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

by Garfield, Simon

  Africa full in Blaeu’s Africae Nova Descriptio.

  Africa empty in a 1766 map based on d’Anville.

  The blanks fired intellectual curiosity; many regarded them as an insult to the enlightened age. But d’Anville’s gaps also made huge political suggestions: the continent, universally known for its troves of slaves and gold, is wide open for conquest; the indigenous population, such as it exists, can have no claims on the unmapped territories, and will therefore present no resistance to subjugation. The blank spaces, swept clean of their inhabitants, were now all potentially white spaces too. Over the next fifty years, d’Anville’s map became the dominant impression of Africa throughout Europe, and went through many editions unchallenged. And in this way science yielded to commerce and avarice. Did d’Anville have such intentions himself? Almost certainly not. But when members of the African Association gathered in London to gaze upon the map towards the end of the century (and potentates did likewise in Antwerp, Paris and Amsterdam), they must have been licking their lips.

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  The blank spaces didn’t last long. In 1873, William Winwood Reade drew an engaging thematic map of the ‘Literature of Africa’, a textual display showing where the key explorers of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had travelled. ‘David Livingstone’, the first to traverse the central width of the continent, straps the map like a belt, while ‘Mungo Park’ and the French explorer René ‘Caillie’ both curve around the Niger. Stanley had located the fading Livingstone near the shore of Lake Tanganyika by the time the map was drawn, but he was yet to set off on his own big discoveries to Lake Victoria and beyond, and so barely features.

  But Stanley does feature prominently in the one of the most brutal accounts of colonisation that we possess. In fact there are two such accounts. One is in Stanley’s own hand, his bestselling journals of his violent sashays from the western mouth of the Congo to Zanzibar, alive with death as he hacks his way through the forests with his valiant and modern expeditionary force.

  Explorers make a name for themselves in 1873.

  And the other is a map of equatorial Africa, the region once known as Congo Free State, which shows Stanley basically doing the same thing. Stanley’s magnificent achievements as an explorer – not only the successful location of Livingstone, but the confirmation of Lake Victoria as the source of the White Nile – have been undermined by his participation in what may be the worst humanitarian disaster ever conceived by colonial hubris and greed.

  Encouraged by Stanley’s heroics along the River Congo between 1874 and 1877, Leopold II, King of the Belgians, co-opted him to take part in a rather less ‘scientific’ venture. Leopold had seen the blank maps and wanted a piece for himself. In a period that saw Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Portugal carve up the continent in a wild imperial looting expedition, the conquest of land through a mixture of industrial ambition and religious divination might have seemed merely like the natural order of things. Leopold made his intentions clear at a geographical conference in Brussels in 1876, proposing the establishment of an international committee with the purpose of increasing the ‘civilisation’ of Congo natives ‘by means of scientific exploration, legal trade and war against the “Arabic” slave traders.’

  He claimed a higher goal: ‘To open to civilisation the only part of our globe which it has not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness which hangs over entire peoples, is, I dare say, a crusade worthy of this century of progress.’ But his ideas of progress and scientific methods were cruelly unconventional, involving as they did brutal enslavement, a military dictatorship and the ruthless control over the ivory and rubber trade, an ambition only made possible initially with Stanley as his entirely respectable agent, buying up vast areas for Belgian control with sweet-talk and trinkets. To what extent Stanley knew of Leopold’s intended subterfuge has long been the subject of debate, but the king reportedly informed him, ‘It is a question of creating a new state, as big as possible, and of running it. It is clearly understood that in this project there is no question of granting the slightest political power to the Negroes. That would be absurd.’

  Belgian Congo – the darkest and bloodiest of colonial maps. Stanleyville sits at the top.

  Leopold (and Stanley’s) conquest of the Congo was one of the prime motivations behind Otto von Bismarck’s Berlin Conference of 1884-5, an attempt to divide the rightful ownership of this recently blank continent. (In Heart of Darkness, Bismarck’s Berlin Conference becomes a parody: the ‘International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs’.) The subsequent map looks colourful and ordered enough, and suddenly full again. But the new appearance of King Leopold’s massive Congo Free State heralds one of the truly dark periods of colonial rule. And the bright new partitions on the rest of the map at the start of the twentieth century – French Algeria, Portuguese Angola, Italian Libya, German Cameroon and British South Africa – show only the ability of maps to conceal what’s really there, and to mask the misery to come.

  A quarter of a century after Conrad’s Heart of Darkness first appeared, and in the year of the author’s death, a private press published the author’s own thoughts about the lightness and darkness of maps. Like Charlie Marlow, Conrad was a map fan. He had to be: he had led such a peripatetic life on land and sea that they were the only way he could find his bearings. In Geography and Some Explorers he wrote of how ‘map-gazing, to which I became addicted so early, brings the problems of the great spaces of the earth into stimulating and direct contact with a sane curiosity and gives an honest precision to one’s imaginative faculty.’ He was aware he was living through a revolution in which ‘the honest maps of the nineteenth century nourished in me a passionate interest in the truth of geographical facts and a desire for the precise knowledge which was extended to other subjects. For a change had come over the spirit of cartographers. From the middle of the eighteenth century on, the business of map-making had been growing into an honest occupation, registering the hard-won knowledge, but also in a scientific spirit, recording the geographical ignorance of its time. And it was Africa, the continent of which the Romans used to say “some new thing was always coming,” that got cleared of the dull, imaginary wonders of the dark ages, which were replaced by exciting spaces of white paper.’

  What really excited him about maps, he realised, was a simple thing: ‘Regions unknown!’ Not defined certainty, but the opposite – the mystery, and the life-enhancing possibility of discovery.

  Pocket Map

  The Lowdown Lying Case of Benjamin Morrell

  The Mountains of Kong were far from the only fictional features of nineteenth-century maps. The Pacific was littered with more than a hundred imaginary islands, floating around happily for decades in every atlas. Then in 1875 a disgruntled British naval captain named Sir Frederick Evans began crossing them out. In all, he removed 123 islands from the British Admiralty Charts that he believed were the result of: a) mistaken coordinates, b) too much rum and nausea, and/or c) restless megalomaniac commanders longing for posterity. In his eagerness, Evans also removed three genuine islands, but it was a small price to pay for cleaning up an ocean.

  One of the worst offenders, of the megalomania variety, was an American called Captain Benjamin Morrell. Between 1822 and 1831 Morrell had drifted around the southern hemisphere in search of treasure, seals, wealth and fame, and failing to find much of the first three, opted for posterity. The published accounts of his travels proved popular and convincing enough for his findings – including Morrell Island (near Hawaii) and New South Greenland (near Antarctica) – to be entered on naval charts and world atlases, where they endured for a century. In fact, Morrell Island caused a westward diversion of the international dateline until 1910, and appeared in The Times Atlas as late as 1922.

  The strange thing was, the true nature of Morrell’s travels and deception had begun to unravel much earlier. In March 1870, the Royal Geographical Society in London gathered to discuss Morrell’s claims. The debate was
led by Captain R.V. Hamilton of the Royal Navy, who was a Morrell fan. He spoke of how the British had recently made great discoveries in the southern oceans, and claimed that Morrell, valiantly slicing through the ice in his schooner Wasp, had made the greatest headway. He explained that the story of his voyages were on the RGS shelves – not only in book form, but on new maps as well. Hamilton had recently placed the results of Morrell’s discoveries on the new Admiralty charts, for they were ‘curious and important’. His main regret was that Morrell’s narrative was ‘not as detailed as it might be.’

  Benjamin Morrell: the world was his football.

  That was the understatement of the year. Even the least experienced captain will diligently log his progress through unfamiliar waters, noting his coordinates alongside sailing and weather conditions. But Morrell’s Antarctic log contained blank weeks, and pages torn out. It observed no ice where others had seen nothing but; and birds of paradise suited only to the tropics. Other navigators at the meeting were rightly sceptical, chief among them J.E. Davis, who had followed Morrell’s Antarctic ‘course’ sixteen years later, as a member of Sir James Ross’s expedition. Davis concluded that Morrell’s work not only lacked credence but resembled the fiction of Robinson Crusoe (Morrell had in fact sailed to the Juan Fernandez Islands (off the coast of Chile), where Alexander Selkirk washed up in 1704, inspiring the Defoe novel.)

  However, it was half a century later before the matter of New South Greenland was finally laid to rest, when Ernest Shackleton, on his Endurance expedition of 1914–16, found that its supposed location was in fact deep sea, with soundings up to 1,900 fathoms. With Shackleton’s reputation far stronger than Morrell’s, off the map it came.

  It wasn’t the last of Morrell’s fabrications to be removed: Morrell Island, in the Hawaiian archipelago, soon followed. However, the modern naval historian Rupert Gould has identified some useful and verifiable Morrell discoveries. Among them – and perhaps a fitting memorial – is Ichaboe Island off the coast of Namibia, which Morrell found to be rich in guano deposits from native seabirds.

  Chapter 12

  Cholera and the Map that Stopped It

  On the morning of 7 April 1853, Dr John Snow was summoned to Buckingham Palace to attend the birth of Queen Victoria’s eighth child Prince Leopold. Snow, a forty-year-old Yorkshireman, was one of the leading advocates of administering chloroform during labour (and during most other things too: in his lifetime he used the anaesthetic in 867 tooth extractions, 222 female breast tumour excisions, 7 male breast tumour excisions, 9 eyelid corrections, and 12 penis amputations).

  The birth was a success, as was that of Princess Beatrice four years later, which Snow also attended. Snow had also used chloroform on the daughter of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the combination of church/royal approval did much to popularise the use of anaesthesia in general. The procedures made Snow famous and rich, although these days he is largely remembered for something else: the use of a map to illustrate the infectious spread of cholera.

  The map, which centred around London’s Soho, was not recognised as anything extraordinary at the time. It was not the first map to display this fatal disease, and the rigour of its science was found wanting. But it is now regarded as iconic, one of the most important maps of the Victorian age. And as a way of engaging young minds in the elementary detection of medical mysteries, it is a map yet to find its equal in either Sherlock Holmes or House.

  John Snow – the map doc

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  Asian cholera first came to Britain in 1831, claiming more than 50,000 lives. A second epidemic killed a similar amount in 1848, a devastating figure for a country being told by its government that the new Public Health Act, passed in the same year, would transform the nation’s sanitation. But cholera would prove a stubborn foe: by the time the third epidemic began to decimate Soho at the end of summer in 1854, there was still widespread disagreement about its cause. Most believed that cholera was miasmic (caused by airborne infection), a view supported by the two most prominent medical names of the day, Florence Nightingale and Sir John Simon, the Medical Officer of the City of London. But several leading epidemiologists had begun to suspect otherwise.

  Snow’s study of the disease, in his 1849 pamphlet On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, dismissed the idea that there was just something in the air. He suggested cholera was caused either by the human consumption of contaminated food or water, or by ‘fomites’, which usually meant infested clothes or bed linen. He claimed that the 1848 outbreak had been caused by the arrival in London of an infected sailor and his bedclothes from Hamburg, though he found this difficult to prove. Snow suspected a cellular structure to the cholera organism, but as he had not been able to show it beneath a microscope he proceeded largely on instinct.

  In late-August 1854 Snow was examining how the water supply routes from the Thames may have affected a serious cholera outbreak in south London when he learnt that new cases had been reported just a few hundred yards from where he lived in Sackville Street, Piccadilly. He used to live even nearer, in Frith Street, where there had already been several deaths, and he believed that his knowledge of the area, and contact with local residents, might yield the clues he needed to support his theory. He did what doctors still did in those days: he made house calls. It was a brave endeavour: in his efforts to match human illness to human behaviour he appeared to put himself at grave risk, for if cholera was airborne, the inquisitive Snow would surely be one of its victims.

  Sniffing out the causes of cholera: Robert Seymour’s health inspectors on the trail in 1832.

  In the first week of his investigations more than five hundred Soho residents would die. People began falling ill on 31st August, with a peak in fatalities occurring two days later. But by the third day, Snow believed he had found his cause: the public water pump where Broad Street met Cambridge Street. This was not only the main water supply for those living nearby, but also a common stop for passing traders and children. There were other fatally opportunist users too, including the local pubs who watered down their gin and whisky, and many coffee houses and restaurants. Snow noted subsequently that one keeper of a coffee house in the neighbourhood, popular with mechanics, ‘informed me that she was already aware of nine of her customers who were dead’. The water was also sold in small local shops, ‘with a teaspoonful of effervescing powder in it, under the name of sherbet.’

  Snow tested the water from the Broad Street pump on 3rd September, but his results were inconclusive: he detected few impurities with the naked eye, although when he looked again the following day he saw an increase in ‘small white, flocculent particles.’ One resident also told him that the water had changed its taste. Seeing no other possible cause, and perhaps fearing that he was running out of time, he requested a list of the dead from the General Register Office. Eighty-nine people had died from cholera in the week ending 2nd September, and as Snow walked around with his list he immediately saw the pattern he had anticipated: ‘Nearly all the deaths had taken place within a short distance of the pump.’

  As Snow continued walking he found further confirmation of his theory. Only ten deaths had occurred within the vicinity of another water pump, and five relatives of the deceased told him that they always drew water from Broad Street as they ‘preferred’ it – presumably either its taste or the fact they thought it cleaner. Two out of five of the remaining cases were children who went to school near Broad Street. Snow argued that the outbreak couldn’t be supported by the miasmic theories (which associated disease directly with poverty) when he found that a nearby workhouse containing hundreds of people was not affected by cholera; it turned out they drew their water from their own well. The evidence now seemed overwhelming. On the evening of 7th September Snow met the local board of guardians and presented them with his findings. ‘In consequence of what I said, the handle of the pump was removed on the following day.’

  The ghost map: Snow’s plan of Soho with the cholera-infected Broad Street
(modern Broadwick Street) water pump at its heart

  Like the water itself, the cases slowed to a trickle. The number of fatal attacks on 9th September was only eleven, compared with 143 eight days earlier. By 12th September there was one case, and by the 14th none. But this could not be attributed directly to the closure of the pump, as the cases were already decreasing in the days before. And as Snow himself reported, evacuation played a significant role – hundreds of inhabitants had already left the area in fear.

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  It was only now that Snow started putting together his famous map – an illustration of his findings rather than a cause of them. The base map itself was already available, printed by the nearby Holborn firm C.F. Cheffins, which also produced some of the earliest railway maps. The detailed scale was 30 inches to a mile, and the portion of the map Snow reproduced had Broad Street at its centre – the Jerusalem of Soho.

  Snow added three key elements to the map. First were the locations of the water pumps – thirteen in all, the most northerly in Adam and Eve Court above Oxford Street, stretching down to Titchborne Street by Piccadilly Circus. Next, he placed a meandering dotted line over the area where the Broad Street pump would be closer for residents to visit than any other pump; this is now known as a Voronoi diagram, and Snow’s version is the most famous early example. And finally he added small black dashes denoting deaths, like gravestones in a very crowded burial yard.