In the spring of 1595, five months after his death at the age of eighty-two, Gerardus Mercator introduced a new word into the European dictionary: atlas. His inspiration wasn’t the figure we’re familiar with – the muscle-bound Titan holding up the heavens on his shoulders – but a rather more learned, bearded fellow, a mathematician and philosopher draped in fuschia robes as he measures a basketball-sized celestial globe with a pair of compasses. That at least is how he appears at the beginning of Mercator’s Atlas, alongside a 36,000-word dissertation on the Creation, several poems in Latin, and 107 maps.
It was the magnificent culmination of a life’s passion. You could buy it at the Frankfurt Book Fair that year, and if you didn’t put your back out getting it home (it was five volumes bound as one) you could marvel at what were consistently the most accurate and complete country maps available, dexterously hand-coloured, with the world elegantly flattened in his novel world-changing projection.
The Atlas was the work of someone who prided himself not on the ornate but on the painstaking. We have seen that Mercator was not hugely prolific, and his maps and globes were intended for a discerning market rather than the masses targeted by his commercial rivals. His son Rumold and his grandson Michael, who completed the atlas after Mercator’s stroke in 1590 and then saw it through the press and binding, shared a similar dedication to their work, travelling to London from their base in the Rhineland to obtain the latest discoveries and coordinates.
The Atlas was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth and the praise lavished on the British Isles was profound. The island was blessed with ‘all the goods of heaven and earth … neither the rigours of winter are too great … nor is the summer’s heat … Indeed, Britain is the work of joyous nature; nature seems to have created her like another world outside the world.’ (It was quite a contrast to the Ancient Greek view of Britain as wretched and perennially wet). The Atlas also contained other unrecognisable novelties, such as a circular map of the North Pole, shown as a rocky island divided by four rivers, and the fictional island of Frisland, at that time a popular apparition near Iceland.
Despite everything, the Atlas did not sell well.* To some it was not ornate enough, but others were just happy with what was already available. For while Mercator was the first to give us a name to describe a bound collection of maps of the same dimensions, he didn’t create the concept. That had already happened in northern Italy.
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The early collection of twenty-seven ancient Ptolemy maps printed in Bologna from 1477 could justifiably be called the first of the breed, with Martin Waldseemüller and two colleagues making the first modern atlas in 1513 by combining the Ptolemy maps with twenty contemporary regional woodcuts of their own. This contained one of the earliest examples of colour printing, and the first map in an atlas entirely devoted to America (it is titled Tabula Terre Nove, and has an unusual textual reference to Columbus as a Genoese explorer sailing under orders from the King of Castile).
Atlas lends his name to the dictionary via this appearance in Mercator’s masterful work from 1595.
It was in Venice that the atlas became a craze. In the 1560s mapsellers had the idea of allowing customers to build their own atlas from the stock on display. If you didn’t like the Spanish maps on offer, you simply didn’t put them in your book. But if you were intrigued with the emerging face of South America you could choose two or three (perhaps conflicting) impressions. Most buyers would select one single-sheet copy of the latest work of the leading cartographers – Giacomo Gastaldi was strong on Africa and Arabia, whilst you might choose Paolo Forlani for South America and George Lily for the British Isles. These would then be folded and bound between covers of your choice, a unique and discerning collection, the cartographic iPod of its day.
This bespoke service was also popular in Rome, where one publisher, Antonio Lafreri, lent his name to the practice and produced the finest known example, a two-volume compilation known as the Lafreri-Doria Atlas. This contained 186 printed and manuscript maps, and in 2005 was sold at Sotheby’s in London for a princely £1,464,000.
The Doria Atlas was bound in about 1570, the same year that saw the publication of the first atlas we would recognise as such – a book of uniform size and style, containing maps primarily drawn or compiled by the same hand. The Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of Abraham Ortelius was a huge and instant success, despite the fact that it was the most expensive book ever produced. Its title (‘Theatre of the World’ – the word Atlas was still twenty-five years away) was both apt and dramatic, for in its various editions over forty-two years it ran to 228 different plates, ranging from local maps of Palestine, Transylvania and the island of Ischia to the latest impressions of America, China and Russia. The Theatrum also included a collection of historical and mythical maps: the Kingdom of Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire, the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece.
The books were produced at the press of Christopher Plantin and their colours were rich and saturated, the lettering (in Latin) elaborately cursive. The cartouches (a map’s decorative emblems) burst with vivid additional information – the natural history of a region, a town plan, or a genealogical tree. Ortelius was also a generous publisher: by including an index of map-makers he had relied upon for source material he created an invaluable checklist for future historians.
The Theatrum sold 7,300 copies in thirty-one editions, and at least 900 survive. To leaf through one today is to get a (misguided) sense of a world as a fully realised enterprise, an ordered place from which cartographic dalliances with geographical guesswork and overbearing religion had been banished in favour of science and reason. The Age of Exploration was not quite over, but Ortelius’ great work already looks unimprovable, and certainly must have seemed so to its eager purchasers.
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The fact that the Theatrum was published not in Italy but in Antwerp marked the beginning of a major shift in cartographic power. The path of the popular atlas – from Italy to the Rhineland and Belgium, and later to the Netherlands, France and Great Britain – provides an accurate weathervane of the course of the golden age of cartography. The factors that determined this movement were predictable: the rise and decline in economic strength brought about by trade and naval power. This in turn reflected the ability and willingness of monarchies to commission new explorations, and the availability and prosperity of skilled draughtsmen, paper-makers, printers and bookbinders.
But there was another factor too – raw and rare talent, a combination of inspiration and tutored craftsmanship, for surveying, plotting, drawing, engraving, compiling, illuminating and colouring – that cannot be wholly explained by financial or other economic perspectives. The vision of seeing the world anew, and the ability to express it, was what set Waldseemüller, Mercator and Ortelius apart.
It is too simplistic to plot the shifting cartographic dominance of one European country over another in terms of decades. But certainly there are trends: Germany’s role in the revival of Ptolemy was crucial in the late fifteenth century (there were important printings in Ulm and Cologne), while Martin Waldseemüller and Martin Behaim both produced maps and globes with exciting new discoveries and ways of showing them. Italy’s vibrant printing trade undoubtedly also benefitted map-making in the same period. But it was the Low Countries that turned cartography into a new commercial artform. In the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a new generation of map-makers transformed an arcane, intellectual and exclusive activity into a booming industry.
This work wasn’t confined to atlases, but it was an atlas published in Amsterdam that best demonstrated what maps had become. The Blaeu Atlas Maior was quite simply the most beautiful, elaborate, expensive, heaviest and stunning work of cartography that the world had ever seen. And everything that followed it – right up to the present day – seems a bit of an anti-climax in comparison.
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The Blaeu dynasty would dominate European map-making for a century, aided by its own vast printing press, believed to be the largest in the world. But its beginnings are cloudy. We still do not know for certain when its cartographic founder, Willem Blaeu, was born, nor precisely where. Alkmaar (Northern Holland) in 1571 seems to be the most likely combination, with Blaeu moving to Amsterdam in his youth, when he was still known as Willem Janszoon (he joined at least four other Willem Janszoons in the city, which may explain the Blaeu – ‘Blue’ – addition to his name). He began working for his father’s herring company, developed an interest in mathematics and instrumentation, and was apprenticed to the astronomer Tycho Brahe. He then became a bookseller and maritime cartographer, forging an early reputation for his pilot charts, which soon became the principal navigational tools for Dutch shipping.
Willem gradually moved into terrestrial maps to expand his income, though his skill lay in compilation rather than draughtsmanship. He would commission copperplates from local cartographers, but more often he would buy already engraved plates from other printers in Europe and enhance them with a few additions and lavish colours. But what appears to have accelerated both the scale of his production and his ambition was a feverish battle with a local competitor called Johannes Janssonius. For decades, these rivals fought for an increasingly lucrative market, and together they dominated the Dutch map trade.
Both Janssonius and Blaeu had back-up – the former worked with Henricus Hondius, while Blaeu was assisted by his two sons Joan and Cornelis – and their focus soon narrowed to one particular specialty, the atlas. Intriguingly and honourably, they didn’t steal each other’s maps but tried to outdo each other on sumptuousness and range. It was with this in mind that in 1634 Willem Blaeu announced plans for his first ‘large map-book’, a compendium of 210 maps, only to find that Janssonius was preparing one of 320 maps. And so the stakes were raised and Blaeu promised an even grander project. When he died in 1638, his son Joan took up the challenge, and the Atlas Maior, produced between 1659 and 1672, was the almost ruinous result. Lavish was only the half of it.
It was published in eleven volumes in folio size (52.7 × 32.1 cm). Some countries (Germany, England, the Netherlands, Italy and America) got a volume each, while Spain and Portugal shared a volume with Africa, and Greece shared a binding with Sweden, Russia and Poland. The first Latin edition contained 594 maps but there was much else too, the apotheosis of geography as history. There were 21 frontispieces (containing paintings of the Creation, optical and measuring instruments, globes and compasses, portraits of Ptolemy and Greek gods). And there were 3,368 pages of text, in which Blaeu and his colleagues explained a country’s history and customs in a tone both exhaustive and reductive. Germany was ‘very rich thanks to its commerce, its mines of gold, silver and other metals, and to its corn, cattle and other products.’ Scotland was praised for ‘the excellence of the minds that it produces.’ The description of China betrays a reliance on far-off fable. ‘Found in this province [of Peking] are long-haired totally-white cats with floppy ears, as prized as little Maltese dogs, and which the ladies adore.’
Blaeu’s maps of America contain the first cartographic appearance of ‘New Amsterdam’ as the capital of ‘New Netherland’, but the name would soon be out of date: it became New York City in 1664. America as a whole is still a distant land, and both Greenland and Iceland are considered to be ‘the northern-most part’ of it. ‘Half of America stretches to the west,’ Blaeu wrote. ‘This part is entirely unknown in its interior…’
The maps themselves are lusciously Baroque. A cartouche would be considered squandered if it wasn’t draped in cherubs or heraldic arms or unicorns. Each sea would be either augmented with trade winds and navigational directions, or else full of galleons, serpents and menacing fish. The wording on the maps is set either with movable type or hand-drawn, while the names of surrounding seas are often drawn in an extravagantly curling script resembling fishing lines. The coastlines are dramatically thick with shading, while mountain ranges, generally of uniform height, look like obstinate rashes.
The Dutch scholar Peter van de Krogt has calculated that the Blaeu printing works made about 1,550 copies of the atlas in a thirteen-year run, some 1,830,000 sheets. And the cost to the customer reflected the outlay: the uncoloured editions were priced at between 330 and 390 guilders, while the coloured editions cost 430 to 460 guilders depending on the translation and number of maps. At today’s values, this would price a coloured edition at approximately £25,000 or $40,000. What else could you get for this sort of money in the mid-seventeenth century? You could buy ten slaves at 40 guilders each. And for 60 guilders in 1626 you could have bought the island of Manhattan from its native Indians.
Baroque and berserk: the most beautiful atlas ever – the Blaeu Atlas Maior, published between 1659 and 1672.
Like teeth adrift in Indonesian waters: the Moluccas, also known as the Spice Islands, as crafted in the appendix to Blaeu’s Atlas Maior.
That Blaeu was proud of his achievement is clear from his address to his ‘gentle reader’ at the beginning of the atlas. ‘Geography has paved the way not only for the happiness and comfort of humanity but for its glory,’ he writes. ‘Were kingdoms not separated by rivers, mountains, straits, isthmuses and oceans, empires would have no confines nor wars a conclusion.’ He might have added ‘nor wars a cause or purpose,’ but he went on to outline the joy felt by so many who have picked up a map in all centuries: our ability to ‘set eyes on far-off places without so much as leaving home.’ He praised Ptolemy, Ortelius, Mercator, and England’s William Camden (whose descriptions of the British Isles he copied), and he ends with a plea to the reader to forgive his mistakes (‘easily made when describing a place one has never seen’) and to send him maps of their own making. It was a humble address considering the bombastic product that followed it.
Astonishingly, Blaeu would help to create one further and even greater atlas: the Klencke Atlas. This was a one-off, produced in 1660 by Joan Klencke and a group of Dutch merchants as a gift for King Charles II of England at the restoration of the monarchy. At 1.78m high by 1.05m wide, it was the largest atlas in the world, and featured countries and continents from the Blaeu and Hondius dynasties. It’s been at the British Library for almost two centuries, and in the Guinness Book of World Records since its records began.
Like the Klencke wonder, Blaeu’s atlas was not a collection of maps to take on a voyage; it was a rich man’s plaything, the sort of thing that in a different age would appear alongside Ferraris in glossy magazines. The fact that Blaeu’s atlas was not always the most up-to-date was not of prime concern (his maps of England, for instance, were more than 30 years old). For cartography had entered yet another phase – a period of flamboyancy and ornamentation, where the luxuriousness and sheer weight of an atlas was judged to be more important than its practical quality and accuracy. It would take a century – and the emergence of the French ‘scientific’ school of map-making – to reverse this trend.
It is not known whether Joan Blaeu recouped his costs, but in the end the gods may have done his final accounting. As new editions of the Atlas Maior were being planned in1672, a huge fire swept through the Blaeu workshop and destroyed many of the copper plates required for further printings. Joan Blaeu died the following year at the age of seventy-six. No one would produce such a tragically magnificent book again. But many would try, and to glimpse the most famous we need to leap forward a couple of centuries.
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On Wednesday 2 January 1895, a brief advertisement appeared in the London Times classifieds: it announced that in early April a new atlas would be published containing 117 pages of new maps with an index of more than 125,000 place names. As was the fashion, the atlas would be issued in serial form, fifteen weekly parts at one shilling each. A month later, another advert carried more information and a harder sell:
‘To newspaper readers of the present day a good Atlas is absolutely indispensable. In order to enable the public to obtain the full advantage of the information contained in the paper, it has been decided to offer to them, at a price within the reach of all, an Atlas of the very highest quality, which will form an inseparable and indispensable companion to the newspaper.’
And thus was The Times Atlas born. The 117 pages would be 17 × 11 inches and display 173 maps in colour. Eleven pages would be devoted to Africa, while there would also be extensive coverage of the ‘Indian Question’, the war between China and Japan, and all the latest developments in polar exploration. The advertisements even carried a review from the Manchester Guardian (‘Superior to English atlases at 10 guineas. We have no hesitation in saying that the publication of this atlas will mark an epoch in English geographical teaching and study’). When the atlas was published in bound form, the 125,000 place names had increased to 130,000, and there was an explanation on the Contents page. ‘Owing to the fact that the maps … embody additions and corrections which have been made, in some cases, only a few days before going to press, it has been found impossible to incorporate the whole of the names of places to be found in the present edition in the main Index.’ So a supplementary index was attached, which contained thousands more. A great many were in Africa and South America.
Six years later there was an updated edition, and the trend was edging towards the luxury seventeenth-century Dutch items: for 24 shillings you could purchase the atlas in ‘extra cloth’; for 30 shillings you could get it in ‘half Morocco’ (a bit of calf-skin that might put readers in mind of the Mappa Mundi); and for 50 shillings you could obtain the utterly leather ‘Edition De Luxe’.
The original Times Atlas was an impressive and popular product, but at the time it didn’t stand greatly apart from its competition – in particular rival tomes from Philips and the map shop Stanfords. Each of these offered small details that the others didn’t, had claims on comprehensiveness, and an eye on posterity. But half a century on, The Times Atlas emerged in a new version that made all others look like yesterday’s news. The 1955 edition appeared in five volumes, making it massively more comprehensive than before and with publicity materials determined to make librarians put in an order at once (for £22). The volumes prided themselves on their new political boundaries and the fine gradation of ink tints to denote altitude. The maps signalled a shift in geography, too. The first Times atlases were based on German maps, but they had subsequently switched to the Scottish cartographic firm of Bartholomew, and the new atlas was Scottish to the core.
The Times Atlas – a decent size for the Empire in 1895.
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It is curious how rival map-makers come up with major innovations at similar times. Like Janssonius and Blaeu, The New Times Atlas had a significant rival – this time across the Atlantic.
The newcomer was the World Geo-Graphic Atlas, published in 1953 in Chicago, which is regarded by many as the most beautiful and original modern atlas ever made. Edited by Herbert Bayer, a former master at the Bauhaus school who fled to New York in the 1930s, the book was a daring early exercise in information graphics. Bayer and his designers believed that it wasn’t enough to just print and bind current maps – they wanted to explain what the maps showed and how the world was changing; the reality, in other words, of what it was really like to live in the transformative years after World War II. (Bayer worked for a while at the leading advertising firm J. Walter Thompson; he was one of the archetypal Mad Men.)
The book was published in a small private edition by the Container Corporation of America and was never commercially available, although many of the world’s major reference libraries recognised its value and managed to obtain a copy. Almost sixty years after publication it remains a stunning thing to behold, as fresh and groundbreaking as the Helvetica typeface of the same decade; both reflect a clear-headed modernism. The atlas is sub-titled A Composite of Man’s Environment, with the standard world maps abetted by sections on economics, geology, geography, demography, astrology and climatology. But what really sets it apart is the use of diagrammatic and pictorial images (some 2,200 illustrations, charts and symbols in all – and pre-computer) to demonstrate the way we live. The slightly awkward title (Geo-Graphic) was designed to highlight the use of pictograms, charts and other infographics.
Some of the diagrams are just fun, such as the ‘arrow map’ of the United States showing the best East-West route through every US State from Maine to Washington State. Others point up ecological concerns; even in 1953 it was clear that the world was running out of the natural resources required to feed a rapidly growing population, let alone meet our demands for mineral fuels. As Bayer made clear in his preface, the atlas was designed with a consciously pacifist and environmental ‘whole-earth’ direction, taking root several years before the approach became a liberal foundation-stone of the 1960s. ‘Political inferences have been avoided whenever possible,’ Bayer wrote, ‘because a global concept of this earth, its people and life sources necessarily rejects implications of power, strategy, force and suppression.’ But it remained provocative throughout, illustrating such things as the US migration routes of Indian tribes and Norse peoples.
The world meets the modernist: Bayer’s magnificent and influential Geo-Graphic Atlas from 1953.
The atlas was also bang up to date: an addenda included the news that there was a new ‘highest point reached by mountain climbers: 29,002 feet,’ marking the ascent of Everest in May 1953. The atlas achieves an immediacy and relevance that the grander, more traditional atlases never could, and it is inspirational to all who see it.
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Two people who probably did fall under the Geo-Graphic spell were Michael Kidron and Ronald Segal, the radical duo behind The State of the World Atlas. This first appeared in 1981 as a self-styled volume of ‘cartojournalism’ published by the radical socialist Pluto Press, and became a bestseller. It was as much an anti-capitalist manifesto as it was geography, and it encouraged the reader to view the world in a new light, the same way one’s conventional idea of a portrait might change after seeing a Picasso.
Every double-page spread was essentially the same – a condensed map of the world portrayed either with each country drawn in its recognisable shape or as a rectangular block – but overlaid with a message of inequality. These ranged from a survey of countries’ trade union membership to a map of state censorship, in which countries were divided up into varying degrees of (il)liberalism. The maps help to turn agitprop into witty graphic art with spreads entitled ‘This Little Piggy’ (to denote workers who toil unproductively) and ‘Dirt’s Cheap’ (to denote polluted air). In the fourth edition (a decade after the first), the atlas contained many symbols that had yet to be recognised by the Ordnance Survey: padlocks, men in suits holding champagne glasses, armed militia and very thin people with begging bowls. By the eighth edition from 2008, the topics had expanded to terrorism, obesity, sex tourism, gay rights and children’s rights.
Not a lot of free speech around: a state censorship map – entitled ‘See, Hear, Speak No Evil’ – from the 1990 State of the World Atlas.
The State of the World Atlas was followed by The War Atlas, which had fewer visual jokes and more retreating armies, and by a succession of politically themed books: The Atlas of Food, The Atlas of Water, The Tobacco Atlas, all displaying what would otherwise be deadening tables in a devastating way. They remain in print and online.
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And whatever happened to the hernia-inducing really big atlas, the one that reached its peak with Joan Blaeu and the walk-in Klencke atlas in the 1660s? It’s back, more hospitalising than ever. In 2009, a company called Millennium House published something called Earth – a 580-page, 24 × 18.5 inch monster. According to its promotional blurb it takes ‘cartography and publishing to a new stratosphere,’ a huge mixture of maps, pictures and six-foot gatefolds, each individually numbered ‘by our calligrapher in Hong Kong.’
The island of serious paper cuts: the Earth Platinum Edition unveiled page by heavy page.
It was, almost inevitably, bound in leather and hand-tooled and hand-gilded, ‘a legacy for future generations.’ There were two editions, the first Royal Blue version with a 2,000 copy print run costing £2,400, and the Imperial Gold edition of 1,000 copies with a price upon application. But before you could apply for the price, Millennium House brought out its Earth Platinum Edition, which made the others look like a postage stamp. This was the biggest book ever made – bigger, at 1.8m × 1.4m, than the British Library’s Klencke. And better because it was for sale, albeit at $100,000. The print run was thirty-one.
The atlas needed its own plane to fly it to its wealthy owners, as well as six people to lift it. The people from the Guinness Book of World Records duly confirmed that it was indeed something special, and at the beginning of 2012 it officially became the biggest, most expensive, most user unfriendly atlas of the world in the world.
The Blaeu Atlas Maior took the atlas to new heights of clarity and comprehensiveness – but one thing it didn’t forsake were the animals, which had roamed freely on maps for centuries, usually adorning a border, or a blank expanse of land or ocean, and occasionally taking over completely.
In the Low Countries, the carto-animal par excellence was Leo Belgicus, a lion that arrived in 1583 and just refused to leave. There is a reason Leo endured – he just fits. He was introduced in Cologne by an Austrian cartographer and nobleman, Michael Aitsinger, when Belgium and the Netherlands were both part of the Spanish Empire and almost every province in the Netherlands featured the lion on its coat of arms. There weren’t a great deal of other map ‘jokes’ at that point and Leo was an instant hit in Low Country homes, the Keep Calm and Carry On of his day.
The original map first appeared as a folding panel in a book, and then went through many editions and twists. In Aitsinger’s original, Leo faced right, tongue panting, his upper jaw by Transylvania, his left paw named Luxembourg. Great Britain received a political seeing to from the tail, which swished over Norwich, Ipswich, Colchester and London. By the time the Amsterdam engraver Claes Janszoon Visscher had a go in 1609, Leo was squatter, less mobile and fierce, his lower jaw dominated by the Zuyder Zee, with a background not of the British Isles but of Dutch traders, coats of arms and views of Antwerpen, Bruxel and Amsterdam. But when Janszoon made his paper lion in 1611, he was facing the other way and was far longer, with the Zuyder Zee now at its rump.
The friendliest lion in cartography: Leo Belgicus semi-rampant over the Low Countries in 1617.
The body of the lion varied over time as borders and rulers changed. After the Treaty of Munster of 1648 curtailed the Eighty Years’ War and recognised a Dutch Republic separated from the southern Spanish Netherlands, Visscher redrew his lion yet again. He was turned around once more, bedraggled and exhausted, and seemingly far less populated, not least because he now represented the new independent Netherlands alone, and was rebranded Leo Hollandicus.
Popular examples of Leo continued until the beginning of the nineteenth century, at which point engravers and collectors presumably wearied of the gag. Perfect timing, then, for the dramatic, short-lived and slightly compromised zoomorphic emergence of the American Eagle. In 1833 an engraver named Isaac W. Moore stretched the eagle over a map of the rapidly transmogrifying United States, his work published in Philadelphia in Joseph Churchman’s geography book Rudiments of National Knowledge, Presented to the Youth of United States, and to Enquiring Foreigners. It is a very rare map (little change from $20,000), measures 42 × 53 cm, and it came about by a trick of the light.
Churchman explained that he was looking at a wall map of the US when the dim light in the room cast its shadow in such a way as to suggest the shape of an eagle. He was ready to dismiss it when he realised that such an image might increase the ‘facility with which [geography] lessons may be impressed and retained upon the youthful memory.’
A dead parrot sketched over the United States, though it’s supposed to be more of an Eagle.
The resultant carto-bird, portrayed in smudgy brown over sharply defined red states and borders, tries very hard to keep its subject in check: its feet and talons look good extending down through Florida and towards Cuba, while its breast effectively covers the eastern seaboard. But its head, with an eye in Vermont, is not big enough to cover Maine (for which the author apologises); its tail feathers extend not far beyond Arkansas; while its wings smother an ill-defined ‘Missouri Territory’. Within sixteen years Californian statehood rendered the bird inoperable.
There is another awkward anomaly: the eagle looks more like a parrot, and the author who made him has a reason for this. The eagle is usually portrayed prey-like, he explains, eager for swooping and flesh-ripping. ‘Here, on the contrary, having possession of the whole country, and no enemy to contend with, it is designed to appear as the placid representative of national liberty, and national independence; with an aspect of beneficent mildness, and in an attitude of peace.’
So where in the world to look for carto-aggression? Towards Russia, clearly, which didn’t have an eagle or a lion on its vast land but an octopus, the animal you use on a map if you want to denote greed, suction and unremitting tentacular ambition. The octopus is cartographically versatile, for it is really eight animals in one. Its globular reach is unmatched by anything else on land or sea – in fact, it is the only sea creature (unless one counts the amphibious dragon) which seems unusually happy on land, even in Siberia, even without its normal dietary supply of whelks, clams and other molluscs. That is because it is eating everything else.
On the famous Serio-Comic War Map for the Year 1877, drawn by Frederick Walrond Rose, the message is both powerful and sinister, one of the most lucid expressions of menace in the entire map drawer. An obese Russian octopus spreads its thick tentacles round the neck of Persia, Turkey and Poland. Germany is portrayed as the Kaiser, England as a colonising businessman with a moneybag labelled India, Transvaal, Suez. A rapier-wielding kilted Scotsman stands on England’s shoulders, a sleeping Spain has its back to the rest of Europe, France is a general with a telescope, Italy is a roller-blading child toying with a wooden figure of the Pope, Turkey is a swarthy gun-toting pirate, and Holland is a gentle land of windmills. The stereotyping is now almost jailworthy.
So long, suckers: the Russian octopus gets heavy with the rest of Europe in 1877.
Rose’s map is an image one can’t easily put away, and it is little wonder that octopuses have had their character besmirched on many maps since. A decade later, an American cartoonist portrayed the British Empire’s ceaseless colonialism in the shape of John Bull smirking in choppy waters. He is more than an octopus: his eleven hands rest on Jamaica, Australia, India, Malta and the rest, while his arms tuck Ireland and Heligoland close to his body. Some of the possessions seem solid enough; some such as Egypt seem already to be drifting away.
In 1890, the United States was in the grip of what the newspapers called The Lottery Octopus, another gift to cartographers as a skinny snake-like thing with its body in Louisiana and its tentacles all over the states from Maine to Washington. The lottery had begun in New York in the late 1860s, with its tickets travelling to cities all over the country by train, making a fortune for its corrupt owners in the process. When legislation to renew its charter came up in 1892 it was granted three more years to overcome widespread church-led opposition, and, failing so to do, was killed in 1895 and erased from the map.
But the award for most influential animal on a map goes to the salamander – an amphibian that gave the English language a new word that was both verb and noun. Its tale begins in February 1812, when the supporters of the ninth Governor of Massachusetts, a man named Elbridge Gerry, decided it might benefit his Democratic-Republican Party to reconfigure the electoral boundaries in Essex South County, north of Boston. The plan was simple: sacrifice a few Senate seats by packing a few districts with opposition Federalist voters, while gaining a Republican majority in many more.
So far, so predictable; it wasn’t a new political ploy, and Gerry’s opponents soon became aware of the chicanery. (Gerry himself, a distinguished diplomat who had signed the Declaration of Independence, helped found the Library of Congress and would one day serve as Vice President, was not himself the prime instigator of this ‘redistricting’.) And then, the story goes, there was a dinner party. Over beef, the resemblance of the reshaped districts to a salamander became clear: a creature curved from left to right, with Chelsea as its behind, Danvers and Andover as its prime torso, and Salsbury as its head. And inevitably the dinner party, with several newspapermen in attendance, produced the immortal line: ‘That’s not a salamander, that’s a Gerrymander!’
The amphibian that lost the election: the Gerrymander encircles Boston in 1812.
The following month, there it was: a respected Boston miniaturist and cartoonist named Elkanah Tisdale reshaded the map to strengthen his point, added claws, wings and viperous jaw, and struck the point home. Elbridge Gerry lost his seat, and the map may have been partly responsible.*
