In his book Island of Lost Maps, American journalist Miles Harvey describes himself a ‘mapperist’ – that is, ‘an ecstatic contemplator of things cartographic’. It is a made-up word, yet it is surprising that the sensation has hitherto eluded naming. The business of collecting maps, after all, is a huge one. The US Library of Congress alone holds 4,250,000 map sheets, 53,000 atlases, 700,000 microfilm images, 300 globes, 2,000 terrain models, 1,600,000 aerial photographs and remote sensing images. W. Graham Arader III, the American dealer whose patented grading system governs the value of rare maps, has built a fortune of more than $US200 million out of a business that began in the back of his station wagon.
Above all, even the simplest map evokes the human need to locate oneself and make a mark. Landscapes abide, but geography is ever a work in progress, not least in a land like Australia, where white settlement is so relatively recent. In Cook’s journal, one can still discern where the words ‘Botany Bay’ were substituted for ‘Stingray Harbour’. It was the revered war historian Charles Bean who described this land as ‘a big blank map’, whose people were ‘constantly sitting over it like a committee, trying to work out the best way to fill it in’.
From the first, cartographers have held a role akin to religious authorities, for following a map requires an act of faith in its maker. Cartographers, in turn, would push at the bounds of ignorance, fortifying themselves against the threat of the unknown with compasses, cartouches, crucifixes and creatures to fill the unexplored spaces. In the collection of world maps at the National Library in Canberra, one can study how Australia was made out over centuries like a crossword clue, starting as such speculative scribbles as Terra Australis Nondum Cognita, Magallanica, Nouvello Hollande and Ulimaroa.
An ancient atlas was as mind-expanding as the worldwide web today. Long-distance travel was slow, expensive, dangerous and discouraged, and education and literacy far from general. But while very few of those who examined Matthew Flinders’ General Chart of Terra Australis ever visited Australia, the existence and estimation of an antipodes were an invitation to its exploitation. It was standing over a map of Africa that Belgium’s King Leopold II uttered his famous apologia for imperialism: ‘We must not miss out on a slice of this wonderful cake.’
Mapping was then a consolidation of the act of conquest, even if science was not so easily suborned. When Colonel William Lambton and his horse-drawn, elephant-mounted survey crews began dragging their half-ton theodolite across India in April 1802, the Honourable East India Company expected their Great Trigonometrical Survey to take five years; it took sixty, and proved a huge drain on profits. Lambton displayed ‘no symptom of more than common powers’, said his successor George Everest, yet ‘when he aroused himself for the purpose of adjusting the great theodolite, he seemed like Ulysses shaking off his rags’.
Science also pushed mapmakers in unexpected directions. William Smith devoted almost twenty years of his life to the first geological survey of a country, and finally published 400 copies of A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales in 1815. Drawn at the scale of five miles to the inch, its fifteen sheets measured 182 * 274cm. Simon Winchester’s book about Smith calls it The Map That Changed the World; it certainly changed Smith’s life, so consuming his resources that he was sent to a debtor’s prison.
The poor themselves were the subject of one especially celebrated work of social cartography: the Labour and Life of the People of London, published by the Victorian social reformer Charles Booth, which starkly delineated social stratification of the city’s streets, grading them in seven classifications ranging from ‘Upper-middle and Upper classes, wealthy’ to ‘Vicious, semi-criminal’. It was a work of statistics rather than surveying, and its goals were political rather than personal.
Perhaps the zenith of the map as a political tool, however, was the peace conference at Versailles in 1919, where the contestants of World War I congregated to divide the spoils of strifetorn Europe, making and remaking national boundaries to suit whomever’s voice was loudest and most insistent. ‘How fallible one feels here!’ lamented the British diplomat Harold Nicolson. ‘A map – a pencil – tracing paper. Yet my courage fails at the thought of the people whom our errant lines enclose or exclude, the happiness of several thousands of people.’
‘It would take a huge monograph,’ wrote two American delegates, ‘to contain an analysis of all the types of map forgeries that the war and peace conference called forth…It was in the Balkans that the use of this process reached its most brilliant climax.’ Some perpetrations took generations to unravel: the effect of the padding of the borders of the old Serbia with the inclusion of Bosnia, Montenegro and Slovenia plus parts of Bulgaria and Albania was not played out until the dissolution of Yugoslavia in March 2002. The world is still dealing with the constituting of Palestine and the cobbling together of Iraq.
Not that the map for mass use is value neutral either. The very first tourist map, printed 500 years ago by a Nuremburg compassmaker Erlaud Etzlaub, was Rom Weg: The Way to Rome. Marking 800 towns, and using familiar German rather than esoteric Latin, it was designed to encourage Catholic pilgrims to make the journey to the centre of their faith. In a similar way, oil companies began publishing free road maps a century ago to encourage motoring, and public transit authorities images of their own routes to discourage it. There probably isn’t a better known map in the world than that of the London Underground, designed to coincide with the foundation of London Transport in 1933, and inspired by the circuit diagrams with which electrical engineer turned draftsman Harry Beck was familiar. The world map in your in-flight magazine is there to inform but also to excite – just think of all those places you haven’t been…
On the vague or unfamiliar, the map imposes order, which makes it an ideal deus ex machina in fiction. Geography is the key to resolving several of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries: a map of Brunton in the Hurlstone Library assists unraveling ‘The Musgrave Ritual’, a map of the region round ‘The Priory School’ helps explain the disappearance of Lord Saltire; there is a map on the body of the Mafia cutthroat Pietro Venucci in ‘The Six Napoleons’, and a cycle map of Sussex in the hotel room of the vengeful Scowrer, Ted Baldwin, in The Valley of Fear. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island not only foregrounds a map but was inspired by one – a map being painted by his stepson Lloyd Osbourne:
Stevenson came in as I was finishing it, and with his affectionate interest in everything I was doing, leaned over my shoulder, and was soon elaborating the map and naming it. I shall never forget the thrill of Skeleton Island, Spyglass Hill, nor the heart-stirring climax of the three red crosses! And the greater climax still when he wrote down the words ‘Treasure Island’ at the top right-hand corner!
In fiction, the map usually acts as a certification of authenticity, such as the minutely imagined representations of Middle Earth, Thror, Wilderland and Bleriand in The Lord of the Rings. American artist Adrian Leskiw has given this a twist by creating road maps of imaginary countries. His book The Map Realm offers such fictional locations as The Treaty States of Aultica, and the neighbouring Canadian provinces of Brampton and Cardin, in such loving detail that their non-existence is disappointing.
More harmful have become the obsessions of those to whom maps become a meal ticket. Miles Harvey’s book is an account of the life and crimes of Gilbert Bland, who suited his name in every respect save his kleptomania where maps were concerned. For twenty years he stalked the world’s great atlases, visiting libraries so that he could whip maps from them with his trusty razor blade. Not until 1995 when he was caught with three maps he had just purloined from Baltimore’s Peabody Library did his activities come to light.
Ten years later, the discovery of an X-Acto knife on the floor of the reading room in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University led to the arrest of one of the map world’s most respected members. In September 2006, Edward Forbes Smiley III was sentenced to three and a half years in jail for the theft of 97 rare maps originally valued at $US3 million. While Bland had been an asocial misfit, the genteel world of map dealing was stunned by the verdict against Smiley, apparently the map-happiest of mapperists. Mind you, it is not unfitting that a discipline all about a faithful representation of the earth should also reflect the full gamut of human natures.