In the Low Countries, the carto-animal par excellence was Leo Belgicus, a lion that arrived in 1583 and just refused to leave. There is a reason Leo endured – he just fits. He was introduced in Cologne by an Austrian cartographer and nobleman, Michael Aitsinger, when Belgium and the Netherlands were both part of the Spanish Empire and almost every province in the Netherlands featured the lion on its coat of arms. There weren’t a great deal of other map ‘jokes’ at that point and Leo was an instant hit in Low Country homes, the Keep Calm and Carry On of his day.
The original map first appeared as a folding panel in a book, and then went through many editions and twists. In Aitsinger’s original, Leo faced right, tongue panting, his upper jaw by Transylvania, his left paw named Luxembourg. Great Britain received a political seeing to from the tail, which swished over Norwich, Ipswich, Colchester and London. By the time the Amsterdam engraver Claes Janszoon Visscher had a go in 1609, Leo was squatter, less mobile and fierce, his lower jaw dominated by the Zuyder Zee, with a background not of the British Isles but of Dutch traders, coats of arms and views of Antwerpen, Bruxel and Amsterdam. But when Janszoon made his paper lion in 1611, he was facing the other way and was far longer, with the Zuyder Zee now at its rump.
The friendliest lion in cartography: Leo Belgicus semi-rampant over the Low Countries in 1617.
The body of the lion varied over time as borders and rulers changed. After the Treaty of Munster of 1648 curtailed the Eighty Years’ War and recognised a Dutch Republic separated from the southern Spanish Netherlands, Visscher redrew his lion yet again. He was turned around once more, bedraggled and exhausted, and seemingly far less populated, not least because he now represented the new independent Netherlands alone, and was rebranded Leo Hollandicus.
Popular examples of Leo continued until the beginning of the nineteenth century, at which point engravers and collectors presumably wearied of the gag. Perfect timing, then, for the dramatic, short-lived and slightly compromised zoomorphic emergence of the American Eagle. In 1833 an engraver named Isaac W. Moore stretched the eagle over a map of the rapidly transmogrifying United States, his work published in Philadelphia in Joseph Churchman’s geography book Rudiments of National Knowledge, Presented to the Youth of United States, and to Enquiring Foreigners. It is a very rare map (little change from $20,000), measures 42 × 53 cm, and it came about by a trick of the light.
Churchman explained that he was looking at a wall map of the US when the dim light in the room cast its shadow in such a way as to suggest the shape of an eagle. He was ready to dismiss it when he realised that such an image might increase the ‘facility with which [geography] lessons may be impressed and retained upon the youthful memory.’
A dead parrot sketched over the United States, though it’s supposed to be more of an Eagle.
The resultant carto-bird, portrayed in smudgy brown over sharply defined red states and borders, tries very hard to keep its subject in check: its feet and talons look good extending down through Florida and towards Cuba, while its breast effectively covers the eastern seaboard. But its head, with an eye in Vermont, is not big enough to cover Maine (for which the author apologises); its tail feathers extend not far beyond Arkansas; while its wings smother an ill-defined ‘Missouri Territory’. Within sixteen years Californian statehood rendered the bird inoperable.
There is another awkward anomaly: the eagle looks more like a parrot, and the author who made him has a reason for this. The eagle is usually portrayed prey-like, he explains, eager for swooping and flesh-ripping. ‘Here, on the contrary, having possession of the whole country, and no enemy to contend with, it is designed to appear as the placid representative of national liberty, and national independence; with an aspect of beneficent mildness, and in an attitude of peace.’
So where in the world to look for carto-aggression? Towards Russia, clearly, which didn’t have an eagle or a lion on its vast land but an octopus, the animal you use on a map if you want to denote greed, suction and unremitting tentacular ambition. The octopus is cartographically versatile, for it is really eight animals in one. Its globular reach is unmatched by anything else on land or sea – in fact, it is the only sea creature (unless one counts the amphibious dragon) which seems unusually happy on land, even in Siberia, even without its normal dietary supply of whelks, clams and other molluscs. That is because it is eating everything else.
On the famous Serio-Comic War Map for the Year 1877, drawn by Frederick Walrond Rose, the message is both powerful and sinister, one of the most lucid expressions of menace in the entire map drawer. An obese Russian octopus spreads its thick tentacles round the neck of Persia, Turkey and Poland. Germany is portrayed as the Kaiser, England as a colonising businessman with a moneybag labelled India, Transvaal, Suez. A rapier-wielding kilted Scotsman stands on England’s shoulders, a sleeping Spain has its back to the rest of Europe, France is a general with a telescope, Italy is a roller-blading child toying with a wooden figure of the Pope, Turkey is a swarthy gun-toting pirate, and Holland is a gentle land of windmills. The stereotyping is now almost jailworthy.
So long, suckers: the Russian octopus gets heavy with the rest of Europe in 1877.
Rose’s map is an image one can’t easily put away, and it is little wonder that octopuses have had their character besmirched on many maps since. A decade later, an American cartoonist portrayed the British Empire’s ceaseless colonialism in the shape of John Bull smirking in choppy waters. He is more than an octopus: his eleven hands rest on Jamaica, Australia, India, Malta and the rest, while his arms tuck Ireland and Heligoland close to his body. Some of the possessions seem solid enough; some such as Egypt seem already to be drifting away.
In 1890, the United States was in the grip of what the newspapers called The Lottery Octopus, another gift to cartographers as a skinny snake-like thing with its body in Louisiana and its tentacles all over the states from Maine to Washington. The lottery had begun in New York in the late 1860s, with its tickets travelling to cities all over the country by train, making a fortune for its corrupt owners in the process. When legislation to renew its charter came up in 1892 it was granted three more years to overcome widespread church-led opposition, and, failing so to do, was killed in 1895 and erased from the map.
But the award for most influential animal on a map goes to the salamander – an amphibian that gave the English language a new word that was both verb and noun. Its tale begins in February 1812, when the supporters of the ninth Governor of Massachusetts, a man named Elbridge Gerry, decided it might benefit his Democratic-Republican Party to reconfigure the electoral boundaries in Essex South County, north of Boston. The plan was simple: sacrifice a few Senate seats by packing a few districts with opposition Federalist voters, while gaining a Republican majority in many more.
So far, so predictable; it wasn’t a new political ploy, and Gerry’s opponents soon became aware of the chicanery. (Gerry himself, a distinguished diplomat who had signed the Declaration of Independence, helped found the Library of Congress and would one day serve as Vice President, was not himself the prime instigator of this ‘redistricting’.) And then, the story goes, there was a dinner party. Over beef, the resemblance of the reshaped districts to a salamander became clear: a creature curved from left to right, with Chelsea as its behind, Danvers and Andover as its prime torso, and Salsbury as its head. And inevitably the dinner party, with several newspapermen in attendance, produced the immortal line: ‘That’s not a salamander, that’s a Gerrymander!’
The amphibian that lost the election: the Gerrymander encircles Boston in 1812.
The following month, there it was: a respected Boston miniaturist and cartoonist named Elkanah Tisdale reshaded the map to strengthen his point, added claws, wings and viperous jaw, and struck the point home. Elbridge Gerry lost his seat, and the map may have been partly responsible.*
Chapter 9
Mapping a Cittee (without forder troble)
We will come, in a few chapters’ time, to one of
the most useful and used maps of all time – the London A to Z – and the legend of its creation. But great and useful maps of cities were not invented in the twentieth century. For that distinction, we need to look back to 1593, when John Norden published A Guide for Cuntrey men in the famous Cittee of LONDON, by the helpe of wich plot they shall be able to know how farr it is to any street. As allso to go unto the same, without forder troble.
Norden’s map stretched from Islington in the north down to St Katherine Docks near the Tower of London, and was engraved with great attention to the arrangement of churches and other public buildings, with trees denoting open land and the coats of arms of city livery companies (Grocers, Drapers, Fishmongers) framing the survey in two vertical panels. Key areas included Grayes Inn, Creple-gate, Lambeth mersh and More feyldes, while the banks of the Thames had only one bridge at Southwark but a great many other landmarks: Black friers, Broken wharfe, Three cranes, Olde swann, Bellyns gate. The map’s other significant feature was that it was designed by a Dutchman, Pieter van den Keere.
The places are phonetic exercises to us now, but the map also had one feature of a truly modern street map: letters and numbers were placed at strategic points, and identified in a table at the bottom. It could justifiably claim to be the first A-Z: a marks Bushops gate streete, c is Allhallowes in the wall, k is Holborne Conduct, and z is Cornehill. In a printing from 1653 the index has been greatly expanded to include ninety-five other locations, from Grub streete to Nightfryday streete (passing Faster lane and Pie Corner on the way).
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You could have bought Norden’s map from Peter Stent at ye Whitehose in Giltspur street neere Newgate. Stent was one of six prominent print and mapsellers in the capital in 1660, but he was soon to face fierce competition. The number had tripled by 1690, a burst of activity that reflected two things: London’s new trading prosperity along the Thames, and a craze for printing and collecting maps.
Most of these new maps, covering every part of the known world, were not bound for explorations; they were instead records of them. And most were not intended as symbols of power or influence. They were the first signs that people – or at least London’s merchant classes (Samuel Pepys among them) – found maps fascinating. In their newly affordable form, maps were educational, decorative, imaginative and journalistic. And they reflected the opening up of the world.
Between 1668 and 1719, the London Gazette, the first official newspaper of record, published more than four hundred advertisements from London mapsellers. Their tone varied from plain to frantic – some of them seemed to suggest they were selling not paper representations of new discoveries but the actual land itself. Long before auction catalogues and the opening of Stanfords map shop in the Strand, they provide the first London snapshot of commercial cartography.
What did they show? ‘There is now Extant a new Mapp of the Estates of the Crown of POLAND,’ began one notice in November 1672. ‘Containing all the Dutchies and Provinces of that Kingdome; as Prussia, Cujavia, Mazovia, Russia-nigra, Lithuania, Volhinia, Podolia and the Ukraine. Shewing all the principal Cities, Towns and Fortifications, wherein may be seen the Advance and Progress of the Turkish Armies.’ It was offered by three vendors: John Seller, Hydrographer to the King, at his shop in Exchange Alley, Robert Morden at the Atlas in Cornhill, and Arthur Tooker, ‘overagainst [ie opposite] Salisbury House in the Strand.’
Other shops offered maps of the Netherlands, France and Germany, new plans of North America with special attention paid to English plantations, along with curiosities (John Seller had a map of the Moon) and newly drafted sea charts. In March 1673, James Atkinson, a mathematical instrument maker, offered a map of the Magellan Straits ‘shewing all the depths of Water and Anchorage, Shoulds, and places of danger’, available from the east side of St Savories Dock.
In 1714, a new celestial and astronomical map was promised by the London cartographer and engraver John Senex from the Globe in Salisbury Court. This would include ‘Mr Professor [Edmund] Halley’s Description of the Shadow of the Moon over England in the total eclipse of the Sun’. Due on 22 April, ‘the sudden Darkness will make the Stars visible about the Sun, the like Eclipse not for 500 Years been seen in the Southern Parts of Great Britain … The Map shews every part of England over which the total Darkness will pass.’
And then there were the maps of London. These tended to emphasise newness, and no wonder – they marked the complete rebuilding of the city after the Great Fire of 1666. Indeed the fire marked an entirely unprecedented burst of civic cartography. It was evident to anyone who survived the flames that Norden’s map was simply no longer relevant, and it helped that the ruling monarch, Charles II, was himself a map enthusiast.
In 1675 a new London map was sold by Robert Green at the Rose and Crown in Budge Row with particular attention to Westminster’s ‘Lanes, Allies and Courts, with other Remarks, as they now are’ (at the same time, Green also had ‘A Map of Pensilvania by William Pen Esq’). In 1697, Robert Morden announced a map of London measuring 8ft by 6ft, divided into wards and parishes ‘with all the new Buildings and Improvements of these late years’. The major selling point (and at forty shillings it was the most expensive map of London on offer – most cost one shilling) seemed not to be its size, however; it was the fact that the area covered had been ‘actually Surveyed’.
Ten years later, a London map offered further treasures. A visit to the Bishop’s Head in St Paul’s Churchyard would be rewarded with an eight section, two-volume publication that boasted ‘a more particular Description thereof than has hitherto been publish’d of any City in the World.’ This contained not only ‘all the Streets, Squares, Lanes, Courts etc’ but also their distances from Charing Cross, St Paul’s and The Tower. There was also a list of all the prisons, statues, churches, hospitals, workhouses, fountains, conduits, public baths and ‘Bagnio’s’ (which may mean either a bathhouse, a brothel, or both at once).
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Among all these advertisements and all these maps, there was one printer-cartographer whose name was mentioned ‘above the title’, in the way a Hollywood star is used to sell a film. It was a name to be trusted, not least because it came with royal approval. The name was John Ogilby.
Ogilby commanded such respect that in May 1668 he announced a licensed lottery – in which the winners would obtain a stake in an exciting new project yet to be announced. It was five years before he put them out of their misery, revealing the project was called Britannia and would comprise an extravagant multi-volume survey of England and Wales, featuring county maps, views of English cities and a topographical description ‘of the whole Kingdom.’ New investors, whom Ogilby called ‘Adventurers’, were called upon to repair to Garaway’s Coffee House near the Royal Exchange, where they ‘may put in their Money upon the Author’ – and if they paid enough their name would appear on a cartouche of one of the maps. While they waited, his adventurers could have immediately satisfied themselves with the second volume of Ogilby’s English Atlas, which consisted of his maps of America. Or they could admire his maps and topographical works on China, Japan and Africa, many of them embellished with engravings by Wenceslaus Hollar.
Alongside John Speed, John Ogilby did more than anyone in England to set cartography on a respectful, practical and commercially popular footing, an achievement made even more remarkable because he had come peculiarly late to the trade. In fact, no one in his profession could rival the variety, misfortune or tireless reinvention of his earlier lives.
The Ogilby saga reads like a tale from the circus. He was born near Dundee in 1600, but by the age of six he was in London and his father was in jail for bad debts. His first love was dancing. He became apprenticed to a dancing master in Gray’s Inn Lane and was soon performing at London’s grandest balls. But a particularly complex manoeuvre performed for James I resulted in a broken leg and permanent lameness, after which he turned his attention to teaching and theatre management in Ireland.
A rough financial
patch followed, followed by a sea crossing to England during which he was almost shipwrecked. His recovery was aided by one of his previous dancing clients, Lord Strafford, who also recognised his literary talents, and supported Ogilby as a translator of Virgil, Homer and Aesop’s Fables, all of which sold well. He believed he had escaped another personal disaster in 1665 when he fled the Great Plague by moving to Kingston-on-Thames, only to learn a few months later that his house and books had been burnt in the Great Fire. And only then did he move into maps.
Ogilby had previously won favour from the royal court for his lavish account of Charles II’s coronation, and he was appointed a ‘sworn viewer’ (surveyor) of the reconstruction of London. It had become an imprisonable offence to depict the damage caused by the fire, but sketches and plans for a new city were widely encouraged, and several mapmakers set to work to assist civic authorities. Ogilby’s map was by far the most ambitious, promising mapping ‘curiously and accurately performed beyond whatever has yet been attempted for any city of the Universe.’ For his pains, he was given a fifteen-year copyright, one of the first times a cartographer had gained protection for his work.
John Ogilby presenting his Subscription List for Britannia to Charles II and his queen, Catherine of Braganza.
Ogilby didn’t labour alone. His chief surveyor was the mathematician and astronomer William Leybourn, whose task it was to walk the new streets, plotting every building and garden, before returning to Whitefriars to enter his day’s findings on the map. It was truly exhausting work. Writing in 1674, Leybourn wearily noted that he hoped ‘with God’s assistance in a few months time to compleat it.’ But it would take two more years.
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