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

by Garfield, Simon

  Step forward Captain Sir James Clark Ross, a thirty-eight-year-old English naval officer, hooked on discovery since his teenage travels with his uncle Sir John Ross to find the Northwest Passage. In 1831 James Ross was the first to find the North Magnetic Pole, the point where the earth’s magnetic field points precisely 90 degrees south, a constantly shifting measurement due to changes in the earth’s core. Surely the South Magnetic Pole was within reach too?

  In the journal of his voyages between 1839 and 1843, Ross provides a dramatic commentary on his travels, and his magnetic observations are supplemented, almost incidentally, by notifications of great geographic discovery. But before the likes of St Helena and the Cape of Good Hope, an unscheduled stop on 17 December 1839: the island of Trinidad. No sooner had he clambered aboard than Ross observed the strangest phenomenon: his magnetic readings on the island oscillated wildly, with three separate compasses (placed far enough apart so not to affect each other) showing three degrees difference, and none of them accurately displaying what he believed to be the island’s true geographical position.

  Thirteen months later, in January 1841, Ross made one of his great discoveries – Victoria Land. The map illustrating his find, included in his published journal, provides one of the proudest, greediest, and most egocentric examples of colonialist cartography of the nineteenth century. Throughout the four-year voyage, the crews of the Erebus and Terror named every new southerly sighting after friends, family, heroes, statesmen and fellow crew members, as if they were cataloguing fossils on a beach. ‘A remarkable conical mountain to the north of Mount Northampton was named in compliment to the Rev W. Vernon Harcourt,’ Ross wrote in his journal on 19 January 1841. Harcourt was a co-founder of the British Association, and the mountain just to the south of it was named after Sir David Brewster, the other co-founder. And mountains nearby named Lubbock, Murchison and Phillips were named after the BA’s treasurer, general secretary and assistant secretary.

  There was nothing unusual in this practice, but it is rare to find an area of new geography so full of civil servants. One requires very keen eyesight to decipher them all on the original map published with his memoirs, the names written tightly on both sides of the coastline, capes on the left, mountains on the right. Even then we are looking at text resembling hairs on an arm: from Cape North we go vertically to Cape Hooker, Cape Moore, Cape Wood, Cape Adare, Cape Downshire, Cape McCormick, Cape Christie, Cape Hallett and Cape Cotter.

  This is how maps were made: you see it and it’s yours (or at your friend’s, or the person who sent you on this mission). There are occasional loved ones too: ‘This land having been thus discovered … on the birth-day of a lady to whom I was then attached,’ Ross wrote on 17 January 1841, ‘I gave her name to the extreme southern point – Cape Anne.’ Romantic cartography, like romantic tattooing, can be a self-indulgent art, not to say a risky one: in this case, Anne did become his wife. In general, women got quite a good deal in Antarctica: Queen Mary Land, Princess Elizabeth Island, Queen Alexandra Range. Adelie Land and Adelie penguins were named for his wife by the French explorer Jules Dumont d’Urville, while Marie Byrd Land, a large chunk of West Antarctica, was named by the pioneering Antarctic pilot Admiral Byrd for his wife in 1929.

  Names on the Antarctic map illuminate more than just devotion; they also show fear and disgust. Despair Rocks, Exasperation Inlet, Inexpressible Island, Destruction Bay, Delusion Point, Gale Ridge and Stench Point; at these southerly points, the explorers’ scales had certainly fallen from their eyes. And we leave James Clark Ross in another bleak region – the Ross Sea and the Great Ice Barrier (later called the Ross Ice Shelf) – the area that rendered him immortal and froze the minds of all who followed him in the valiant and tragic subsequent British expeditions to the pole.

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  Apsley Cherry-Garrard set off on the ill-fated Terra Nova expedition with Scott and Co. Ltd in 1910, at the age of twenty-four, and he returned three years later almost blind and toothless, with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression to come. His stated role on the mission was principally to gather penguin eggs and supply the depots, but he had other uses too: he was indefatigably cheery, and he was, it turned out later, a brilliantly dramatic chronicler of events. The Worst Journey in the World (1922), his classic account of the expedition, still chills, and did much to realign our romantic vision of the age of ice and heroism.

  Cherry-Garrard writes that one of the books passed around on the return voyage was a biography of Robert Louis Stevenson; and he was also aware of the quests of E.F. Knight. The first major adventure in his account, some forty days after setting off from Cardiff, concerns yet another landing at South Trinidad (Scott’s second visit and his last), and he writes with displeasure at the land crabs and with anticipation of ‘a very thorough search of this island of treasure’. Scott and his team were there partly for sport (they killed a lot of terns and petrels) and partly for research (they bottled a lot of spiders and labelled them for the British Museum). The island almost gets its revenge on the visitors when, on departure, many in the party are swept away onto rocks by huge waves; for a tempestuous while this looked like the end of the Antarctic party long before they tackled the pole, and they were only just rescued by ropes.

  Cherry-Garrard’s account is notable to us for another stark reason – three sketched maps. The first, showing McMurdo Sound, contains useful indications of points in the author’s story, including a Fodder Depot, Safety Camp and Rescue Camp, but is otherwise unremarkable. The second shows the route of the winter journey from Cape Evans to Cape Crozier and back in search of an unhatched Emperor penguin egg. This was the ‘Worst Journey’ of the title, a dotted line with dates attached (June 28, July 15, August 1): five weeks of unyielding misery as three men hauled heavy supplies against raging blizzards and their chronicler experienced ‘such extremity of suffering’ that ‘madness or death may give relief’.

  But the last map is the one we remember – the terrible return trek from the South Pole to the ‘safety’ camp by McMurdo Sound, the camp that Scott’s party didn’t reach. A long dotted line passes over mountains and glaciers, and it seems to dominate them; for the first time, the route appears to be in charge of nature. But look closer and we see this is not the case – it is the line of a funeral procession. Every now and then there are familiar names marking landmarks that had not existed before: ‘Evans Retd’ is one, a small nick on the route between two supply depots. About 250 geographical miles further on (the scale is unreliable) we reach another nick by the Beardmore Glacier: ‘Evans Died’. About 250 miles more there is another vertical nick, this one supplemented with a slightly longer horizontal line, the international sign of a cross for a grave or a church, and it says simply: ‘Oates’. Eleven or so miles north along the line is another cross, marking the final resting place of Scott, Wilson and Bowers (Cherry-Garrard was in the search party that found the bodies six months after they died). On the map it just says ‘Tent’.

  A long white trail of despair: Cherry-Garrard’s map from ‘The Worst Journey in the World’.

  Paul Theroux has made the point that great explorations demand fine writers to bring it all home – the fierce desperation, the unbound elation, the emotional and humane mixed with the procedural. This explains why we know what cold feels like, but we don’t really know what it’s like to walk on the moon. A good sketched map delivers a similar bounty. We may detect the emotional state of the amateur cartographer through the graphite and nib of hand-drawn markings, and because we know we are witnessing history as it happens. In the introduction to his book, Cherry-Garrard expressed a sense of duty to pass on to the next set of adventurers as much systemised knowledge as possible to aid them on their travels, just as Cook had passed to Ross and Ross to Shackleton and Scott. Cherry-Garrard maintains that ‘exploration is the physical expression of the Intellectual Passion’, and the gradual filling-in of the maps is the most direct and literal way of reflecting progress in this field.

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  In December 1959, the map of Antarctica was made anew. Or rather it was settled anew, after twelve countries signed the Antarctic Treaty in Washington DC and agreed to use the continent for scientific and peaceful purposes. Weapons testing and nuclear waste disposal were banned, and the free sharing of information was encouraged, and when the treaty was renewed on its 50th anniversary, 36 other countries had agreed to its terms. Between 1908 and 1940, seven countries staked territorial claims to the land (Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, Great Britain, New Zealand and Norway), and the treaty officially refused to recognise or dispute them. When occasional spats – usually between Britain, Argentina and Chile – flare up over the possibility of exploiting the natural resources beneath the ice, the land-grab map is dusted off to reveal about fifteen per cent of the pie left unclaimed. It is widely understood that the United States will make a claim should the treaty fail, although it already seems to run the place.

  In 2002, 165 years after Ross began to put the region on the map, and 93 years after Amundsen and Scott reached the Pole, the Americans built a permanent road there. Stretching some 1,400 km from McMurdo Sound to the Amundsen-Scott research station at the pole, it is a road through half the map of Antarctica. The South Pole Traverse is a strip of packed ice marked by flags, the coldest man-made roadway on earth. A trail of huge-wheeled vehicles pulls sleds of food, medical supplies, waste, communication cables and visitors, and since becoming operational in 2008 it has saved an estimated forty flights a year. This being an American enterprise, the traverse has another name too: the McMurdo-South Pole Highway.

  It takes about forty days to make the trek. No dogs, horses or possessed explorers die en route, and those who passed this way less than a hundred years before would have perished from shock if they had been told of such a thing. A road from the tip of Victoria Land across the Ross Ice Shelf; a road connecting a runway and helicopter pad with a permanently manned research centre resembling a small town, where its scientists are engaged year-round in glacial geology and the monitoring of the drifting ice sheet, astrophysics and the monitoring of ozone, and a slightly less academic science known as the vigilant disapproval of tourists.

  A little more than a century after Amundsen and Scott, Antarctica tops the wealthy traveller’s bucket list. It’s an expensive trip: the clothes alone will cost as much as a summer in the Med, and you will lose your dinner many times over as you chop your way south of Argentina through stormy Drake Passage. But more than 20,000 visitors a year now visit a continent that was once thought unattainable. Many who make the trip report not just on the cold, the penguins and the incredible light, but echo the views of one polar explorer – Robert Swan, who walked to the South Pole in 1985–86 – who observed that the experience wipes the slate clean, like a child’s magic drawing pad.

  Despite the influx, there is still romance to be had. When I met the writer Sara Wheeler for tea one day to talk about Antarctica (the book of her adventures, Terra Incognita, is one of the modern classics of polar literature) she brought along one of the paper maps she had in her backpack as she made her trip to the South Pole. Produced by the US Geological Survey, the map is a topographical collection of data around the Taylor Glacier near Victoria Land, an area first explored by the British expedition of 1901–04.

  ‘It was one of the happiest days of my life,’ Wheeler told me. ‘I was following the map with my finger, trying to locate exactly where I was, and I came to this point here …’ She unfurled the map, and half of it was a big white blank. The words marking the end of this cartographic endeavour simply read, ‘Limit of Compilation’. ‘I’d reached the end of the map,’ Wheeler said with delight.

  But she was travelling in the 1980s, and that map was from the 1960s. Thanks to satellites, Antarctica is all mapped now. The region is still predominantly unexplored, but the satellites have seen it, and the frozen wastes have digital coordinates. Perhaps we cling to a romantic notion of Antarctica because we are responsible for transforming it from the last great unmapped place on earth into something dotted with old huts and new research stations, and we face the sobering fact that much of the recent research conducted there points towards environmental disaster. The map is no longer white, and the challenge is no longer to reach the continent but to save it.

  Pocket Map

  Charles Booth Thinks You’re Vicious

  Are you vicious? Do you lurch? Have you ever thought of yourself as semi-criminal? Or are you just purple going on blue?

  If you lived in London in the 1890s, Charles Booth, creator of the London Poverty Map, had a category for you – for what you were depended on where you lived. If you lived in a nice neighbourhood such as Kensington or Lewisham then you probably lived in a street coloured yellow and designated ‘Upper-middle and Upper classes. Wealthy’. If you lived in Shoreditch or Holborn, you might well have a street address edged in black (‘Lowest class, vicious. Semi-criminal.’).

  It was a slight, of course, and a slight generalisation. But that’s morphological mapping for you, and it was just this mapping that changed the lives of millions.

  Charles Booth was born in Liverpool in 1840, which meant he was perfectly placed to witness the effects of industrialisation on a city that didn’t have the social infrastructure to cope with it. When he took the new steam train to London the picture was even more extreme: those who had been made wealthy by mass manufacture and foreign trade were erecting fearful mental barricades against those whose lives had seemingly gone backwards in the rush. The well-off had begun to segregate themselves in cities like never before, and swiftly became reliant on the new police force to maintain order. But just how big was the problem of the poor? And did domestic squalor necessarily lead to social disorder?

  Influenced both by the Quaker philanthropic zeal of Joseph Rowntree and by his wife Mary’s experience of deprivation in the East End, Booth decided to find out. And as the President of the Royal Statistical Society, he was clearly well placed.

  Booth had studied the census from 1891, and had broken down the figures on earnings and dwellings into conclusions that at the time established a completely new understanding of how poverty influenced a geographical area. Then he went further, and suggested that where you called home may influence not only how well you lived, but also how well you behaved. A multi-volume report of Booth’s work was full of notes, tables and jagged graphs, and encompassed not just poverty and housing, but also industry and religious influences. Yet he knew from his earliest statistical work that the impact of his research rarely reached those directly affected by it. So he published his findings as maps.

  London’s East End – well-to-do on the main roads but distinctly dodgy in the back streets.

  Booth obtained the latest Ordnance Survey charts (on a scale of 25 inches to a mile), and instructed his assistants on hand-colouring. The streets of his first map of Tower Hamlets had six colour coded categories, but the large-scale map of London had seven:

  Black: Lowest class. Vicious, semi-criminal.

  Dark blue: Very poor, casual. Chronic want.

  Light blue: Poor. 18 to 21 shillings per week for a moderate family.

  Purple: Mixed. Some comfortable, others poor.

  Pink: Fairly comfortable. Good ordinary earnings.

  Red: Well to-do. Middle class.

  Yellow: Upper-middle and Upper classes. Wealthy.

  Some streets contained a blend of Booth’s colours, but his findings were still stark. Just over 30 per cent of London’s population was shown to be in poverty. His methodology set the tone for a new form of urban cartography that amplified a specific form of information in an aesthetically compelling way. But there was something else about Booth’s maps: they made it look as if the city was moving, not unlike like a live traffic stream today. They weren’t just about topography or navigations – they were about people.

  The maps were first displayed at Toynbee Hall in the East End where Booth lectured, and they received instant acclaim. T
he Pall Mall Gazette called him ‘a social Copernicus.’ A closer look revealed far more than the dissection of London’s rich and poor. They showed that the middle/merchant classes grouped around the large thoroughfares into the city – Finchley Road, for instance, as well as Essex Road and Kingsland Road. Extreme poverty settled by railway yards and canals, as well as cul-de-sacs and alleys; the common wisdom had it that criminal classes would find these labyrinths easier to hide in and ambush intruders. Nor did you want to live – or venture close to – the docks around Shadwell or Limehouse, areas we now would regard as warehouse-hip and 2012 Olympic.

  Booth continued to expand and update his map coverage until 1903. He didn’t work alone, and his many assistants gathered information from many sources, particularly school board inspectors, ‘worthy’ locals and the police. The descriptions that accompanied the maps were both startling and compelling. Chelsea, for example, was predominantly blue to black, its houses described as predominantly damp, crowded and peopled with ‘lurchers’ who never pay rent. Westminster was dark blue, a dirty, bad lot. Greenwich, red, was a little more des res, teeming with caretakers, police sergeants and works inspectors. The reports also detected what we may now call gentrification and the reverse, the formation of slums. As Booth put it colourfully, ‘The red and yellow classes are leaving, and the streets which they occupied are becoming pink … whilst the streets which were formerly pink turn to purple and purple to light blue.’

  Booth’s reports on the black and blue areas were less about poverty and more the degrees of crime. In the Woolwich ‘Dust Hole’ for example, blue and black on the map, the police refuse to attend incidents unaccompanied, and find that ‘missiles are showered on them from every window when they interfere.’ Elsewhere in the darkness, Borough High Street seemed to come straight out of Nicholas Nickleby: ‘Youths and middle-aged men of the lowest casual class loafing. Undergrown men. Women slouching with bedraggled skirts. A deformed boy with naked half-formed leg turned in the wrong direction …’