by Val Ross
John Murray was knighted for his contributions to oceanography and our knowledge of the nature of the ocean floor.
“SOUNDING” THE DEEPS
For as long as sailors have run their ships aground, people have understood the importance of measuring and charting the water’s depths. For thousands of years, this was done using a lead-line — a rope with a lead weight at the end — that was lowered over the side of the boat while sailors watched how far it spooled down. As recently as the 19th century, surveys of the ocean floor were being done by dropping lines over a boat’s side and taking depth soundings.
In 1912, the Titanic hit an iceberg and went down off eastern Canada. To help sea captains detect icebergs, a Canadian inventor named Reginald Fessenden, one of the pioneers of radio, came up with an oscillator that could produce an underwater sound wave. Just as echolocation helps bats and dolphins find their way, Fessenden’s sound waves could detect big underwater shapes, such as mountain ranges, in the darkest reaches of the sea. Sonar revolutionized underwater mapping.
In 1899, Murray joined Prince Albert of Monaco and scientists from more than a dozen countries for an International Geographical Congress, called to come up with a standard map of the oceans. Prince Albert took on the work — and the cost — of compiling all the latest charts, including Sir Johns topographical maps of the oceans. The Prince also founded the International Hydrographic Bureau, headquartered in Monaco, to keep the charts updated. It’s still there, hard at work.
With the development of sonar in the early 20th century, oceanographers had a new tool with which to map the depths. Prince Albert was a pioneer of sonic mapping before his death in 1922. In the 1930s, a British expedition named after John Murray charted the Arabian Sea with sonar, and detected a long undersea mountain range that seemed divided, or cleft.
World War II halted exploration again. Then, in the late 1940s, Maurice Ewing of Columbia University and his assistant Bruce Hezeen took sonar readings of the mid-Atlantic, the area once called Dolphin Rise. Ewing and Hezeen took their data to their colleague Marie Tharp, who in 1953 began plotting the data on charts.
Soon Tharp was puzzling over the same kind of strange mountain ranges — cleft in the middle — that the British scientists on the John Murray Expedition had noticed. In places this cleft was as deep as the Grand Canyon. For months, Tharp couldn’t convince Ewing and Hezeen to take a closer look. When they finally did, they realized they were looking at something really big: in fact, the sea bottom revealed how the planet was formed. The clefts showed where huge plates had collided, pushing up into double mountain ranges.
Shown at the far left, Prince Albert holds a shark when the day’s catch of specimens is displayed.
The map Tharp and Hezeen brought out in 1957, a portrait of how the sea bottom would look like if drained of water, revolutionized geography. For the first time, humans could see the huge, M-shaped mountain range running down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean — and the Arctic, Antarctic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans, too. This mountain range is 65,000 kilometers (40,000 miles) long. It encircles the whole Earth. It has been pushed up, and pulled apart, along the edges of the plates of the surface of the Earth. As the plates shift, earthquakes occur, and trenches like the Marianas Trench are formed. Where the edges stretch apart, volcanoes burst through — sometimes forming islands. The Mid-Oceanic Range, as it’s now known, is one world-circling belt of rubbing, grinding tensions that shapes the planet on which we live.
The seas cover three-quarters of the Earth’s surface. We lived in the dark about the secrets of the deep — and the mysteries of how the Earth was formed — until people such as Prince Albert and Sir John Murray mapped the part of the world that lay hidden under the waves.
THE MAPMAKER’S DISGUISE
Secret Maps
IT IS EARLY in 1865, and a caravan plods through the cold, rocky passes of southern Tibet. It is heading for the capital, Lhasa, one of the highest and most remote cities in the world. Most people in the caravan are merchants, carrying cotton and tobacco to barter for Tibetan wool, borax, and goats. But one man is dressed as a Buddhist pilgrim. The other travelers think he must be very pious, for he walks thoughtfully, always handling his rosary beads and murmuring the Buddhist prayer “Om Mani Padme Hum” (“Hail, Jewel of the Lotus!”)
If the merchants were to look more closely, they might notice something odd. Instead of the usual 108 beads, this pilgrims rosary has an even hundred, and every tenth bead is slightly larger than the rest. They might see him slip tiny pieces of paper into the cracks in his prayer wheel. If they examined his prayer wheel, they might find that it unscrews to reveal a compass. His pilgrims staff conceals a miniature thermometer. Fortunately for Pundit Nain Singh, no one ever checks.
Singh is no holy man. His British spymasters call him Number 1 and, like the fictional 007, he is equipped with top-secret equipment, charm, and the guts to defy death.
QUILT MAPS
You are a slave in the 1800s, and you are running for your life through a forest somewhere in the southern United States. The yelps of the tracking dogs and the sound of the slave catchers crashing through the undergrowth are getting closer. Up ahead, outside a cabin, hangs a quilt. You can just make out its pattern — a sailboat. It’s a sign, and you can read it. It says you must cross a body of water. Sure enough, there’s a river up ahead, and a small raft waiting. You take the raft to the far shore, and off you run again. The yelping dies away. As night falls, you scan the sky and find the Big Dipper. Also called the Drinking Gourd, the constellation points you to the North Star. You hum the song “Follow the Drinking Gourd” as you head north towards freedom.
Before the end of slavery in the United States, about 60,000 black people escaped from southern slave states to free states and to Canada. Runaways could not carry maps, which might give them away, and they were forbidden to learn how to read anyway. So their maps to freedom were “mental maps” coded in the words of songs and in patterns on quilts. What kind of directions could a quilt map give? A zigzag pattern known as the Drunkard’s Path was a sign that you should move the way a drunk person moves, back and forth instead of in a straight line. The Crossroads pattern was a symbol for the city of Cleveland, Ohio. And if you saw a quilt with a log cabin on it and a black center, you could be pretty sure that here was a safe place to rest.
This map of the Vale of Kashmir was made around 1636 by Abdur Rahim (who was from modern-day Uzbekistan). It was purchased by a British army captain, whose bosses were thrilled to have a map of a region “beyond our frontiers.”
By the last half of the 19th century the British, who controlled India, had also mapped most of it — except for the far north, where the worlds tallest mountains, the Himalayas, blocked the way. The way was also blocked by the Russians, who were keenly interested in central Asia. The Chinese knew that if the Russians or British got maps of the region, it would give them a way to extend their influence there. So the Emperor of China decreed that no foreigner, especially a European, should enter Tibet unauthorized — on pain of death.
The British leaders of the Great Indian Survey, perhaps the most ambitious mapping project undertaken to that time, weren’t going to leave the top of their map blank. They had purchased whatever maps they could from local people, but they wanted more accurate data. If English surveyors could not enter Tibet, then English-trained surveyors must do the job.
The man they needed taught school in the Johar Valley near India’s border with present-day Nepal. A slim thirty-year-old, Pandit Nain Singh (pandit or pundit means “learned man”) was the son of a trader who had taught him some of the Tibetan language. In 1863 Singh agreed to accept the most dangerous job in the Great Indian Survey, and went to its northern headquarters at Dehra Dun to train.
For two years he studied the use of surveying tools: theodolite, sextant, compass, and thermometer (to calculate altitude). But Singh’s basic tools were his feet. For two years he practiced pacing so that he could walk a mi
le in precisely 2,000 steps, each step around 79 centimeters (31 inches).
Singh set off in January 1865, eventually joining a caravan traveling across the cold, stony plateau towards Lhasa. By October the caravan reached Shigatse. There Singh learned, to his alarm, that they would be presented to the Panchan Lama, a religious leader said to have the power to see deep into men’s hearts. The spy was taken to the lama. But if the gorgeously robed boy on the Panchan throne saw through Singh’s disguise, he didn’t show it. His Holiness merely blessed Singh and offered him tea.
On the caravan went towards Lhasa. As Number 1 paced 2,000 steps to the mile, he fingered his special rosary beads, marking every thousand paces. In secret, he wrote down the distance he had traveled and the coordinates of his present location, slipping his notes into his prayer wheel. Using his secret thermometer to take the temperature of water he boiled for tea, he was able to calculate altitude at more than thirty sites.
In January 1866, the mapmaker walked into the walled city of Lhasa. His calculations put it at an altitude of 3,475 meters (11,400 feet) — pretty close to its correct height of 3,600 meters (11,800 feet). Here he survived for three months like a typical pilgrim, holding out his begging bowl for strangers to fill with food.
The survey notes of the brave and clever Pundit Nain Singh enabled a member of the Great Indian Survey, Captain T.G. Montgomerie, to compile this map of Nepal (left) and Tibet (upper right) in 1868.
While Number 1 stayed in Lhasa, he was always in danger. He saw the Chinese publicly beheading people not authorized to be in the forbidden city. By April, the mapmaker decided it was time to escape. He joined a westward-bound caravan. As they traveled out of Tibet, he charted their 800-kilometer (500-mile) route along the Tsangpo River. One night, he slipped away into the dark and headed back to Dehra Dun.
The British spymasters were delighted with Singh’s reports of his 1,900-kilometer (1,200-mile) journey, and with his measurements of altitude and latitude. They declared that he had “added a greater amount of positive knowledge to the map of Asia than any individual of our time.” Number 1 was made a Companion of the Indian Empire, and given medals and a pension for life.
But there was this problem: Singh had brought back not only answers to questions on the map, but a new question as well. Did the Tsangpo River flow through the mountains to become the mighty Brahmaputra River? To solve the mystery, the spymasters came up with an ingenious plan. They would send another Indian team into the Himalayas to float fifty logs a day for ten days down the Tsangpo. If fifty logs a day turned up on the Brahmaputra, the two rivers must be one.
Today’s map of Singh’s and Kinthup’s India.
This time they recruited a real holy man, or lama, for the journey, and gave him a servant named Kinthup to help with the secret mapmaking. In 1880, the two headed into the mountains. Unfortunately, the lama turned out to be a scoundrel. He used his pay to get drunk, and sometimes beat his servant Kinthup. The last straw came when he sold Kinthup into slavery in a Tibetan village, and vanished.
The long-suffering Kinthup worked for the village boss for two years. Finally he escaped and headed up the Tsangpo River, determined to finish the job his boss had abandoned. With slave-catchers out looking for him, Kinthup hid in a monastery for four months. Then he slipped away into the forest and cut down trees until he had 500 logs. He dragged them to the river and, every day for ten days, tossed in fifty logs so the British watching downstream would see them.
SECRET MAPS
Maps offer information, and information is power. So maps have a long history of spies, lies, and disguise. In the days of Henry the Navigator, the Portuguese tried to keep their knowledge of Africa to themselves. But Dutch and Italian agents managed to steal copies. So did the English pirate Sir Walter Raleigh — and possibly Christopher Columbus, whose brother worked in the Portuguese map library.
In the 16th century, the Russians executed anyone convicted of selling maps of Siberia, the remotest regions of Russia. The Hudson’s Bay Company kept its archives of Canadian charts closed to the public until the late 18th century.
In the 20th century, when the Soviet Union feared that the West might try to invade and topple its Communist government, it produced maps that showed strategic cities hundreds of miles away from their true location. During World War II, the British government doctored aerial photo maps by hand-painting fields over airports and factories. Sometimes the British map-disguisers put cotton balls on top of photos of secret sites, and then photographed the photographs, so that the cotton balls looked like clouds covering part of the landscape.
Today, the U.S. government tries to limit the publication of sensitive satellite images. And just try getting your hands on a hiker’s-scale map of China’s hotly disputed Tibet border!
But two long years had passed, and the British back in India had given up watching. Had they stayed at their posts they would have seen the logs, for the Tsangpo does indeed become the Brahmaputra. But there was nobody there to see.
When Kinthup finally turned up in India after a four-year absence, his spymasters were shamed by his dedication to a job they had abandoned. He was honored and his name is still a symbol of devotion to duty among Indian mapmakers.
It is a testament to our continuing faith in the power of maps that some people try so hard to keep their contents secret — and others risk their lives to fill in their blank spaces.
THE MAPMAKER AND HER BUSINESS
Phyllis Pearsall
IT IS A RAINY night in London, England, in 1935. Phyllis Pearsall, a portrait painter, has taken the wrong bus. She is lost. She was on her way to the house of her old school friend, Lady Veronica Knott, but London’s streets are confusing, and no one Phyllis asks knows the right way. When she finally arrives at Lady Veronica’s door, Phyllis is very wet and very late.
“Of course it is impossible to find your way in London without a taxi,” says Lady Veronica, pampering the dripping Phyllis with a glass of wine and a dinner of roast duck. Phyllis promises herself that the very next day she will get herself a good, up-to-date street map of London. The next day, she discovers that there isn’t one. And so Phyllis, a divorced woman with very little money, decides to make one. It is the start of her fortune.
Phyllis Isobelle Gross was born in Dulwich, London, in 1906, to a rich, unhappy family. Her charming, difficult father, Alexander “Sandor” Gross, was a Jew who had left small-town Hungary to make his fortune in England. He and his wife, Bella, started a business publishing maps and worked like demons to make it succeed. Their Geographia company published roadmaps for drivers of the newly invented motorcars. It was the first company in England to make aerial maps for those who traveled by an even newer invention, the airplane. Geographia also made maps to be published in newspapers, showing everything from the routes of royal funerals to where battles were taking place in World War I.
CONSUMER MAPS
Different people need different maps. Consumer maps, like the ones sold by Geographia, are for ordinary people with no special training in mathematics or geography. Often they are cartograms, or simplified diagrams. One classic cartogram is the map of the London subway, drawn in 1933 by Harry Beck. Beck realized that an accurate map of London’s complicated Underground would be a big tangle of crisscrossing tracks. His simplified map is all straight lines and 45-degree angles, and each subway line has a different color code. Beck spaced the stations not where they actually were, but where the lettering of their names could be read most clearly. His subway map has been imitated by subway systems all over the world, including New York, Washington, and Toronto. It also had a nice side effect: it boosted subway passenger traffic enormously, as people felt more confident about finding their way.
Sandor and Bella made a lot of money and sent their children, Phyllis and Tony, to expensive schools. But, at first, Phyllis found it hard to win friends at her school, Roedean. The meanest girls called Phyllis “Pig” (for her initials, Phyllis Isobelle Gross). But she wa
s good at art and won the school geography prize. Then one day, when Phyllis was thirteen, she was hauled out of class, to be told that she would have to leave the school because her parents’ company had gone broke.
Phyllis was sent back to London, where she learned that Sandor and Bella had been spending more than they earned. The war was changing the boundaries of Europe so fast, Geographia’s maps were out-of-date and the company had started to lose money. Sandor blamed everyone but himself. He fired his wife, who ran off with an alcoholic painter. Then Sandor left London too, to start a new mapmaking business in America.
At first Phyllis lived with her grandparents and supported herself by working as a tutor. Her brother Tony became an artist and moved to Paris. Phyllis followed him, but was too proud to ask Tony if she could sleep on his floor. She slept under bridges, wrapping herself in newspapers for warmth.
Luckily Phyllis was clever and talented, and soon found she could make money by writing newspaper articles and selling paintings. In 1929, she married an artist friend of Tony’s named Dick Pearsall. Unfortunately Dick got jealous when Phyllis’s paintings sold better than his did. After six years, Phyllis left him. But she kept his name; as Phyllis Pearsall, she would no longer be “Pig.”
Sandor Gross wanted everyone to see how far he had come fron the Hungarian village of Csurog. He even bought a pet elephant for his children, shown here with Phyllis as a child.
Back again in London, she had to earn a living. Her father had become rich publishing maps of New York, but Phyllis had no intention of working for Sandor — she didn’t want to risk being pushed aside as her mother had been. Phyllis decided on a different career — painting portraits of her old school chums. With her vibrant sense of color and line, and her stories about life in romantic Paris, Phyllis did well. Her friends happily paid her to paint them and often invited her for dinner as well. Which is what Lady Veronica Knott did that night in 1935.