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

by Garfield, Simon

  As they sailed for home, Knight took the valiant view, and grew ever prouder of his men, like Long John Silver in Treasure Island. Their real treasure lay in human experience; they had followed a map and a dream, and they had returned poorer but wiser. ‘We seemed happy enough as we were,’ he concluded. ‘If possessed of this hoard our lives would of a certainty have become a burden to us. We should be too precious to be comfortable, We should degenerate into miserable, fearsome hypochondriacs, careful of our means of transit, dreadfully anxious about what we ate or drank, miserably cautious about everything.’ It is possible he may actually have believed this.

  A few years after his voyage, Knight became a war correspondent for The Times and lost an arm in the Second Boer War. An account of his death published in the New York Times in 1904 turned out to be greatly exaggerated; he lived until 1925. To the end he believed that the treasure of Trinidad was real, and there was only perhaps ‘one link in the directions’ that had led him astray.

  Chapter 14

  The Worst Journey in the World to the Last Place to be Mapped

  On 10 September 1901, Ernest Henry Shackleton, Robert Falcon Scott and the crew of the Discovery decided to make an unscheduled stop on their journey to the Antarctic. They had been at sea for five weeks, had crossed the equator eleven days before, and now, after early problems with sails and leaks, decided to break their trip down the coast of South America with a day’s fact-finding on an unknown island. Perhaps their food supplies would be increased with edible birds. At 10am three days later, Scott and his crew climbed into two boats and tried to land. In a subsequent letter to London he noted that the ‘curious rocky promontory’ chosen for his embarkation point had previously been observed by a man called E.F. Knight.

  Shackleton gave no further details of his day ashore, but another voyage member, the second surgeon Edward A. Wilson, was keeping a personal diary intended for his wife Oriana. He was ‘called some time before sunrise to see South Trinidad as I had asked. It was worth it … It was a most striking sight, this oceanic island, after so long seeing nought but clouds and sea and sky.’

  Wilson’s three-page entry on Trinidad – the legendary Treasure Island – is among the longest in his three-year diary, much of it concerned with the difficulty of disembarking and the ease of killing birds once they had done so. Wilson also noted dead and bleached tree trunks all over the slopes, ‘white outside, red inside and rotten’, which suggested either volcanic damage or some terribly ravenous creature. And then there was his most chilling description of all: ‘The whole shore of the island was alive, literally alive, with a big vividly coloured red and green crab, a flat long pointed clawed beast.’

  But of course Shackleton, Scott and Wilson were going further.

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  Antarctica has long been described as the last place on earth to be mapped, and romantically we still like to see it that way. We may never tire of its great and terrible stories, and if they grow more vast, heroic and mythical in the telling then so be it. In cartographic terms the stories are thrillingly recent, and it is odd to think that, a little over a century ago, the continent – all 5.4 million square miles of it – was still predominantly white and silent on the map.

  The maps we remember from the age of Shackleton, Scott and Amundsen were not drawn by professionals, and they were not drawn by the polar superstars. Edward Wilson’s record of the Discovery expedition is the most personal account from all the polar trips, and the most aesthetic. It is full of yearning for the woman he had married only weeks before setting sail, a state of mind that perhaps informs his unofficial notes of mishap and inglorious incidents not recorded in, say, Scott’s lionised account. Wilson was a keen painter, and his medical and zoological training had made him not only an excellent skinner and preserver of birds, but also an accurate draughtsman.

  His maps from the voyage are invaluable. Some are just little doodles within his notes, such as the map of the sleeping arrangements drawn at an ice-sawing camp at the end of 1903. The large tent slept thirty, split into two halves divided by a stove. In one half were six three-man sledging tents, in the other a huddle of single sleeping bags, marked by Wilson with the name of each occupant: Skelton, Royds, Hodgson and the rest. Supply boxes were scattered at heads and feet. The sketch suggests camaraderie, cramp and odour, something confirmed in Wilson’s journal: ‘There was never a healthier crowd of ruffians, than the 30 unwashed, unshaven, sleepless, swearing, grumbling, laughing, joking reprobates that lived in that smoky Saw Camp.’

  Wilson’s more conventional maps show the vast distances covered in this barren land. One tracks the route of the Discovery from Trinidad at the northwest of the map (as we see it), through Cape Town and then the Crozet Islands, onto Lyttleton in New Zealand before venturing deeper south. The to-and-fro of the winter quarters at the tip of the Great Ice Barrier are clearly marked, as is the southern sledge journey in the winter of 1902/03. The map is a scratchy specimen, hurriedly drawn with no care for posterity. One could mistake it for a spider’s web, with tiny flies for landmarks. But as an historical document of a participant in a grand quest it can never be matched. And, of course, Wilson worked under the most trying conditions. ‘Sketching in the Antarctic is not all joy,’ he noted on 25 January 1903, ‘for apart from the fact that your fingers are all thumbs, and are soon so cold that you don’t know what or where they are … apart from this you get colder and colder all over, and you have to sketch when your eyes stop running, one eye at a time, through a narrow slit in snow goggles …’

  This may explain why his most enchanting map was drawn from memory some seven years after he left the ice. It shows the area around Cape Crozier and Mt Terror, and because it is a map combining jotted notes, memory and imagination, it carries a lot of detail. Wilson was particularly keen to show the work he had carried out with the local inhabitants, marking with crosses an area of Emperor penguins nesting on sea ice, clearly distinguishable from the ‘dots that indicate thousands of Adelie penguins in a rookery in an enclosed arena sheltered entirely from sky blizzards’.

  The map is torn from a sketchbook and drawn in pencil, and uses classic Renaissance techniques to mark coastlines, cliffs, craters and inlets – contouring, chiaroscuro and cross-hatching that makes the land resemble the palm of a wizened hand. It really does look like a treasure map.

  But it had a very clear intention. It was drawn for the next great assault on the continent in 1910, the Terra Nova expedition, in which Wilson would again attend in his capacity as doctor and naturalist, this time with Scott as captain. His writing on the map looks like a summons from Jack Hawkins: ‘Old glacier of blue ice where we shall cut a cave for an ice house and from where we shall get all our drinking water,’ he wrote just below the steep Cape Crozier rock cliffs. Close by was the ‘Probable position of our hut on edge of a snowdrift.’

  Such careful mapping for such a fateful voyage.

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  Of course, Wilson and Scott were just adding to what had gone before. We may remember how, in the second century BC, the ten-foot globe made by Crates of Mallus envisioned a quartered world of four gigantic islands split by a torrid ocean. Only one – his own – was inhabited, but the others were believed to be perhaps equally hospitable. We have also seen that, around 114 AD, Marinus of Tyre, the great inspiration for Ptolemy, used the name Antarctic on his gazetteer of place names to signify the region lying at the polar opposite of the Arctic.

  Geology now affords us a greater understanding – or at least advanced theorising – about how it got there. Antarctica may once have been a place of lush greenery and busy rivers inhabited by amphibians and large reptiles. Recent discoveries of a varied range of fossils on exposed rock suggest something closer to Amazonian conditions than icy wilderness, and the possibility of dinosaurs and six-foot-tall penguins. This ties in with the idea that Antarctica was once part of Gondwana, the southern ‘supercontinent’ that originally comprised South America, Africa, India and Australia. It
is thought this once lay near the equator, and gradually began to drift south before being broken apart by the shift in the earth’s tectonic plates. South America and Africa drifted off first, while India, Australia and Antarctica continued towards the South Pole, arriving about a hundred million years ago. The break-up continued. India and Australia moved north some thirty-five million years later, but Antarctica remained. It began to ice over between ten and twenty-five million years ago.

  In our modern age, no region has been the subject of more conflicting hypotheses. The possibility of a fabulously abundant southern continent took hold in the West in the middle ages, where they were unaware of the (perhaps true) fable of the Polynesian sailor Ui-te-Rangiora, who is supposed to have sailed his canoe to the edge of Antarctica in about AD 650, to be met by a vast frozen ocean. But as mappae mundi gave way to true exploration things became a little less alluring, and Antarctica tended to disappear from maps altogether. In 1497, Vasco da Gama’s journey around the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of southern Africa disproved once and for all the prospect of this southern continent still being attached to a temperate country.* Then in 1531, the French cartographer Oronce Finé published a famous woodcut of the world in two heart-shaped spheres, notable for showing Greenland as an island for the first time, and for a remarkably accurate estimate of the coast of Antarctica as it would appear to us now if free of ice. This was accompanied by a rather modest observation: ‘Not Fully Examined.’

  But for the next three centuries the mapping of Antarctica remained a confused mess of conjecture. It was perennially considered part of Terra Australis, a huge shape-shifting area in the southern hemisphere that, at various times, contained Tierra del Fuego, Australia, New Zealand and anything else floating in the Pacific Ocean that sailors encountered by accident. The word ‘Australis’ was simply the Latin word for ‘Southern’, and on maps of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it most commonly appeared within the phrase ‘Terra Australis Incognita’ (a shortened form of ‘Terra Australis Nondum Cognita’, which Ortelius spread over the whole base of his world map in 1570). The South Pole or ‘Antarctic Pole’ was often located on these maps, but in most of the great atlases by Blaeu, Mercator, Jansson and Hondius it is surrounded not by a white mass of land but a sepia or green one, made up entirely of ocean. The entire continent had seemingly disappeared, and so it remained until Captain Cook suggested otherwise.

  Oronce Finé’s remarkably accurate map of Antarctica from 1531, which also shows Greenland for the first time as an island.

  We have seen how much explorers and cartographers abhor a blank space, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that, faced with a lack of true knowledge, we began inventing things. Mythical islands appeared on the southern base of the map at regular intervals. Francis Drake got there first in 1578, when the Golden Hind was driven south by gales and he encountered what was in reality probably the Tierra del Fuego archipelago, which he instead named Elizabethides and claimed for his Queen. But Drake merely set a trend. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, Elizabethides was joined by Isla Grande, Royal Company Island, Swain’s Island, The Chimneys, Macey’s Island, Burdwood Island and Morrell’s New South Greenland – all of which floated around Antarctica, all of which made their way onto popular maps, all of which were discovered by proud (mainly English) explorers, and none of which actually existed.

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  Between 1772 and 1775, on his second great voyage, James Cook undertook what may be considered one of the bravest and most brutally elemental sea voyages ever made. He entered the Antarctic Circle three times in dense fog, on each occasion being forced back by pack ice. His voyage was sponsored by the Royal Society, where the Scottish Hydographer Alexander Dalrymple had postulated that Terra Australis was not a hypothetical land, and lay somewhere not far south of Australia. (Cook had sailed to Australia in 1770, replacing the name on contemporary Dutch maps – New Holland – with the British ‘New South Wales’.)

  There was indeed land somewhere south, but it was far more southerly and far less welcoming than anyone at the Royal Society’s London offices had dared imagine. ‘I will not say it was impossible anywhere to get farther to the south,’ Cook wrote after his third attempt, ‘but the attempting it would have been a dangerous and rash enterprise…’ He noted the sound of penguins but saw none, and envisioned land somewhere beyond the icebergs. The area spooked him, and he was pleased to be heading north – ‘I, who had ambition not only to go farther than any one had been before, but as far as it was possible for man to go.’ More than a century later, Captain Scott would sum it all up: ‘Once and for all the idea of a populous fertile southern continent was proved to be a myth, and it was clearly shown that whatever land might exist to the South must be a region of desolation hidden beneath a mantle of ice and snow…The limits of the habitable globe were made known.’

  Cook never claimed to have actually seen Antarctica, and he did not affirm its presence on the map. Precisely who saw the Antarctic Peninsula first is still open to conjecture, and it may well have been any number of uncelebrated and anonymous British mariners in search of seal fur. Or it may have been Sir Edward Bransfield, an Irish lieutenant in the Royal Navy, and his pilot William Smith. But the written records suggest that the first official sighting, forty-five years after Cook turned for home, involved a mythically grizzled Russian sea captain and a young fur trader from America.

  In November 1820, Nathaniel Palmer, a twenty-one-year-old American sea captain, was considered sufficiently experienced by his New England sealing compatriots to pilot a small shallow-bottomed boat in search of new bounty in the Southern Ocean. The area around the newly-discovered South Shetland Islands was yielding such vast quantities of fur and blubber that a trawler with a large enough hull could make a fortune for its crew on just one voyage (if only it could avoid the stunning pale blue icebergs).* Palmer was out on watch duty one night on his boat, Hero, when he believed he heard voices in the fog. At first he thought it must have been penguins or albatrosses, but when the fog lifted the following morning it turned out to be the Russian frigate Rostok.

  Palmer went aboard, and relayed what happened next by letter to his niece. He was ushered into the presence of the ship’s commander, Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen. He told him how far south he had been on his journey, and that he had sighted land. ‘He rose much agitated, begging I would produce my logbook and chart.’ When it arrived, the Russian, speaking through an interpreter, proclaimed:

  ‘What do I see, and what do I hear from a boy in his teens – that he is commander of a tiny boat the size of a launch of my frigate and has pushed his way to the pole through storm and ice and sought the point I, in command of one of the best appointed fleets at the disposal of my august master, have for three long, weary, anxious years searched day and night for. What shall I say to my master? What will he think of me? But be that as it may, my grief is your joy; wear your laurels with my sincere prayers for your welfare. I name the land you have discovered in honor of yourself, noble boy, Palmer’s Land.”’

  And there it sits on the map to this day, a long narrow slice of the lower half of the peninsula not far from the main body of the continent. The Bellingshausen Sea is there as well, but it buffets a westerly area around the largest Antarctic island that Bellingshausen could lay claim to, Alexander Island, which he named after the reigning Tsar.*

  The prospect of unclaimed territory was an immensely appealing ambition for almost everyone who followed Palmer in the direction of the pole, and occasionally ambition undid them. Fans of the heroic age of Antarctic discovery will be familiar with the Weddell Sea, the treacherous area of drifting pack ice that crushed Shackleton’s Endurance in 1915. The man after whom it was named, the British Royal Navy sealing captain James Weddell, is not remembered by colleagues as a universally upright character (he failed to repay his loans), and in cartographic respects he appears to hover between unreliable and fraudulent. His map of 1825 appears to have been copied
straight from Nathaniel Palmer, merely changing names to include his sponsors, colleagues or friends. So Spencer’s Strait became English Strait, Sartorius Island became Greenwich Island, and Gibbs Island became Narrow Island. These random transformations (there were more than twenty of them) remained on atlas maps for half a century.

  There is also the suggestion that in the reports of his voyages Weddell deliberately overstated just how far south he had travelled, claiming he had sailed six degrees of latitude nearer the pole than anyone before him, apparently making the journey in clear sea without pack ice. The apparent ease of his passage inspired many subsequent navigators to plot a similar course, wherein they encountered only thick, impassable ice and were forced to turn back. Admiralty maps thus changed their description in the 1820s from ‘Sea of George the Fourth, navigable’ to merely Weddell Sea.

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  In 1838, the mapping of the continent received a welcome new scientific impetus. At the eighth meeting of the British Association For The Advancement of Science, a discussion was devoted to the dilemma of Terrestrial Magnetism, the pull of the earth’s magnetic force that had baffled sailors and their compasses for centuries. Those at the BAFTAS that year believed that Germany was leading the way in magnetic science, and, if unchecked, would lead to unfair dominance in the mapping, settling and trading of distant lands. So a committee was appointed, led by the indefatigable astronomer-photographer-botanist Sir John Herschel. Lord Melbourne, the Prime Minister, was to be kept continually informed, and it was recommended that a naval expedition depart for magnetic observations in the Antarctic seas. According to the meeting’s resolutions, the expedition was to focus specifically on the ‘horizontal direction, dip and intensity’, measured hourly. The further south these observations could be made, the better. But who, among the scientific and naval personnel at the disposal of Her Majesty’s Government, was up to this task?