There were several areas of clustering: St Ann’s Court off Dean Street had 24 bars; Bentinck Street off Berwick Street had 19; Pulteney Court by Peter Street had 10, with nine of them seemingly at one property. But the cluster around Broad Street is unmistakable: 82 deaths in the street alone, with many more marked close by.
Snow presented his findings – and his map – in a lecture to the London Epidemiological Society in December 1854. Soon afterwards, another report on the outbreak (conducted by local parishioners with Snow as their chief investigator) delivered an even more detailed breakdown of events, and another map. The findings were sickening, detailing not only extreme poverty and overcrowding but the sort of sanitation you wouldn’t expect on a farm, with cellars and basement rooms layered with human faeces.
It was the miasmatics’ claim that the fumes from these dungs would alone be enough to spread disease, and there was also a theory that the Soho area most affected by cholera in 1854 lay directly above a mass burial ground of thousands of casualties of the Great Plague of 1665. Despite the apparently glaring evidence displayed on Snow’s map, his water-borne theory was still not universally accepted, and for a while a great riddle remained: how did the pump’s water become contaminated in the first place?
The most convincing answer was provided by a local priest called Henry Whitehead, who, in the weeks that followed the Soho outbreak, had conducted a thorough investigation of his own. He began as a confirmed miasmatic, but began to have doubts as he did his rounds. At 40 Broad Street he met the police constable Thomas Lewis and his wife, and learnt that their daughter Sarah had died on 2nd September aged five months after a prolonged bout of diarrhoea. The mother spoke of the start of her illness on 28 August, and of emptying water containing the ‘dejections’ of the baby into the cesspool in the basement. When Whitehead examined this he found its faecal content leaking into the soil and evidently into the water supply. Snow was unaware of this first victim, and the baby is missing from his map, which shows the deaths at 40 Broad Street as four rather than five.
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Snow’s epidemiology wasn’t the first of its kind. The concept existed long before the word was coined in 1802, and there was significant mapping of London’s deaths following the Great Plague and Fire of 1665–66. And half a century before that, Bills of Mortality had identified the chief causes of death in London as dysentery and convulsion.
The first disease spot map: Valentine Seaman’s 1798 impression of the New York waterfront, identifying incidences of yellow fever.
In America, the title of first medical cartographer should go to a man named Valentine Seaman, the New York public health official who drew the first proper disease ‘spot’ map in 1798. An outbreak of yellow fever in the Manhattan docks near Wall Street had caused hundreds of deaths when he began examining what he believed to be the principal cluster of cases and plotting them on two maps that were published in an influential new medical journal. Unlike Snow, however, Seaman was a confirmed believer in miasma theory, finding that many of the deaths had occurred close to what he called ‘furry-fostering miasmata’ and an open public toilet. In the absence of a pump handle, the New York authorities would in time learn to control tropical diseases with quarantine.
Seaman’s maps remain both influential and timely. They amplified the emergence of a new trend, even a new science: medical geography. Its leading thinker was Leonhard Ludwig Finke, a German obstetrician who, in the 1780s, planned to construct an atlas based on disease. Heavily influenced by the writings of Hippocrates some 2,000 years earlier, he began to wonder about the overseas epidemics he had read about and wondered if they had a common thread. And then he found several, including the soil, vegetation, air, and methods of animal welfare. He believed that it was a particular district or country (rather than its people) that was diseased, and he constructed a scientifically rigorous three-volume explanation of his new geography – an early travellers’ advisory of where not to go. His ambition for a disease atlas was quashed by high costs at the time of the Napoleonic Wars, but he did produce a world map of disease in 1792.
Finke’s theories certainly endured. In 1847, Charlotte Brontë described Jane Eyre’s search for a dwelling place in the Empire that was free of the terrible diseases that filled the newspapers, but her choices were extremely limited. The new medical geography seemed to justify what would otherwise pass for xenophobia. In Jane Eyre the Tropics were largely a malaria-ridden disaster zone, while West Africa was ‘the plague-cursed Guinea coast swamp’. The West Indies, East Indies and much of the New World were similarly infested. But Bronte adopted a largely anti-imperialist stance, suggesting that the scarring of the physical landscape and the importation of pathogens were the definable and disastrous legacy of western colonialism.
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In London, the fact that water was the prime cause of cholera was finally acknowledged in the 1870s, when Sir John Simon, who had left his post as London’s chief medical officer to take on a similar role for the government, abandoned his miasma theory. It is impossible to estimate the number of lives saved by Snow’s instinct and persistence, nor the impact on urban sanitation. He didn’t do it all, of course: Henry Whitehead’s work was equally significant, and health officials were well aware by this time that public sanitation had to be checked and improved, not least the water supply from the Thames (ultimately it was cholera itself, rather than any report or map, that spoke the loudest). Within four years of the Broad Street epidemic the engineer Joseph Bazalgette would be appointed to rid London of the Great Stink; his intricate network of underground sewers, completed in 1875, did more to cleanse London of cholera than anything else.
But Snow’s work – and particularly his map – remains a thing of legend. The writer Steven Johnson has called it ‘The Ghost Map’, and it’s an apt title: despite the anonymity of those slim black dashes, they are more than just statistics. Perhaps because Snow lived in the area and would have known some of these individuals as neighbours if not patients, and perhaps because the descriptions of their lives and dwellings in the texts by Snow, Whitehead and others are so vivid, we feel we have a stake in their lives, even after death. Charles Dickens may have something to do with this too – not least his pungent descriptions of London squalor from the late 1830s that Snow would have witnessed on his daily rounds as a young doctor.
And then there is Snow’s map itself: its scale, the detail of the streets and alleys that many of us have walked down and enjoyed their noise and vibrancy. The map provides a degree of focus that was rare in public maps of the period, a focus not only on the streets but also the bustling and fetid activity they contained, something we are only now becoming familiar with again through the zoom of electronic mapping. But perhaps we remember Snow most of all because the story is so perfect: the map found the pump, and the removal of its handle stopped the epidemic. Neither is quite true, of course, but the map and its ghostly mortality has taken on an invincible life of its own.
Pocket Map
Across Australia with Burke and Wills
In 1860, Australia was a place of barren mystery. The shape of the continent had been mapped reasonably well, the coastal cities of Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane were expanding rapidly, and a gold rush in the early 1850s had caused a great boom in the population and economy of New South Wales. But the interior was a different story. Was it arable and potentially profitable? Would an inland waterway make it navigable? Could a telegraph line be laid down to link it with the rest of the shrinking Victorian world?
The aborigines had no need for these questions, but white explorers from the newly established Royal Society of Victoria wanted to advance not only scientific and geographic knowledge, but also play catch-up with the rest of the world. Detailed scientific cartography had transformed the look of Europe; the belts of India and Africa were being traversed; the Northwest Passage was being opened up in the Arctic. But in Australia the map remained a carpet of blank.
A few explorer
s had made tentative inroads in the first half of the century. In 1813 Gregory Blaxland and William Wentworth ventured from Sydney to cross the Blue Mountains. In the mid-1840s Charles Sturt made a bold northward trek from Adelaide, but was forced to retreat after desert heat proved unbearable. A Prussian adventurer called Ludwig Leichardt travelled for thousands of miles along the north-east coast, but his journey into the interior in 1848 ended in one of those great Bermuda Triangle-style conundrums of exploration: he and his team were simply never seen nor heard of again.
But in 1860, a grander – one may say grandly ludicrous – expedition was proposed by the Royal Society of Victoria. This was a journey across the entire continent, from Melbourne in the south to the Gulf of Carpentaria* in the north; and then back again, replete with maps and journals. It was a journey that would nowadays be classified as Extreme Sports, except that most extreme sports are rather better organised and carry less air of folly. For this was not a civilised expedition in the manner of the Ordnance Survey; it was an adventure closer in spirit to polar exploration. And like polar exploration, the quest would inevitably be led by men who were either too ambitious or too crazed to know their limits, and the voyage would be remembered for the sort of tragic heroism that made young boys sit up straight in class and vow to become explorers themselves. And then there was a map summing it all up – a map notorious for its depiction of death rather than glory, a precursor to something we would soon see in the Antarctic.
Several contemporaneous maps relate the exacting journey of Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills, but the most dramatic was produced at the end of 1861, a few months after the two men and others in their party had met a sorry, starving end. It was published, on a scale of 1:3 million, by De Gruchy & Leigh, a flourishing lithographic company that had made its reputation with city maps of Melbourne. It was a long millipede of a map, locationally unreliable, scientifically wanting, with little logic to its place names and observations, and a seemingly random start point, several months into the journey, halfway up the country by Cooper’s Creek. As such, it was utterly compelling.
The most dramatic section of De Gruchy & Leigh’s map of Burke and Wills’ route to the Gulf of Carpentaria. The rings show the doomed explorers’ final demise.
Burke and Wills’ expedition – a party of 19 men, 26 camels and 23 horses – set off from the Royal Park in Melbourne on 20 August 1860, with some 15,000 inhabitants cheering them away. It was an inauspicious start: their equipment included six wagons, but one collapsed before it had left the park and two others didn’t make it out of Melbourne. By 16 December, when the narrative on the maps starts at Cooper’s Creek, all but four of the nineteen men had either left the mission or been deployed on back-up and food storage tasks.
The biographical details of those who remained read like the start of a bad joke: Robert O’Hara Burke was an Irishman from County Galway who had once fought in the Austrian army; William John Wills was an Englishman from Devon, who had emigrated to South Australia and become a medical assistant and astronomer; John King, another Irishman, had gained some geographic experience in India; while Charles Gray’s background was more of a mystery, beyond the fact that he hailed from Scotland.
The second half of the outward journey, from Cooper’s Creek to the gulf, took a relatively uneventful two months. The scenic observations noted on the map are calm enough: Suitable for Pastoral Purposes; Stony Desert; Brackish; Rivulet of Pure Water; Large Anthills 2½ to 4ft High; Tea Tree Spring – Mineral Taste Probably Iron. Occasionally there is mention of the local inhabitants: by King’s Creek they noted Natives Inclined to be Troublesome. Near the summit, which reached Flinders River just below the Gulf of Carpentaria, a line declares: Burke & Wills proceed N on foot, leaving King & Gray in charge of camels. And then, at the top of the map, the happy legend: Burke & Wills, Feb 11 1861.
But the return journey is a very different concern. Wills, the main surveyor, made his own piecemeal maps every few weeks, but he was in no fit state to draw the full route. The De Gruchy & Leigh map was compiled retrospectively, largely from field notes recovered from the earth months after they were buried by the travellers, eager to lighten their loads. Their increasingly desperate narratives are reflected on the map with markings both shorter and sadder: Golah [a camel] Left Behind; April 16, Gray Died; Wills’ Body Found; Burke’s Body Found.
How did they die? Another map entry provides the source for the answer: King Found. John King was the only survivor of the quartet, discovered camping with natives by a search party led by Alfred Howitt several weeks after the others had perished. His diaries provide a vivid account of the final days of the expedition as they were destroyed by a combination of extreme heat, cold, hunger and exhaustion. They staggered through parched land and swampland. They encountered snakes with girths like tree trunks, shot about forty rats each night near their camps, and found the native Yandruwandha tribe to be both generous and thieving.
‘Is that Mount Hopeless up ahead?’ Burke, Wills and King crossing the desert in an engraving by Nicholas Chevalier in 1868.
They sacrificed their camels to cure and eat their flesh, and went back and forth over the same land for weeks with the increasingly delirious dream of being rescued. One landmark mentioned frequently in the field notes was called Mount Hopeless.
King’s account also revealed the tragi-comic circumstances of how the travellers just missed their support group (and the promise of rescue) on their return leg. Their back-up party had waited for the quartet to reappear at Cooper’s Creek for four months, assumed they had all died, and on 21 April turned back to Melbourne. Just eight hours later, Burke, Wills, Gray and King finally made it to their depot. It was their last chance. ‘From the time we halted, Mr Burke seemed to be getting worse,’ King wrote after his lonely return. ‘… He said he felt convinced he could not last many hours, and gave me his watch … He then said to me, “I hope you will remain with me here until I am quite dead – it is a comfort to know that some one is by”.’
The funeral of the pioneers was held in Melbourne in January 1863, and attracted about 100,000 mourners. Within a decade a telegraph line had been laid from Adelaide to Darwin, and in 1873 Ayers Rock, in the middle of the continent, was mapped by the English explorer William Gosse. A decade after that, much of the Australian interior had been traversed from many angles.
But it is Burke and Wills’ calamity that endures around the campfires. The voyage has become a movie – Burke and Wills – starring Jack Thompson as Burke, Nigel Havers as Wills and Greta Scacchi as the rather unlikely singing love interest; ‘Runs short of plot even before the explorers run short of water,’ said the New York Times. But more than that, the map and its narrative have etched themselves on the national consciousness and some distance beyond, so that they are now as much a part of the fantastical landscape as Ned Kelly, Dame Edna and Crocodile Dundee.
Chapter 13
‘X’ Marks the Spot: Treasure Island
‘It’s all about a map, and a treasure …’
Robert Louis Stevenson, describing his new book, 1881
Why would anyone ever go to Trinidad? That’s Trinidad out in the southern Atlantic, one of six islands in a barren archipelago, rather than the sandy white Caribbean Trinidad honeyeymoon isle, or the Trinidad in Colombia, Cuba or Paraguay, or even the Trinidads in California, Texas or Washington. All these places may have their charms.
But our Trinidad lies somewhere else. It is a place where even the most experienced sailors struggle among treacherous reefs to negotiate a landing, and, failing to do so, gratefully turn back. It is a place where sea birds attack from the air and armies of crabs attack on land. The island boasts little edible vegetation, but it does offer an angry volcano and sharks at its rim. In 1881, the British adventurer E.F. Knight called the place ‘one of the most uncanny and dispiriting spots on earth’, and vowed never to return.
But what if you came across a map of Trinidad with details of buried treasure –
the genuine ‘X marks the spot’ variety, where the value of X makes the tomb of Tutankhamun look like a disappointing evening’s metal detection on Clacton Sands. Then wouldn’t you be romantic and greedy enough to take up the challenge?
You wouldn’t be alone. In 1889, the same Edward Frederick Knight who vowed never to return, returned. Lured by the prospect of shiny wonders from Lima (giant gold candlesticks, jewel-rimmed chalices, chests of coins, gold and silver plate), he was equally attracted by the dangerous narrative that piratical legend confers. He not only believed the treasure was there, but that divine intervention had selected him to locate it. God had wanted him to go there, he believed, because God had given him a map.
In The Cruise of the Alerte, the vivid and (one imagines) true account of his quest published in 1890, Knight explained that he had not known of the existence of treasure on Trinidad when he had first approached the island eight years earlier. On that trip, he had been yachting around the South Atlantic and South America with a small crew, and on a journey from Montevideo to Bahia faced unexpectedly strong headwinds. Steering eastward, he was about 700 miles from the east coast of Brazil when he first saw Trinidad, latitude 20° 30˙ south, longitude 29° 22˙ west. He decided to land, struggled desperately with the coral reefs, spent nine ghastly days there, and found the land crabs ‘hideous’.
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