Rick Laprairie has always been enchanted by the stories that old maps tell. His recent discovery has been his most exciting to date: a “cartographic birth certificate” for Toronto that dates to 1678 — the earliest known appearance of the word on a map, he writes in an upcoming Ontario History article.Laprairie had been trying to show the evolution of Toronto’s geography and name, and he kept “bumping into” a map by Jean-Baptiste-Louis Franquelin. It was a survey of land grants made to soldiers along the St. Lawrence River when the French were still colonial power. The map was dated 1678 and showed the outline of the eastern seaboard, but it also featured drawings of woodland animals, Indigenous men, an angel blowing a horn, and King Louis XIV’s face radiating sun rays, right on brand for the Sun King.The map was made “in that decade where the name Toronto was starting to appear,” and Laprairie wondered about the handwriting on what is now known as Lake Simcoe.He studied the map online at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France — but he couldn’t make out the writing. Frustrated, he ordered a high-resolution digital copy.When it arrived in his inbox, he zoomed in below the decorative beavers grazing north of present-day Orillia. He saw it: “Tarontos Lac.”“I just about fell out of my chair,” he says. “It was incredible. Because of the work I had been doing, I knew full well that this was the first time the name had been used on a map.”“Tarontos” was the French take on “Tkaronto,” an Indigenous word referring to the fishing weirs they had used for thousands of years where Lake Simcoe empties into Lake Couchiching. Kory Snache, a member of Rama First Nation and a tour guide with Indigenous tour group First Story Toronto, thinks the word was in common usage in the 17th century.“At the time Tkaronto is really well-known because it carrie ...
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