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

by Garfield, Simon

  At about the time that he was getting bored with it all, the need to buy his father, a retired naval architect, an eightieth birthday present threw up a new opportunity. ‘I just thought it would be nice to get him a globe. But I went to some shops and looked online, and the range was either expensive antiques that would go for tens of thousands, or new ones that were made in a factory and looked like it; many of them had lights inside them. There didn’t seem to be anyone making really good hand-made globes in the whole country.’

  So in 2008 Bellerby thought he would try his hand at a new profession, hoping that at last he had found his true calling. When he was growing up, he learnt that he was possibly related to the great missionary explorer David Livingstone. His great-great-grandmother was called Marion Carswell Livingstone, and she presumed that the man who had opened up the African interior was a cousin. Bellerby never felt any desire to verify the claim, but only now did the true value of not doing so become professionally useful.

  When Bellerby embarked on his mission for his father, the market for globes seemed largely untapped. It was a tiny fraction of the market that existed in Livingstone’s day, when there was a globe in every classroom and Great Britain governed half of it. But Bellerby believed – incorrectly as it turned out – that every self-respecting company director would want one in the boardroom. Globes would also make ideal retirement presents, or impressive pieces of furniture for the country home.

  The closer the day got to his father’s birthday, the more the possibility of making a globe in time for it receded. But his father’s globe was now just one of hundreds in his head, the perceived demand growing each day. Why not globes in airline departure lounges? Or corporate globes with branding tastefully placed amidst the oceans? But how to make such a thing? That would be harder than he imagined, and would cost him his rather nice Aston Martin DB6.

  r

  We had a mile to go, and Bellerby’s eyes had switched from the sat nav to the road signs. ‘When sat navs first came out I thought, “Why would anyone want one?”, he observed. ‘But then my girlfriend started map reading for me and I thought, ‘no, that’s not the way forward …” So I bought one when we went to Greece, and short of taking us on a 150 mile detour through France it was absolutely fantastic.’

  ‘Making anything round is just a nightmare’: Peter Bellerby, modern-day globemaker.

  At Chartwell we looked for the tradesman’s entrance. The house had recently closed to the public for the winter, and although the gardens remained open there was hardly anyone else around. We were met by Nicole Day, one of Chartwell’s stewards. She escorted us past the laden apple trees and magnificent views, and led us into a small painting studio that Churchill had converted from a garden summer house.

  It was pretty much as he had left it. There was an easel and pots of paint, and the walls were decorated with his handiwork in oils. There was the obligatory half-smoked, half-chewed cigar on an ashtray on the table, as if its owner had just popped out for a bathroom break (you’ll find these half-cigars at practically every Churchill shrine). And there, in one corner, roped off, was the fifty-inch globe.

  We moved the ropes and a red leather easy chair by the globe’s side, and a sign that stood on top of it (on top of the North Pole in fact) that read Please Do Not Touch. We could touch it very tentatively, Nicole said, if we really had to, and we could feel the areas that had been worn away, including northern France and New York, and the area around the equator that appeared to have suffered some sort of damage from the glue that joined the two hemispheres. But on no account were we allowed to try to turn it. If we tried, the whole sphere might disintegrate.

  It was extraordinary to think that we were breathing over something that had played a small part in the outcome of the war. There are photographs of Churchill with his hand on the globe, and there are worn areas over strategic theatres of war. Here, perhaps, was the first tactile impression of a new offensive on Guadalcanal, the British victory in the Barents Sea above Norway and Roosevelt’s plans to block Rommel’s supply lines in North Africa.

  Some of the globe’s history may be divined from a framed letter hanging on the studio wall. It was sent from Washington on 12 December 1942 by General George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff of the US Army.

  My dear Mr. Churchill:

  We approach Christmas with much to be thankful for. The skies have cleared considerably since those dark weeks when you and your Chiefs of Staff first met with us a year ago. Today the enemy faces our powerful companionship which dooms his hopes and guarantees our victory.

  In order that the great leaders of this crusade may better follow the road to victory, the War Department has had two 50-inch globes specially made for presentation on Christmas Day to the Prime Minister and the President of the United States. I hope that you will find a place at 10 Downing Street for this globe, so that you may accurately chart the progress of the global struggle of 1943 to free the world of terror and bondage.

  With great respect,

  Faithfully yours.

  ‘It clearly hasn’t been restored, and quite right too,’ Bellerby observed as he examined it. ‘It’s a bit like I’d just blown up a much smaller map and put that on a ball. You’ll see how few cities there are on it, and I get the impression that it was a bit of a rushed job.’ Nicole Day had her own observation: ‘Why put that much detail into a map when you know you’re soon going to be playing with the boundaries?’

  r

  In fact, the globe had been restored in 1989, after years of neglect. It was driven to the British Museum, where it came under the care of Dr David Baynes-Cope, the man who had fixed the mould on the Mappa Mundi with pyjama cord. But there was only so much he could do: the colours had faded, the varnish had worn away and there were dents, maybe from the globe being moved around Churchill’s various residences.

  Its scale is 1:10,000,000, which resulted in a thirteen-foot equator. It was based on a standard map readily available before the war, and contained no special consideration of disputed wartime borders. There were approximately 17,000 names, and if a few of the towns in the United States were small and unfamiliar, that is because everyone who worked on the map at the OSS made sure to include their home town.

  How to transform the map into a globe? By the time-honoured tradition going back to the sixteenth century. The printed map was divided into gores, the acutely tapered triangular sections that had become a staple of globe production for centuries. These would be 3ft-long, with a width tapering from 4.5 inches to zero; had they been steel, these spears would have been lethal. Each hemisphere consisted of thirty-six 10°-wide gores, and mounting them required great precision. This task fell to the Chicago-based company Weber Costello, rivals to the other great Chicago map-makers Rand McNally. The first choice for the spheres was aluminium, but this was practically unobtainable during wartime. So they settled on hoops of laminated cherrywood. The halves were dowelled every six inches to limit expansion and contraction from changing temperatures. They were bolted together within themselves to maintain rigidity, and then, when the southern hemisphere was mounted on the northern, screwed together with rods from pole to pole.

  The globe weighed about 750 lbs, and had it been made a decade earlier would likely have rotated on a pool of mercury. But mercury had become regarded as a health hazard, so a platform of three hard rubber balls was chosen instead, with this contraption concealed in a steel base that held the globe like an eggcup. At Chartwell, the base of Churchill’s globe was painted black, and was in good shape. But it was believed that the rubber balls within had started to rot; certainly the ‘easy action’ had long gone.

  Shipping a globe of this size is an arduous task in the best of circumstances. But with a war on, the most direct channels were restricted. And then there was the winter. The initial idea was to transfer the globe on a special flight from Maine, and then to Greenland and England in time for Christmas. But the weather was so bad at Maine that an alternative route was plann
ed through South America, St Helena Island, Accra and then Gibraltar, which would mean that the globe would have seen almost half the area it covered. It had an escort throughout, a US army captain named B. Warwick Davenport. When the globe finally arrived at 10 Downing Street on 23 December, it was no longer a surprise. ‘Where the hell have you been, Davenport?’ Churchill snorted as it came through the door (according to a published account by Davenport, who seemed thrilled to be insulted by such a famous man). Churchill posed for a photo with the globe on Christmas day, with a cigar in one hand and the other on the northern hemisphere somewhere near Japan, and on the following day he sent General Marshall a telegram: ‘We have marched resolutely through this past difficult year, and it will be of deep interest to me to follow on the Globe the great operation all over the world which will bring us final victory.’

  r

  The globe’s attractions today – historical, ornamental, educational, monumental – may not be that removed from its value to Churchill at the end of 1942, nor even the earliest German examples from the end of the fifteenth century, when a globe was seen as God’s molecule, a repository of knowledge and discovery, and status. And, of course, it was once a significant navigational tool, and before that a scientific one, designed to explain the rotation of the earth around its axis.

  To Peter Bellerby, the globe at Chartwell was merely a stopping off point. He was hoping to make something with the same arresting visual impact, for he knew that even in a savvy and jaundiced world the wonder one feels when encountering a huge globe for the first time remains. His own version, which he naturally intended to call The Churchill, would have the latest gores, and include far more political and demographic information than the original. And it would be made from fibreglass, with a base cast from aluminium that would resemble an aerodynamically shaped housing nacelle of the type found on a Rolls Royce aircraft engine.

  Some of these updates were Bellerby’s ideas, and some came from his client, a man he would only initially refer to as David The Wealthy Texan, who was willing to pay him £25,000 to have one in his home. The two were developing a firm friendship, though it was not without its trials. The first globe that Bellerby had sold the Texan – the regular 50cm Perano – had not fully satisfied. ‘He opened up the packaging,’ Bellerby explained, ‘and he said “it’s the most beautiful globe I’ve ever seem, but unfortunately there’s some damage”.’ One of the internal strengthening struts had snapped, and some internal cladding used to dampen the sound inside the globe (should any plaster flake off) had gone missing. The globe also had some holes drilled into it, and what may have been knife marks.

  ‘It could have happened in two ways,’ Bellerby believed. ‘It could have exploded in the air due to the pressure, which I think is unlikely. Or they could have hacked into it with an instrument.’ By ‘they’ he means US customs officials.

  As we drove back from Chartwell to London, Bellerby observed that he now had to stop talking about Churchill’s globe and start building it. In the three years since he had first imagined himself a globemaker, Bellerby had learnt that it was a tricky task. ‘You know what?’ he asked. ‘Making anything round is just a nightmare.’

  r

  Making things round – and maps in particular – has been a problem since at least 1492, the year that Martin Behaim of Nuremberg made, or at least commissioned, the oldest terrestrial globe still in existence. Behaim, an ambitious merchant, had learnt of the new trade routes being opened up by the Portuguese, and his globe was an attempt to demonstrate to his German sponsors the potential value of establishing a new route westwards towards China. It shows the world at the precise time that Christopher Columbus got out his compass to look for Japan, making it an invaluable historical and scientific bridge between medieval map-making and the golden age of exploration. The biggest gap in the land surface on the globe was the very one to be ‘filled’ by Columbus.

  The Behaim is twenty inches in diameter and spins on its correct axis within an elegant metal frame. It is slightly blistered in places but otherwise beautifully preserved, possibly because it has hardly been outside Nuremberg since it was made. When it was constructed, the real globe had not yet been circumnavigated (that was still thirty years away), but the amount of cartographical learning displayed by Behaim was staggering: the Americas are absent, but the Arctic and Antarctic circles are there, and between them lie the discoveries of Marco Polo, Henry the Navigator and other Italian and Portuguese explorers making their way around Asia and Africa.

  And the detail is compelling. The globe contains some 1,100 place names, eleven ships being rocked by mermen, sea-serpents and seahorses, more than fifty flags and coats of arms, and almost as many intricate representations of kings upon thrones. Four saints are honoured with full-length portraits, while among them parade leopards, elephants, ostriches, bears and our old friend the sun-shielding sciapod. Behaim called his globe the Erdapfel, the Earth Apple.

  Inevitably, Behaim and his chief draughtsman Georg Glockendon made mistakes, the errors as intriguing to us now as the many things they got right. Western Africa is mis-shaped; Cape Verde is in the wrong place; many place names appear twice. There are also curious omissions: no mention of Antwerp, Frankfurt or Hamburg for instance, crucial centres of trade and shipping. This is all the stranger given the globe’s fascination with contemporary narrative discoveries. ‘In Iceland are handsome white people,’ one piece of text begins, ‘and they are Christians. It is the custom there to sell dogs at a high price but to give away the children to merchants, for the sake of God, so that those remaining may have bread.’ This information likely had a political slant, attempting to justify the piratical actions of kidnapping Icelandic children to be used as slaves.

  Behaim’s Erdapfel globe.

  The Icelandic text also features an early dietary pointer towards longevity: there were men ‘eighty years of age who have never eaten bread, for corn does not grow there, and instead of bread they eat dried fish.’

  r

  Globes became something of a craze in the sixteenth century, an easy symbol of power. Miniature versions were particularly popular, with a round earth option often encased in a celestial shell. The fashion for engraved copper and hand-painted manuscript editions continued well into the eighteenth century, even though by then the method of stretching printed gores over a sphere was already established as a far cheaper technique (and would eventually ensure there was a globe in almost every European classroom).

  The maps and style of the globes varied according to country of manufacture – the late-seventeenth century Italian globes of Vincenzo Coronelli, for example, were particularly decorative, while the German globes produced a few decades later by the likes of Homann and Doppelmayr tended increasingly towards the exact and scientific. But the biggest difference was in the choice of meridians. A globe’s most functional use beyond the classroom was navigational, with measurements of longitude calculated from a ship’s home port or capital city. So Cassini’s French globes had their meridian through Paris, while the first American globes chose Washington. London’s choice of Greenwich only became the global standard at the end of the nineteenth century.

  Three gores from Cassini’s classic Globo Terrestre, 1790.

  In 1850, Charles Dickens’ Household Words contained an article in its ‘Illustrated Cheapness’ column about the popularity and construction of globes. The article explained the straightforward method upon which all globes were now made – as systematic, it claimed, as the process of making a Lucifer match. It estimated that about one thousand pairs of globes were sold each year (terrestrial and celestial), with sizes ranging from 2-inch pocket spheres to 36-inch giants, with prices from six shillings to fifty pounds. ‘The number of globes annually sold represents to a certain extent the advance of Education,’ the article reasoned, although unlike maps, globes – both more durable and costly – tended to be replaced infrequently, thus rendering them a far less accurate teaching tool at a time when the e
xtent of the British Empire seemed to be broadening monthly.

  Dickens’ detailed description of globe manufacture – the many layers of paper required to be glued and dried, how to locate the correct axis – was evidently not lost on Ellen Eliza Fitz, the prominent American globemaker from New Brunswick who had an unlikely bestseller in 1876 with her Hand-book of the Terrestrial Globe. Much of this followed the Dickens template. ‘A globe is made of pasted paper,’ she explained, ‘eight or ten layers of this being applied successfully to a mould prepared for this purpose. A turned stick of right length, with a short wire in each end for poles, is now introduced, one end in each hemisphere …’

  Globes attracted other successful women to the craft, not least Elizabeth Mount from Long Island, whose ‘All States in the Union’ sphere from about 1820 is now regarded as a key cartographical landmark. But the first successful commercial American globemaker was James Wilson, who built up a hugely popular business in Vermont and Albany in the early 1800s. Prior to Wilson the majority of globes in America had been imported from England (including models favoured by Thomas Jefferson during his presidency). Wilson was a self-taught, self-made man. In his youth he had admired an English globe made by Samuel Lane, and believed that a process of trial and error would enable him to make his own. His story has at least one modern parallel.

  r

  In mid-winter, Peter Bellerby’s workshop in Stoke Newington, north London, feels like Iceland, or perhaps Greenland. The workshop doubles as a shop to catch the passing trade, with the front almost all glass, so that pedestrians can observe the archaic practices within. But people do not generally buy boutique globes on a whim, so Bellerby and his small team are seldom distracted from their task.