Good day citizens and welcome to what would Jefferson do. Our weekly opportunity to discuss

current American events with President Thomas Jefferson, who is seated across for me now.

Good day to you, Mr President.

Good day to you, Citizen.

Mr. Jefferson, I wanted to ask you about maps and map-making and geography,

things that we sort of take for granted during my age.

During your time, I've heard it called the geography was the mother of all sciences. Well, we had a sense of the world.

Columbus had found the Western Hemisphere.

And then in my era, this was the great age of discovery,

Captain Cook, going to the South Seas and finding Australia and

New Zealand and mapping them, and Cook looking for a Northwest Passage across the top of what's in your time Canada,

finding the Hawaiian Islands which were called the Sandwich Islands and looking for

the transit of Venus on Tahiti.

So all of these expeditions were fanning out across the world,

making new discoveries, new peoples.

It was an extraordinary time for plants

and rare and unusual animals, and just a sense that there was a much bigger

world than we had ever anticipated before and so we were fascinated.

We were intoxicated by geography in that era.

It is said, sir, that you learned map-making from your father, correct?

My father Peter Jefferson was a great man.

He was one of the first settlers in the western part of Virginia and what later became

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