On The Map: Why the world looks the way it does

by Garfield, Simon

  Towards the end of the session in the Cotswold bookshop there was a final video to watch – what to include in your rucksack. A head-torch is useful, perhaps lip salve, and don’t forget some warmer clothing lest the weather turns against you. ‘And, most important, your map. Never be without your map and your compass. Not only does it show you where you are, but you get so much more out of the walking experience.’ When it was over, and Simon King told us to honour the country code and ‘leave only footprints, take only memories,’ one of the workshop leaders said, ‘Now you’re ready to find your way!’ as if it was an evangelical awakening. Most of us then bought maps, paper maps, and promised ourselves we’d open them very soon.

  Pocket Map

  A Nineteenth-Century Murder Map

  Mary Ashford is not yet a major part of cartographic history, but perhaps she should be, poor thing. At 8am on Tuesday 27 May 1817 her body was found in a watery pit in a field in Erdington, on the outskirts of Birmingham. She may have fallen in, or she may have been murdered, and the mystery of how this twenty-year-old woman failed to return home after a local dance became one of those great and terrible stories that enthralled the public and filled the papers for months. The trial brought about a change in English law; the scandal brought about what was probably the world’s first commercially produced forensic murder map.

  Ashford had attended the annual dance at a public house with a girlfriend, and attracted the attention of a man called Abraham Thornton, who had previously boasted of his reputation as a lothario. The two danced together, and afterwards walked back over open fields. Ashford was last seen alive at 4am; at 6.30am a local mill worker discovered her blood-spotted shoes and bonnet.

  Thornton was immediately charged with her murder. At the trial ten weeks later two maps were used to describe what may have happened that night, one drawn up for the prosecution by local surveyor William Fowler, and one drawn for the defence by the Birmingham surveyor Henry Jacobs. Each side drew arrows on their maps to instruct the jury on Ashford’s and Thornton’s possible movements after the dance, and once-insignificant places such as Penn’s Mill Lane and Clover Field became known on breakfast tables throughout the country. Thornton had an alibi and a good counsel, and the jury took only six minutes to acquit him.

  It was an unpopular verdict. Mary Ashford’s brother William, incensed by the outcome but cheered by the strength of public opinion against Thornton, managed to arrange a retrial at the King’s Bench in Westminster the following November, and the news pleased not only the newspapers but pamphleteers and cartographers too. There was money to be made. The most successful map, in several editions, was made by a local teacher who inspired his pupils and his colleague George Morecroft to rise at dawn to construct a survey of the crime scene and surrounding area. The teacher, by the name of R. Hill, explained that he had not been impressed with the ‘rude plan’ produced in the Midland Chronicle that was ‘apparently done without measurement … a very imperfect representation.’ Hill, a keen geographer, had previously sketched new maps of Spain and Portugal for his school, though no examples survive. He had also read a popular account of the birth of the Ordnance Survey by its director, Major-General William Mudge, and, ‘finding it more interesting than any novel’, taught himself trigonometry and other modern surveying techniques.

  His map, a wood engraving printed in Birmingham, measures 38 × 48.5cm. Hill cast his boundaries wider than the maps in the newspapers ‘so far as to include the place of the alleged alibi,’ and added a cross-sectional drawing and an engraving of the pit where Mary Ashford’s body was found (shown for what it really was, a rather bucolic tree-lined pond). The main map is augmented by helpful directions: ‘The road which Thornton says he took after leaving Mary’; ‘Supposed track of the Murderer.’ And then there is a bit of topographical sensationalism. In an inset of the fields where the murder was alleged to have occurred, Clover Field is renamed Fatal Field.

  The fateful last journey of Mary Ashford in a map by the mysterious ‘R Hill’.

  The map was accompanied by detailed explanatory text and a juicy title in a combination of plain and ornate Old English type: ‘Map of the roads, near to the spot where Mary Ashford was murdered’. The text provided a basic outline of the case and the disputed claims of Abraham Thornton’s route after accompanying Mary Ashford from the dance, composed in the peculiarly unemotional style of a policeman’s evidence (‘It may perhaps assist the inspector of the map to be reminded of some of the particulars …’; ‘the height of the water as here presented, is as near as possible [to] what it was when the Murder took place.’) Hill’s map was a great success, earning him and his class £15 profit despite widespread plagiarism.

  No map, however, could hope to capture the courtroom drama to come. Thornton not only continued to plead his innocence, but invoked the archaic statute of trial by combat – challenging William Ashford to a duel by putting on a gauntlet and throwing another down by Ashford’s feet. Ashford declined to pick it up. Thornton was then tried for a third time the following April (no one could really get enough of this case), when he was again acquitted, the judge declaring that he could indeed induce his ‘wager of battle’ as a valid defence, although a new statute would soon abolish it.

  Thornton then fled to America, where he is believed to have died in his late-sixties. The lengthy inscription on Mary Ashford’s gravestone in a Sutton Coldfield churchyard makes sober and moralistic reading, describing her terrible fate ‘having incautiously repaired to a scene of amusement without proper protection.’

  And what became of our principal map-maker? He did all right for himself. He left teaching and the Midlands for the civil service and a house in Hampstead, northwest London; he was promoted to the Treasury; and in 1840, twenty-three years after the murder of Mary Ashford, he transformed the world’s postal system with the Universal Penny Post and the Penny Black stamp. The murder map is the only evidence we have of Sir Rowland Hill’s cartographic career.

  Chapter 11

  The Legendary Mountains of Kong

  In 1798, an English cartographer called James Rennell did something so audaciously memorable, so uniquely unpredictable, that no one in the map world has been able to match it since. He invented a mountain range. Not just any range, either: a central belt that stretched through thousands of miles of West Africa – mountains of ‘stupendous height’ that would prove an impassable mental barrier to Livingstone, Stanley, and any other European explorer with ambitions to penetrate one of the most lucrative blanks on the map.

  The Mountains of Kong, named after a once-prosperous trading region in what is now Côte d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso, are one of the great phantoms in the history of cartography, and not just because of the ridiculous novelty of their length, extending west to east from modern-day Nigeria to Sierra Leone. The Mountains of Kong were also extraordinary because of their longevity. Once on the map, they stayed on it for almost a century – until finally an enterprising Frenchman called Louis-Gustave Binger went to have a look and found that they weren’t there, an achievement for which he was awarded the highest domestic honours. But who could possibly perpetrate such an absurd act of cartographical chicanery? And how could they get away with it?

  In the latter part of the eighteenth century James Rennell was something of a cartographical hero. His survey of Bengal was justly regarded as the most detailed and accurate yet undertaken, a feat achieved along newly scientific mapping principles. He was a pioneer too in the new science of oceanography, and he is remembered as one of the founders of the Royal Geographical Society. It was only to be expected, therefore, that any map he drew displaying a new discovery was not only believed but welcomed, particularly if it appeared in one of the most significant books of travel literature written in his lifetime.

  And so it was: his most elaborate apparition made its debut in two maps published to accompany Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa by Mungo Park, the Scottish explorer’s account of his quest to find th
e source and course of the Niger. (For more than a century, almost all African explorers’ principal quests concerned rivers, and the ancient Greek conundrums of locating the source, the flow and the outfall – whether the White and Blue Nile, the Niger or the Congo.)

  Park’s challenge was set by the newly formed African Association, the London-based society established by Joseph Banks, William Wilberforce and others with the joint ambitions of intellectual and commercial conquest. Africa’s gold reserves and the prospects for British trade were believed to be limitless, and although the coastline had been well-mapped by 1780, the interior remained largely a mystery. Park’s journey through Senegal and Mali in 1795–97 was more circuitous and less penetrating than his second fateful mission a decade later (at the end of which he is thought to have drowned after a pursuit by spear-chucking natives), but his journals offer a vivid topography of a vanishing world on the eve of a colonising stampede.

  The Mountains of Kong – ‘a Chain of Great Mountains’ – arrive on James Rennell’s map in 1798.

  James Rennell’s accompanying maps are based on Park’s written account, but also on additional information provided to the cartographer after Park’s return to London. Rennell wrote an appendix to the book in which he explained how Park’s discoveries had provided a ‘new face’ to the continent and had proved ‘that a belt of mountains, which extends from west to east, occupies the parallels between ten and eleven degrees of north latitude, and between the second and tenth degrees of west longitude (from Greenwich). This belt, moreover, other authorities extend some degrees still farther to the west and south, in different branches …’ In his book, Park reported seeing only two or three peaks, but Rennell knitted them together. It wasn’t by chance that the existence of these non-existent mountains reinforced Rennell’s theory (vaguely suggested by Park) about the route of the Niger. He believed, erroneously, that it began in the mountains, travelled east-to-west along its range, but was prevented from travelling south and reaching the Gulf of Guinea … by the mountains. He showed the Niger evaporating inland in Wangara.

  He then explained how these ‘other authorities’, including the fifteenth-century Moorish geographer Leo Africanus, had previously referred to mountain ranges in the area but had failed to give them a name. But now they did have a name, inspired by Park hearing a native description of ‘the Kingdom of Kong’. It was an intrepid and resolute act, the modern equivalent, perhaps, of drawing a thick contoured line through more than half of Western Europe and calling it the Mountains of Luxembourg.

  And of course that wasn’t the last of it. Mungo Park’s account was a bestseller, and Rennell’s maps had an immediate influence on others. The mountains were not just a dramatic obstacle; the legend grew that they glistened with gold. In 1804 the German map-maker Johann Reinecke produced what looked like a fluffy snow-covered range (titled Gebirge Kong) for a new atlas. A year later, the leading London engraver John Cary produced another map with the Mountains of Kong looming ever more menacingly over the plains (this time linked to the similarly fictitious Moon Mountains, the supposed source of the White Nile since the days of Ptolemy). Cary’s work was titled, with some conviction, ‘A New Map of Africa, from the Latest Authorities’.

  The phantom mountains stubbornly refusing to leave this American atlas of 1839.

  How did the mountains remain standing for so long – at once both falsifiable and unverifiable? The American scholars Thomas Bassett and Philip Porter have identified forty maps which show the Mountains of Kong in various stages of development from 1798 to 1892, eventually forming a range the size of a small African state. Faced with a lack of evidence to the contrary, cartographers copy each other – we know that. But the fact that some of the most convincing representations of the Mountains of Kong appeared on maps many years after the Lander brothers confirmed that the Niger flowed into the Gulf of Guinea quite undermined the theory that we had entered a new scientific age. As Bassett and Porter found, cartographic knowledge in the nineteenth century was still ‘partly based on non-logical factors such as aesthetics, habit, [and] the urge to fill in blank spaces …’

  Rennell, one of England’s most garlanded geographers (he was buried in Westminster Abbey), changed the cartography of Africa for ninety years. One needs look no further for a pristine example of the power of the printed word to confer status, or the power of the printed map to confirm authority. It was only in 1889, with the travels of the French officer Louis-Gustave Binger, that things began to change. In December 1889 Binger addressed a distinguished audience at the Paris Geographical Society, and recounted his previous year’s journey along the Niger from Bamako (in present-day Mali) to the outskirts of Kong. What did he find? ‘On the horizon, not even a ridge of hills!’

  Binger’s demolition job had an immediate effect: the Mountains of Kong disappeared from almost all maps as quickly as they had appeared. They last featured in Rand McNally’s map of Africa of 1890, although as late as 1928 the esteemed Bartholomew’s Oxford Advanced Atlas featured this in its index: ‘Kong Mountains, French West Africa, 8°40 N 5°0 W.’

  k

  Charlie Marlow, the chief narrator in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, arrived in Africa just a few years too late to see the Mountains of Kong. But his regret lay elsewhere – in the fact that most of the white spaces he had seen on the map as a boy had been filled in. ‘Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps,’ he tells his fellow crew members as they sit anchored on the Thames estuary waiting for the tide to turn at the beginning of the novella. ‘I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look like that) I would put my finger on it and say, “When I grow up I will go there.”’

  Even though by Marlow’s adulthood Africa ‘had got filled … with rivers and lakes and names … It had become a place of darkness’, he remains entranced by a map in a shop window of a snake-like river curving over a vast country, and he endeavours to join any enterprise that will get him there. Before his interview with an ivory company, he sits in a waiting room with another map, both shiny and colourful. ‘There was a vast amount of red – good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch…’ He wasn’t interested in any of this. ‘I was going into the yellow. Dead in the centre.’

  Charlie Marlow’s apocalypse lay ahead of him, and maps wouldn’t be of much use. But his concept of Africa becoming ‘a place of darkness’ is an illuminating one. Beyond the spiritual darkness of those he encounters, Marlow (and one presumes Conrad, who had himself travelled up the Congo in the 1870s) viewed the continent as dark when it was full: fully explored, fully colonised, fully mapped (and conceivably, one imagines, as was the fashion, full of the dark-skinned).

  Most Victorian-era explorers and cartographers had an entirely different interpretation of dark. It was a term for the barbarian unknown, and the unmapped. When Henry Morton Stanley entitled his book Through The Dark Continent in 1878 (two decades before Conrad completed Heart of Darkness) Africa was still dark, despite the recent intentions of Mungo Park, Richard Burton, John Speke, David Livingstone and Stanley himself, to name the British alone. In fact, Africa was getting darker by the year: Stanley’s follow-up, another bestseller, was In Darkest Africa (1890).

  But there is an even stranger tale of light and dark, and it is unique to Africa: the story of how we consciously placed blank spaces on a map that was hitherto crammed with life and activity.

  Among cartographers, the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift is known for these four lines from his long poem ‘On Poetry: A Rhapsody’:

  So geographers, in Afric maps,

  With savage pictures fill their gaps,

  And o’er unhabitable downs

  Place elephants for want o
f towns.

  Certainly this was once the case. The Belgian map-maker Jodocus Hondius had a nice safari of elephants, lions and camels on his map of 1606, and in 1670 John Ogilby had an elephant, rhino and what may have been a dodo doing their worst in Ethiopia. But in 1733, when Swift wrote those lines, it was hardly true at all. Africa was emptying out. There were no animals, or such animals that did exist had been confined to the cartouche, alongside naked natives. This wasn’t to make way for the latest geographical discoveries and a new topography, but the opposite: the interior was turning blank again. It wasn’t just symbols and illustrations that were disappearing, but a multitude of rivers, lakes, towns and mountains, and it was a remarkable thing – one of those rare instances of a map becoming less instructive and less sure of itself as the decades and centuries passed.

  Here are two examples. The first is Blaeu’s popular Africae Nova Descriptio from the early 1600s. The outline of the continent is essentially correct, there are many recognizable kingdoms and lakes (alongside elephants, crocodiles and large frogs), and the map looks full. Partly this is a trick, with the text of coastal locations named by Portuguese explorers in the previous two centuries being turned inland, rather than the usual practice of displaying them towards the oceans. And partly it is wishful thinking, the interior topography a combination of Herodotus, Ptolemy, haphazard Portuguese expansion in the quest for gold, and hearsay. It is not wholly inaccurate, but there is a lot of supposition.

  Compare this to the key map of the country made more than a century later in 1749. This is by the influential French cartographer Jean Baptiste Bourgignon d’Anville, who is notable chiefly for two things: the scientific accuracy of his maps elevating the art of cartography throughout Europe, and the fact that he hardly left Paris. His map of southern Africa is noteworthy for its extreme honesty; d’Anville rejected hearsay and plagiarism, and sought verification on every mark he placed; if there was no confirmation yet he believed a river or settlement to exist, he would duly note an uncertain provenance. D’Anville’s map thus contains substantial details of three areas only. The kingdom of Congo on the west coast, the state of Manomotara and its immediate neighbours on the east coast, and the southerly tip by the Cape of Good Hope, ‘Le Pays des Hotentots’. Madagascar is also well documented. But the rest of the country is a vast swathe of blank, a brave act for a map-maker.