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

by Garfield, Simon

Zeno, Antonio 101n

  Zeno, Nicolo 101n

  Ziegler, Robert 376, 377

  Zipangu (Japan) 111

  Zork! 408

  Zuckerberg, Mark 16–17

  * This is the first terrestrial globe we know of, although it no longer exists. Crates of Mallus, a leading literary critic, was believed to be the librarian at Pergamum, Alexandria’s biggest rival. But the fleeting accounts of his life in the history books remember him for one other thing, too – breaking his leg while examining a sewer in Rome.

  * The Babylonian clay tablet that sits proudly in the British Museum (and at the beginning of many pictorial histories of maps) is believed to date from the Persian Period of 600 to 550 BC, and is a mystical and brilliantly imaginative item, the sort of thing that inspires conspiracy theories and blockbuster novels. We only have a damaged portion of the whole, believed to have been no more than 12.5 × 8cm when made. Its purpose is unclear, but it does conform to the general pattern of ancient world maps in so far as its creator placed his own world at the centre of it. So Babylon sits in a sea surrounded by seven unnamed circles, which may be either cities or countries. Around these sits an encircling ocean named Bitter River, into which flows the Euphrates, and on the edge of this lie seven triangular islands. We glean what we can from the damaged text above the map and on the back of the tablet: the islands are only seven miles apart from the Babylonian world, and are described principally in terms of light. One, due north, lies in complete darkness, and may betray knowledge of polar regions, while others lie ‘where the morning dawns’ or in light brighter than stars. Yet another contains a horned bull that ‘attacks the newcomer’. The text also describes a Heavenly Ocean ringed by a constellation of animals, some of which we would recognise today as Leo, Andromeda and Cassiopeia.

  The world comes alive on the Ebstorf map, not least Christ’s feet at the bottom.

  * Dorothy L. Sayers was clearly a fan of the saying, and the possibilities it contained. In 1918 her poetry collection Catholic Tales and Christian Songs contained the following phrase, a world-view we may all aspire to:

  ‘Here be dragons to be slain, here be rich rewards to gain;

  If we perish in the seeking, why, how small a thing is death!’

  * The Fra Mauro map of the world was not just a great cartographic milestone; it also signalled the death of Paradise. The space between its round world and the frame of the map is occupied by cosmological notes and drawings, including descriptions of the distance of the stars, the flow of the tides and theory of the elements. Paradise is here, too, but it is off the map: a Garden of Eden set apart from the inhabited world.

  * The full inscription reads: ‘By God’s will, after a long voyage from the island of Greenland to the south toward the most distant remaining parts of the western ocean sea, sailing southward amidst the ice, the companions Bjarni and Leif Eiriksson discovered a new land, extremely fertile and even having vines, the which island they named Vinland. Eric, legate of the Apostolic See and bishop of Greenland and the neighbouring regions, arrived in this truly vast and very rich land, in the name of Almighty God, in the last year of our most blessed father Pascal, remained a long time in both summer and winter, and later returned northeastward toward Greenland and then proceeded in most humble obedience to the will of his superiors.’

  The dating of the discovery between 985 and 1001 comes from a contested account of these journeys in a fourteenth-century collections of traveller’s tales, although it is thought that Bjarni and Eiriksson may have made separate rather than joint voyages.

  * William Reese curated a show at Yale’s Beinecke Library called ‘Creating America’ in which he showed the Vinland Map alongside another controversial specimen, a map illustrating the supposed voyages of Nicolo and Antonio Zeno. The Zeno Brothers may have seen North America around 1380, although their exploits were only documented on a map made by a descendant in Venice more than 200 years later. This showed Greenland as part of the European mainland, but there was also an intriguing inclusion of ‘Estoliland’ and ‘Drogho’, which may have been Labrador and Newfoundland.

  * Latitude had been established in ancient Greece, but the correct measurement of longitude, a function of time, was only made possible in the late eighteenth century, when John Harrison’s chronometer won a fabled competition.

  * The man who found it was the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt, who had many other claims to fame in the fields of geography and the emerging science of meteorology. In 1816 he devised the concept of isothermal lines on maps, indicating comparative atmospheric temperatures across the globe.

  * There is, almost inevitably in a tale such as this, an intriguing contemporary aside. The Waldseemüller map was lost for hundreds of years, only to be rediscovered in 1901 in Wolfegg Castle in Southern Germany. At the very same castle some decades later Josef Fischer may have forged the Vinland Map.

  * Magellan had previously noted and named Tierra del Fuego on his circumnavigation, as had the Spanish explorer Francisco de Hoces in 1525/26, but the news failed to change the work of most cartographers, who were still convinced of some giant southern landmass attached to South America.

  * But the Mercator Atlas did become popular fifteen years later. Following the death of Mercator’s son, the Dutch cartographer Jodocus Hondius bought the family’s copperplate engravings, added almost forty maps of his own (including new interpretations of Africa and America), and the new volume went through twenty-nine popular editions and translations in as many years.

  The New World shapes up nicely in Ortelius’s ‘Theatre of the World’, an atlas featuring 228 exquisite and detailed plates.

  * But we have also lost something. The “G” in “Gerry” was hard; we have long since learnt to mispronounce it.

  The first London A-Z? Norden and van den Keere’s map of London in 1593.

  A long pleasant scroll to the West Country: a detail from John Ogilby’s route from London to Cornwall.

  * The British mapping of India provided some irrefutable evidence of the power of maps, not least to conceal as much as they reveal. A map of Calcutta, for example, produced in 1842 for the ominously named Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, showed public buildings such as banks and police stations, but no mention of temples or mosques. As Ian J. Barrow has pointed out in his history of mapping in India, ‘apart from the depiction of Indians as porters or peasants, there is little indication in the maps that Calcutta was an Indian city inhabited by Indians.’

  * The Gulf of Carpentaria is a large waterway to the east of Darwin. It was where Willem Janszoon – the Dutch explorer rather than the cartographer – became the first European to make landfall in Australia in 1606.

  The best known map of Amundsen’s route to the pole was drawn by the Englishman Gordon Home from telegraph reports. It appeared in a book by the Norwegian a few months after the event.

  * Vasco da Gama’s journey round the Cape into the Indian Ocean was the most celebrated but not the first to follow this route. The Portuguese sea captain Bartolomeu Dias had made a similar journey round the tip a decade earlier, but then promptly turned back when his crew threatened mutiny. The news of his route to the Indies was not treated with glee by the Portuguese – indeed, quite the opposite: he had demonstrated just how far one had to travel to reap these potential new rewards. Cartographically, though, Dias inspired a breakthrough. The German map-maker Henricus Martellus took full advantage of the reports of Dias’s expedition on a map from about 1490 and makes what may be considered a cartographic joke. It presents the world as it stood on the eve of Columbus’s stellar voyage, and it is still based on Ptolomeic principles. But now it also includes an Africa with its southernmost tip unmistakably washed by a navy blue sea, and to emphasise the point he has extended it deep into the painted frame of his map. It’s as if he’s saying: This is the News.

  * In the 1970s one of these ‘tabular’ icebergs was reported to be the size of Luxembourg. Another, labelled Iceberg B-15
, part of the Ross Ice Shelf, was reported to have been larger than Jamaica.

  * In 1949 von Bellingshausen’s story changed, posthumously. Anxious about the possibility of losing out in the post-war land grab, Soviet claims on the Antarctic strengthened to compete with the Americans and British, and Bellingshausen had suddenly seen the peninsula first.

  * Many of Murray’s writers were already established in other fields, such as academia or literature. The writer of the 1855 guide to Portugal, for instance, one John Mason Neale, had composed the lyrics of the carol ‘Good King Wenceslas’. The most famous of his writers was Richard Ford, who wrote a magnificently eccentric handbook to Spain (1845), the information gathered largely on horseback, its idiosyncracy best defined by his useful language section which included such phrases as vengo sofocado (‘I am suffocated with rage’).

  * In the US, the closest homegrown guides to Murray and Baedeker were those produced by D. Appleton & Co. in New York. Appleton was a successful general trade publisher of encyclopedias and fiction (its biggest hit was probably The Red Badge of Courage), but it wasn’t slow to realise the impact of railway and steamboat travel on its readers’ vacationing habits. Its Southern and Western Travelers Guide from 1851, for example, took in the tourist attractions Virginia Springs and the Mammoth cave in Kentucky, and included maps of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, plans of Cincinnati, Charleston and New Orleans, and three folding engraved maps of the Western, North Western and South Western States. The latter were beautifully hand-coloured, and as artifacts of the opening up of the West are now valuable items in themselves.

  * Early British and American contenders include the animated lines drawn over maps in two documentaries. The first appears over a map of the Pacific Ocean in Among the Cannibal Isles of the South Pacific, the film tracking Martin and Osa Johnson’s 1918 adventures to the Solomon Isles; and The Great White Silence (1924), Herbert Ponting’s film of the British heroic/tragic quest for the South Pole, in which moving black lines show the different paths across the Great Ice Barrier pursued by Amundsen and Scott.

  * There is another nice parody in the ever-aware Family Guy. Peter and Brian float over the Middle East in a balloon and the countries appear below them as coloured slabs. “Huh, so that’s what it looks like from up here,” Brian observes.

  * If you prefer, you can have Stephen Fry saying ‘Now, when possible, could you turn around. Ideally, don’t do it when impossible. Bless.’ Or a character called All-The-Way Annie say, ‘Take the ferry. Oooh, let’s rock the boat, baby!’ For a limited time you could also have bought a Top Gear Edition in which Jeremy Clarkson calls you a ‘driverist’ and observes, ‘after 700 yards, assuming this car can make it that far, you have reached your destination, with the aid of 32 satellites and me. Well done!’ but there were endorsement problems with BBC Worldwide and Clarkson is no longer available.

  * Like Antarctica, GPS is effectively run by the United States. But there are several other global navigation networks at various stages of execution, including systems in Russia (Glonass) and Europe (Galileo). The Chinese government, ever fearful of external reliance and influence, launched its own satellites to construct its own guidance systems, supplying regional coverage. This is now expanding into a network called Compass, extending beyond Asia to acknowledge a wider world.

  * In the United States, the world of electronic navigable maps is dominated by Navteq, based in Chicago, the supplier of maps to Garmin and other brands, as well as Bing Maps and MapQuest. Navteq is now a subsidiary of the Finnish company Nokia, but from the early 1990s until 2007 it was owned by Philips, which is also, of course, Dutch. Etak, one of the car sat nav pioneers, and apparently named after the Polynesian method of navigating by celestial guidance, was also originally an American company, beginning in California in 1983. But in 2000 it was acquired by Tele Atlas, which is Dutch. And lastly, one of the key elements of sat nav, the ability to find the shortest route, relies on an algorithm developed in the 1950s by a man called Edsger W Dijkstra, who was, inevitably, Dutch.

  * This was in the 1830s; the earth’s prime meridian at the Greenwich Observatory was not internationally accepted for another half century.

  * In a cool nod to the sort of human exploration that had inspired many NASA staff at school, two of the recent Mars microprobes were named Amundsen and Scott. As for permanent names on the surface, these have been standardised: large craters are named after deceased scientists, while small craters take the name of small villages of the world.

  * This Monopoly story has assumed the tinge of myth and James Bond about it, but its ingenuity was certainly typical of MI9 and its American equivalent MIS-X. The key item in this mystery is a letter from an M19 agent, Captain Clayton Hutton, to Norman Watson, an executive at John Waddington, sent at the end of March 1941. It states: ‘I shall be glad if you shall make me up games on the lines discussed today containing the maps as follows: One game must contain Norway, Sweden and Germany. One game must contain N France, Germany and frontiers. One game must contain Italy. I am also sending you a packet of small metal instruments. I should be glad if in each game you could manage to secrete one of these.’

  There is no specific mention of Monopoly, but another letter refers to Free Parking (the space on the Monopoly board had been marked with a full stop to show that there was a map inside).

  Monopoly had already annoyed the Germans before the war. Goebbels objected to the fact that the most expensive area on its Berlin board was Insel Schwanenwerder, where many Nazi leaders lived. Fearing that the Third Reich would be associated with capitalism and extravagance, the manufacturers Schmidt were advised to stop selling it; an allied bombing raid on the company subsequently destroyed any remaining copies. But the game is back in business in Germany, with Unification transforming the layout.

  * In 2009 archeologists from the University of Zaragoza revealed what they declared was the world’s earliest map – a stone tablet found in a cave in Abauntz in northern Spain. Engravings on the stone, which dates from around 14,000 BC and measures around seven by five inches, seem to depict mountains, rivers and areas for foraging and hunting. ‘We can say with certainty that it is a sketch, a map of the surrounding area,’ said Pilar Utrilla, who led the research team. ‘Whoever made it sought to capture in stone the flow of the watercourses, the mountains outside the cave and the animals found in the area.’

  * Such a primitive form of brain mapping would inevitably prove useful to those with a bent for racial purity and social cleansing; a sympathetic physician could suggest superiority with a bigger frontal or temporal lobe, the grim reality in the Third Reich and the earliest conflict between the Hutus and the Tutsis.

  * For a mouthwatering collection of similar work see Strange Maps by Frank Jacobs (Viking Studio, 2009), or his online blog: bigthink.com/blogs/strange-maps