atlas projects in Israel, Morocco, the Congo, Australia, and the United States are documented, though many regions remain underrepresented. The paper underscores the value of national atlases as tools for planning, education, and research, and notes the growing trend of bilingual map legends and summaries to serve international audiences. The survey reveals increasing ambition and scope in national atlas production, mirroring both rising nationalism and the demand for systematic spatial knowledge of individual countries.
Gold Coast Atlas
Bondy, Malcolm E. · 1951
This paper presents a descriptive analysis of the fifth edition of the Gold Coast Atlas (1949) as a historical cartographic resource. The primary purpose is to document its key enhancements and evaluate its scholarly value, particularly in light of comparisons with earlier territorial atlases. The method involves a feature-by-feature examination of the atlas’s content, including its new gazetteer listing 1083 towns and villages, 161 rivers, and 62 prominent hills, as well as minor map revisions since the 1945 edition. The atlas contains 20 maps, 17 of which are dedicated to the Gold Coast, with thematic coverage spanning administrative divisions, population, tribal and linguistic distribution, physical geography, geology, minerals, rainfall, forestry, agriculture, livestock routes, and transport infrastructure. City plans for Accra, Kumasi, and Takoradi and a statistical section on utilities and road/railway mileage are also included. A comparative assessment with the earlier Atlas of the Territory identifies two notable deficiencies: the absence of textual commentary accompanying the thematic maps, and the omission of disease distribution maps, such as those for sleeping sickness and malaria. The paper concludes that while the Gold Coast Atlas constitutes a rich compendium of socioeconomic and physical data for the region, its utility for medical geography is limited. Researchers in that field are advised to consult complementary mapping resources, specifically the 1947 Directorate of Colonial Surveys series on Glossina distribution and the Ash–Spits Atlas of Tropical Diseases. The work thus serves as both a catalogue of atlas contents and a pragmatic guide to its contextual usage.
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