On 10 September 1901, Ernest Henry Shackleton, Robert Falcon Scott and the crew of the Discovery decided to make an unscheduled stop on their journey to the Antarctic. They had been at sea for five weeks, had crossed the equator eleven days before, and now, after early problems with sails and leaks, decided to break their trip down the coast of South America with a day’s fact-finding on an unknown island. Perhaps their food supplies would be increased with edible birds. At 10am three days later, Scott and his crew climbed into two boats and tried to land. In a subsequent letter to London he noted that the ‘curious rocky promontory’ chosen for his embarkation point had previously been observed by a man called E.F. Knight.
Shackleton gave no further details of his day ashore, but another voyage member, the second surgeon Edward A. Wilson, was keeping a personal diary intended for his wife Oriana. He was ‘called some time before sunrise to see South Trinidad as I had asked. It was worth it … It was a most striking sight, this oceanic island, after so long seeing nought but clouds and sea and sky.’
Wilson’s three-page entry on Trinidad – the legendary Treasure Island – is among the longest in his three-year diary, much of it concerned with the difficulty of disembarking and the ease of killing birds once they had done so. Wilson also noted dead and bleached tree trunks all over the slopes, ‘white outside, red inside and rotten’, which suggested either volcanic damage or some terribly ravenous creature. And then there was his most chilling description of all: ‘The whole shore of the island was alive, literally alive, with a big vividly coloured red and green crab, a flat long pointed clawed beast.’
But of course Shackleton, Scott and Wilson were going further.
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Antarctica has long been described as the last place on earth to be mapped, and romantically we still like to see it that way. We may never tire of its great and terrible stories, and if they grow more vast, heroic and mythical in the telling then so be it. In cartographic terms the stories are thrillingly recent, and it is odd to think that, a little over a century ago, the continent – all 5.4 million square miles of it – was still predominantly white and silent on the map.
The maps we remember from the age of Shackleton, Scott and Amundsen were not drawn by professionals, and they were not drawn by the polar superstars. Edward Wilson’s record of the Discovery expedition is the most personal account from all the polar trips, and the most aesthetic. It is full of yearning for the woman he had married only weeks before setting sail, a state of mind that perhaps informs his unofficial notes of mishap and inglorious incidents not recorded in, say, Scott’s lionised account. Wilson was a keen painter, and his medical and zoological training had made him not only an excellent skinner and preserver of birds, but also an accurate draughtsman.
His maps from the voyage are invaluable. Some are just little doodles within his notes, such as the map of the sleeping arrangements drawn at an ice-sawing camp at the end of 1903. The large tent slept thirty, split into two halves divided by a stove. In one half were six three-man sledging tents, in the other a huddle of single sleeping bags, marked by Wilson with the name of each occupant: Skelton, Royds, Hodgson and the rest. Supply boxes were scattered at heads and feet. The sketch suggests camaraderie, cramp and odour, something confirmed in Wilson’s journal: ‘There was never a healthier crowd of ruffians, than the 30 unwashed, unshaven, sleepless, swearing, grumbling, laughing, joking reprobates that lived in that smoky Saw Camp.’
Wilson’s more conventional maps show the vast distances covered in this barren land. One tracks the route of the Discovery from Trinidad at the northwest of the map (as we see it), through Cape Town and then the Crozet Islands, onto Lyttleton in New Zealand before venturing deeper south. The to-and-fro of the winter quarters at the tip of the Great Ice Barrier are clearly marked, as is the southern sledge journey in the winter of 1902/03. The map is a scratchy specimen, hurriedly drawn with no care for posterity. One could mistake it for a spider’s web, with tiny flies for landmarks. But as an historical document of a participant in a grand quest it can never be matched. And, of course, Wilson worked under the most trying conditions. ‘Sketching in the Antarctic is not all joy,’ he noted on 25 January 1903, ‘for apart from the fact that your fingers are all thumbs, and are soon so cold that you don’t know what or where they are … apart from this you get colder and colder all over, and you have to sketch when your eyes stop running, one eye at a time, through a narrow slit in snow goggles …’
This may explain why his most enchanting map was drawn from memory some seven years after he left the ice. It shows the area around Cape Crozier and Mt Terror, and because it is a map combining jotted notes, memory and imagination, it carries a lot of detail. Wilson was particularly keen to show the work he had carried out with the local inhabitants, marking with crosses an area of Emperor penguins nesting on sea ice, clearly distinguishable from the ‘dots that indicate thousands of Adelie penguins in a rookery in an enclosed arena sheltered entirely from sky blizzards’.
The map is torn from a sketchbook and drawn in pencil, and uses classic Renaissance techniques to mark coastlines, cliffs, craters and inlets – contouring, chiaroscuro and cross-hatching that makes the land resemble the palm of a wizened hand. It really does look like a treasure map.
But it had a very clear intention. It was drawn for the next great assault on the continent in 1910, the Terra Nova expedition, in which Wilson would again attend in his capacity as doctor and naturalist, this time with Scott as captain. His writing on the map looks like a summons from Jack Hawkins: ‘Old glacier of blue ice where we shall cut a cave for an ice house and from where we shall get all our drinking water,’ he wrote just below the steep Cape Crozier rock cliffs. Close by was the ‘Probable position of our hut on edge of a snowdrift.’
Such careful mapping for such a fateful voyage.
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Of course, Wilson and Scott were just adding to what had gone before. We may remember how, in the second century BC, the ten-foot globe made by Crates of Mallus envisioned a quartered world of four gigantic islands split by a torrid ocean. Only one – his own – was inhabited, but the others were believed to be perhaps equally hospitable. We have also seen that, around 114 AD, Marinus of Tyre, the great inspiration for Ptolemy, used the name Antarctic on his gazetteer of place names to signify the region lying at the polar opposite of the Arctic.
Geology now affords us a greater understanding – or at least advanced theorising – about how it got there. Antarctica may once have been a place of lush greenery and busy rivers inhabited by amphibians and large reptiles. Recent discoveries of a varied range of fossils on exposed rock suggest something closer to Amazonian conditions than icy wilderness, and the possibility of dinosaurs and six-foot-tall penguins. This ties in with the idea that Antarctica was once part of Gondwana, the southern ‘supercontinent’ that originally comprised South America, Africa, India and Australia. It is thought this once lay near the equator, and gradually began to drift south before being broken apart by the shift in the earth’s tectonic plates. South America and Africa drifted off first, while India, Australia and Antarctica continued towards the South Pole, arriving about a hundred million years ago. The break-up continued. India and Australia moved north some thirty-five million years later, but Antarctica remained. It began to ice over between ten and twenty-five million years ago.
In our modern age, no region has been the subject of more conflicting hypotheses. The possibility of a fabulously abundant southern continent took hold in the West in the middle ages, where they were unaware of the (perhaps true) fable of the Polynesian sailor Ui-te-Rangiora, who is supposed to have sailed his canoe to the edge of Antarctica in about AD 650, to be met by a vast frozen ocean. But as mappae mundi gave way to true exploration things became a little less alluring, and Antarctica tended to disappear from maps altogether. In 1497, Vasco da Gama’s journey around the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of southern Africa disproved once and for all the prospect of this southern continent still being attached to a temperate country.* Then in 1531, the French cartographer Oronce Finé published a famous woodcut of the world in two heart-shaped spheres, notable for showing Greenland as an island for the first time, and for a remarkably accurate estimate of the coast of Antarctica as it would appear to us now if free of ice. This was accompanied by a rather modest observation: ‘Not Fully Examined.’
But for the next three centuries the mapping of Antarctica remained a confused mess of conjecture. It was perennially considered part of Terra Australis, a huge shape-shifting area in the southern hemisphere that, at various times, contained Tierra del Fuego, Australia, New Zealand and anything else floating in the Pacific Ocean that sailors encountered by accident. The word ‘Australis’ was simply the Latin word for ‘Southern’, and on maps of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it most commonly appeared within the phrase ‘Terra Australis Incognita’ (a shortened form of ‘Terra Australis Nondum Cognita’, which Ortelius spread over the whole base of his world map in 1570). The South Pole or ‘Antarctic Pole’ was often located on these maps, but in most of the great atlases by Blaeu, Mercator, Jansson and Hondius it is surrounded not by a white mass of land but a sepia or green one, made up entirely of ocean. The entire continent had seemingly disappeared, and so it remained until Captain Cook suggested otherwise.
Oronce Finé’s remarkably accurate map of Antarctica from 1531, which also shows Greenland for the first time as an island.
We have seen how much explorers and cartographers abhor a blank space, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that, faced with a lack of true knowledge, we began inventing things. Mythical islands appeared on the southern base of the map at regular intervals. Francis Drake got there first in 1578, when the Golden Hind was driven south by gales and he encountered what was in reality probably the Tierra del Fuego archipelago, which he instead named Elizabethides and claimed for his Queen. But Drake merely set a trend. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, Elizabethides was joined by Isla Grande, Royal Company Island, Swain’s Island, The Chimneys, Macey’s Island, Burdwood Island and Morrell’s New South Greenland – all of which floated around Antarctica, all of which made their way onto popular maps, all of which were discovered by proud (mainly English) explorers, and none of which actually existed.
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Between 1772 and 1775, on his second great voyage, James Cook undertook what may be considered one of the bravest and most brutally elemental sea voyages ever made. He entered the Antarctic Circle three times in dense fog, on each occasion being forced back by pack ice. His voyage was sponsored by the Royal Society, where the Scottish Hydographer Alexander Dalrymple had postulated that Terra Australis was not a hypothetical land, and lay somewhere not far south of Australia. (Cook had sailed to Australia in 1770, replacing the name on contemporary Dutch maps – New Holland – with the British ‘New South Wales’.)
There was indeed land somewhere south, but it was far more southerly and far less welcoming than anyone at the Royal Society’s London offices had dared imagine. ‘I will not say it was impossible anywhere to get farther to the south,’ Cook wrote after his third attempt, ‘but the attempting it would have been a dangerous and rash enterprise…’ He noted the sound of penguins but saw none, and envisioned land somewhere beyond the icebergs. The area spooked him, and he was pleased to be heading north – ‘I, who had ambition not only to go farther than any one had been before, but as far as it was possible for man to go.’ More than a century later, Captain Scott would sum it all up: ‘Once and for all the idea of a populous fertile southern continent was proved to be a myth, and it was clearly shown that whatever land might exist to the South must be a region of desolation hidden beneath a mantle of ice and snow…The limits of the habitable globe were made known.’
Cook never claimed to have actually seen Antarctica, and he did not affirm its presence on the map. Precisely who saw the Antarctic Peninsula first is still open to conjecture, and it may well have been any number of uncelebrated and anonymous British mariners in search of seal fur. Or it may have been Sir Edward Bransfield, an Irish lieutenant in the Royal Navy, and his pilot William Smith. But the written records suggest that the first official sighting, forty-five years after Cook turned for home, involved a mythically grizzled Russian sea captain and a young fur trader from America.
In November 1820, Nathaniel Palmer, a twenty-one-year-old American sea captain, was considered sufficiently experienced by his New England sealing compatriots to pilot a small shallow-bottomed boat in search of new bounty in the Southern Ocean. The area around the newly-discovered South Shetland Islands was yielding such vast quantities of fur and blubber that a trawler with a large enough hull could make a fortune for its crew on just one voyage (if only it could avoid the stunning pale blue icebergs).* Palmer was out on watch duty one night on his boat, Hero, when he believed he heard voices in the fog. At first he thought it must have been penguins or albatrosses, but when the fog lifted the following morning it turned out to be the Russian frigate Rostok.
Palmer went aboard, and relayed what happened next by letter to his niece. He was ushered into the presence of the ship’s commander, Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen. He told him how far south he had been on his journey, and that he had sighted land. ‘He rose much agitated, begging I would produce my logbook and chart.’ When it arrived, the Russian, speaking through an interpreter, proclaimed:
‘What do I see, and what do I hear from a boy in his teens – that he is commander of a tiny boat the size of a launch of my frigate and has pushed his way to the pole through storm and ice and sought the point I, in command of one of the best appointed fleets at the disposal of my august master, have for three long, weary, anxious years searched day and night for. What shall I say to my master? What will he think of me? But be that as it may, my grief is your joy; wear your laurels with my sincere prayers for your welfare. I name the land you have discovered in honor of yourself, noble boy, Palmer’s Land.”’
And there it sits on the map to this day, a long narrow slice of the lower half of the peninsula not far from the main body of the continent. The Bellingshausen Sea is there as well, but it buffets a westerly area around the largest Antarctic island that Bellingshausen could lay claim to, Alexander Island, which he named after the reigning Tsar.*
The prospect of unclaimed territory was an immensely appealing ambition for almost everyone who followed Palmer in the direction of the pole, and occasionally ambition undid them. Fans of the heroic age of Antarctic discovery will be familiar with the Weddell Sea, the treacherous area of drifting pack ice that crushed Shackleton’s Endurance in 1915. The man after whom it was named, the British Royal Navy sealing captain James Weddell, is not remembered by colleagues as a universally upright character (he failed to repay his loans), and in cartographic respects he appears to hover between unreliable and fraudulent. His map of 1825 appears to have been copied straight from Nathaniel Palmer, merely changing names to include his sponsors, colleagues or friends. So Spencer’s Strait became English Strait, Sartorius Island became Greenwich Island, and Gibbs Island became Narrow Island. These random transformations (there were more than twenty of them) remained on atlas maps for half a century.
There is also the suggestion that in the reports of his voyages Weddell deliberately overstated just how far south he had travelled, claiming he had sailed six degrees of latitude nearer the pole than anyone before him, apparently making the journey in clear sea without pack ice. The apparent ease of his passage inspired many subsequent navigators to plot a similar course, wherein they encountered only thick, impassable ice and were forced to turn back. Admiralty maps thus changed their description in the 1820s from ‘Sea of George the Fourth, navigable’ to merely Weddell Sea.
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In 1838, the mapping of the continent received a welcome new scientific impetus. At the eighth meeting of the British Association For The Advancement of Science, a discussion was devoted to the dilemma of Terrestrial Magnetism, the pull of the earth’s magnetic force that had baffled sailors and their compasses for centuries. Those at the BAFTAS that year believed that Germany was leading the way in magnetic science, and, if unchecked, would lead to unfair dominance in the mapping, settling and trading of distant lands. So a committee was appointed, led by the indefatigable astronomer-photographer-botanist Sir John Herschel. Lord Melbourne, the Prime Minister, was to be kept continually informed, and it was recommended that a naval expedition depart for magnetic observations in the Antarctic seas. According to the meeting’s resolutions, the expedition was to focus specifically on the ‘horizontal direction, dip and intensity’, measured hourly. The further south these observations could be made, the better. But who, among the scientific and naval personnel at the disposal of Her Majesty’s Government, was up to this task?
Step forward Captain Sir James Clark Ross, a thirty-eight-year-old English naval officer, hooked on discovery since his teenage travels with his uncle Sir John Ross to find the Northwest Passage. In 1831 James Ross was the first to find the North Magnetic Pole, the point where the earth’s magnetic field points precisely 90 degrees south, a constantly shifting measurement due to changes in the earth’s core. Surely the South Magnetic Pole was within reach too?
In the journal of his voyages between 1839 and 1843, Ross provides a dramatic commentary on his travels, and his magnetic observations are supplemented, almost incidentally, by notifications of great geographic discovery. But before the likes of St Helena and the Cape of Good Hope, an unscheduled stop on 17 December 1839: the island of Trinidad. No sooner had he clambered aboard than Ross observed the strangest phenomenon: his magnetic readings on the island oscillated wildly, with three separate compasses (placed far enough apart so not to affect each other) showing three degrees difference, and none of them accurately displaying what he believed to be the island’s true geographical position.
Thirteen months later, in January 1841, Ross made one of his great discoveries – Victoria Land. The map illustrating his find, included in his published journal, provides one of the proudest, greediest, and most egocentric examples of colonialist cartography of the nineteenth century. Throughout the four-year voyage, the crews of the Erebus and Terror named every new southerly sighting after friends, family, heroes, statesmen and fellow crew members, as if they were cataloguing fossils on a beach. ‘A remarkable conical mountain to the north of Mount Northampton was named in compliment to the Rev W. Vernon Harcourt,’ Ross wrote in his journal on 19 January 1841. Harcourt was a co-founder of the British Association, and the mountain just to the south of it was named after Sir David Brewster, the other co-founder. And mountains nearby named Lubbock, Murchison and Phillips were named after the BA’s treasurer, general secretary and assistant secretary.
There was nothing unusual in this practice, but it is rare to find an area of new geography so full of civil servants. One requires very keen eyesight to decipher them all on the original map published with his memoirs, the names written tightly on both sides of the coastline, capes on the left, mountains on the right. Even then we are looking at text resembling hairs on an arm: from Cape North we go vertically to Cape Hooker, Cape Moore, Cape Wood, Cape Adare, Cape Downshire, Cape McCormick, Cape Christie, Cape Hallett and Cape Cotter.
This is how maps were made: you see it and it’s yours (or at your friend’s, or the person who sent you on this mission). There are occasional loved ones too: ‘This land having been thus discovered … on the birth-day of a lady to whom I was then attached,’ Ross wrote on 17 January 1841, ‘I gave her name to the extreme southern point – Cape Anne.’ Romantic cartography, like romantic tattooing, can be a self-indulgent art, not to say a risky one: in this case, Anne did become his wife. In general, women got quite a good deal in Antarctica: Queen Mary Land, Princess Elizabeth Island, Queen Alexandra Range. Adelie Land and Adelie penguins were named for his wife by the French explorer Jules Dumont d’Urville, while Marie Byrd Land, a large chunk of West Antarctica, was named by the pioneering Antarctic pilot Admiral Byrd for his wife in 1929.
Names on the Antarctic map illuminate more than just devotion; they also show fear and disgust. Despair Rocks, Exasperation Inlet, Inexpressible Island, Destruction Bay, Delusion Point, Gale Ridge and Stench Point; at these southerly points, the explorers’ scales had certainly fallen from their eyes. And we leave James Clark Ross in another bleak region – the Ross Sea and the Great Ice Barrier (later called the Ross Ice Shelf) – the area that rendered him immortal and froze the minds of all who followed him in the valiant and tragic subsequent British expeditions to the pole.
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Apsley Cherry-Garrard set off on the ill-fated Terra Nova expedition with Scott and Co. Ltd in 1910, at the age of twenty-four, and he returned three years later almost blind and toothless, with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression to come. His stated role on the mission was principally to gather penguin eggs and supply the depots, but he had other uses too: he was indefatigably cheery, and he was, it turned out later, a brilliantly dramatic chronicler of events. The Worst Journey in the World (1922), his classic account of the expedition, still chills, and did much to realign our romantic vision of the age of ice and heroism.
Cherry-Garrard writes that one of the books passed around on the return voyage was a biography of Robert Louis Stevenson; and he was also aware of the quests of E.F. Knight. The first major adventure in his account, some forty days after setting off from Cardiff, concerns yet another landing at South Trinidad (Scott’s second visit and his last), and he writes with displeasure at the land crabs and with anticipation of ‘a very thorough search of this island of treasure’. Scott and his team were there partly for sport (they killed a lot of terns and petrels) and partly for research (they bottled a lot of spiders and labelled them for the British Museum). The island almost gets its revenge on the visitors when, on departure, many in the party are swept away onto rocks by huge waves; for a tempestuous while this looked like the end of the Antarctic party long before they tackled the pole, and they were only just rescued by ropes.
Cherry-Garrard’s account is notable to us for another stark reason – three sketched maps. The first, showing McMurdo Sound, contains useful indications of points in the author’s story, including a Fodder Depot, Safety Camp and Rescue Camp, but is otherwise unremarkable. The second shows the route of the winter journey from Cape Evans to Cape Crozier and back in search of an unhatched Emperor penguin egg. This was the ‘Worst Journey’ of the title, a dotted line with dates attached (June 28, July 15, August 1): five weeks of unyielding misery as three men hauled heavy supplies against raging blizzards and their chronicler experienced ‘such extremity of suffering’ that ‘madness or death may give relief’.
But the last map is the one we remember – the terrible return trek from the South Pole to the ‘safety’ camp by McMurdo Sound, the camp that Scott’s party didn’t reach. A long dotted line passes over mountains and glaciers, and it seems to dominate them; for the first time, the route appears to be in charge of nature. But look closer and we see this is not the case – it is the line of a funeral procession. Every now and then there are familiar names marking landmarks that had not existed before: ‘Evans Retd’ is one, a small nick on the route between two supply depots. About 250 geographical miles further on (the scale is unreliable) we reach another nick by the Beardmore Glacier: ‘Evans Died’. About 250 miles more there is another vertical nick, this one supplemented with a slightly longer horizontal line, the international sign of a cross for a grave or a church, and it says simply: ‘Oates’. Eleven or so miles north along the line is another cross, marking the final resting place of Scott, Wilson and Bowers (Cherry-Garrard was in the search party that found the bodies six months after they died). On the map it just says ‘Tent’.
A long white trail of despair: Cherry-Garrard’s map from ‘The Worst Journey in the World’.
Paul Theroux has made the point that great explorations demand fine writers to bring it all home – the fierce desperation, the unbound elation, the emotional and humane mixed with the procedural. This explains why we know what cold feels like, but we don’t really know what it’s like to walk on the moon. A good sketched map delivers a similar bounty. We may detect the emotional state of the amateur cartographer through the graphite and nib of hand-drawn markings, and because we know we are witnessing history as it happens. In the introduction to his book, Cherry-Garrard expressed a sense of duty to pass on to the next set of adventurers as much systemised knowledge as possible to aid them on their travels, just as Cook had passed to Ross and Ross to Shackleton and Scott. Cherry-Garrard maintains that ‘exploration is the physical expression of the Intellectual Passion’, and the gradual filling-in of the maps is the most direct and literal way of reflecting progress in this field.
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In December 1959, the map of Antarctica was made anew. Or rather it was settled anew, after twelve countries signed the Antarctic Treaty in Washington DC and agreed to use the continent for scientific and peaceful purposes. Weapons testing and nuclear waste disposal were banned, and the free sharing of information was encouraged, and when the treaty was renewed on its 50th anniversary, 36 other countries had agreed to its terms. Between 1908 and 1940, seven countries staked territorial claims to the land (Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, Great Britain, New Zealand and Norway), and the treaty officially refused to recognise or dispute them. When occasional spats – usually between Britain, Argentina and Chile – flare up over the possibility of exploiting the natural resources beneath the ice, the land-grab map is dusted off to reveal about fifteen per cent of the pie left unclaimed. It is widely understood that the United States will make a claim should the treaty fail, although it already seems to run the place.
In 2002, 165 years after Ross began to put the region on the map, and 93 years after Amundsen and Scott reached the Pole, the Americans built a permanent road there. Stretching some 1,400 km from McMurdo Sound to the Amundsen-Scott research station at the pole, it is a road through half the map of Antarctica. The South Pole Traverse is a strip of packed ice marked by flags, the coldest man-made roadway on earth. A trail of huge-wheeled vehicles pulls sleds of food, medical supplies, waste, communication cables and visitors, and since becoming operational in 2008 it has saved an estimated forty flights a year. This being an American enterprise, the traverse has another name too: the McMurdo-South Pole Highway.
It takes about forty days to make the trek. No dogs, horses or possessed explorers die en route, and those who passed this way less than a hundred years before would have perished from shock if they had been told of such a thing. A road from the tip of Victoria Land across the Ross Ice Shelf; a road connecting a runway and helicopter pad with a permanently manned research centre resembling a small town, where its scientists are engaged year-round in glacial geology and the monitoring of the drifting ice sheet, astrophysics and the monitoring of ozone, and a slightly less academic science known as the vigilant disapproval of tourists.
A little more than a century after Amundsen and Scott, Antarctica tops the wealthy traveller’s bucket list. It’s an expensive trip: the clothes alone will cost as much as a summer in the Med, and you will lose your dinner many times over as you chop your way south of Argentina through stormy Drake Passage. But more than 20,000 visitors a year now visit a continent that was once thought unattainable. Many who make the trip report not just on the cold, the penguins and the incredible light, but echo the views of one polar explorer – Robert Swan, who walked to the South Pole in 1985–86 – who observed that the experience wipes the slate clean, like a child’s magic drawing pad.
Despite the influx, there is still romance to be had. When I met the writer Sara Wheeler for tea one day to talk about Antarctica (the book of her adventures, Terra Incognita, is one of the modern classics of polar literature) she brought along one of the paper maps she had in her backpack as she made her trip to the South Pole. Produced by the US Geological Survey, the map is a topographical collection of data around the Taylor Glacier near Victoria Land, an area first explored by the British expedition of 1901–04.
‘It was one of the happiest days of my life,’ Wheeler told me. ‘I was following the map with my finger, trying to locate exactly where I was, and I came to this point here …’ She unfurled the map, and half of it was a big white blank. The words marking the end of this cartographic endeavour simply read, ‘Limit of Compilation’. ‘I’d reached the end of the map,’ Wheeler said with delight.
But she was travelling in the 1980s, and that map was from the 1960s. Thanks to satellites, Antarctica is all mapped now. The region is still predominantly unexplored, but the satellites have seen it, and the frozen wastes have digital coordinates. Perhaps we cling to a romantic notion of Antarctica because we are responsible for transforming it from the last great unmapped place on earth into something dotted with old huts and new research stations, and we face the sobering fact that much of the recent research conducted there points towards environmental disaster. The map is no longer white, and the challenge is no longer to reach the continent but to save it.
Are you vicious? Do you lurch? Have you ever thought of yourself as semi-criminal? Or are you just purple going on blue?
If you lived in London in the 1890s, Charles Booth, creator of the London Poverty Map, had a category for you – for what you were depended on where you lived. If you lived in a nice neighbourhood such as Kensington or Lewisham then you probably lived in a street coloured yellow and designated ‘Upper-middle and Upper classes. Wealthy’. If you lived in Shoreditch or Holborn, you might well have a street address edged in black (‘Lowest class, vicious. Semi-criminal.’).
It was a slight, of course, and a slight generalisation. But that’s morphological mapping for you, and it was just this mapping that changed the lives of millions.
Charles Booth was born in Liverpool in 1840, which meant he was perfectly placed to witness the effects of industrialisation on a city that didn’t have the social infrastructure to cope with it. When he took the new steam train to London the picture was even more extreme: those who had been made wealthy by mass manufacture and foreign trade were erecting fearful mental barricades against those whose lives had seemingly gone backwards in the rush. The well-off had begun to segregate themselves in cities like never before, and swiftly became reliant on the new police force to maintain order. But just how big was the problem of the poor? And did domestic squalor necessarily lead to social disorder?
Influenced both by the Quaker philanthropic zeal of Joseph Rowntree and by his wife Mary’s experience of deprivation in the East End, Booth decided to find out. And as the President of the Royal Statistical Society, he was clearly well placed.
Booth had studied the census from 1891, and had broken down the figures on earnings and dwellings into conclusions that at the time established a completely new understanding of how poverty influenced a geographical area. Then he went further, and suggested that where you called home may influence not only how well you lived, but also how well you behaved. A multi-volume report of Booth’s work was full of notes, tables and jagged graphs, and encompassed not just poverty and housing, but also industry and religious influences. Yet he knew from his earliest statistical work that the impact of his research rarely reached those directly affected by it. So he published his findings as maps.
London’s East End – well-to-do on the main roads but distinctly dodgy in the back streets.
Booth obtained the latest Ordnance Survey charts (on a scale of 25 inches to a mile), and instructed his assistants on hand-colouring. The streets of his first map of Tower Hamlets had six colour coded categories, but the large-scale map of London had seven:
Black: Lowest class. Vicious, semi-criminal.
Dark blue: Very poor, casual. Chronic want.
Light blue: Poor. 18 to 21 shillings per week for a moderate family.
Purple: Mixed. Some comfortable, others poor.
Pink: Fairly comfortable. Good ordinary earnings.
Red: Well to-do. Middle class.
Yellow: Upper-middle and Upper classes. Wealthy.
Some streets contained a blend of Booth’s colours, but his findings were still stark. Just over 30 per cent of London’s population was shown to be in poverty. His methodology set the tone for a new form of urban cartography that amplified a specific form of information in an aesthetically compelling way. But there was something else about Booth’s maps: they made it look as if the city was moving, not unlike like a live traffic stream today. They weren’t just about topography or navigations – they were about people.
The maps were first displayed at Toynbee Hall in the East End where Booth lectured, and they received instant acclaim. The Pall Mall Gazette called him ‘a social Copernicus.’ A closer look revealed far more than the dissection of London’s rich and poor. They showed that the middle/merchant classes grouped around the large thoroughfares into the city – Finchley Road, for instance, as well as Essex Road and Kingsland Road. Extreme poverty settled by railway yards and canals, as well as cul-de-sacs and alleys; the common wisdom had it that criminal classes would find these labyrinths easier to hide in and ambush intruders. Nor did you want to live – or venture close to – the docks around Shadwell or Limehouse, areas we now would regard as warehouse-hip and 2012 Olympic.
Booth continued to expand and update his map coverage until 1903. He didn’t work alone, and his many assistants gathered information from many sources, particularly school board inspectors, ‘worthy’ locals and the police. The descriptions that accompanied the maps were both startling and compelling. Chelsea, for example, was predominantly blue to black, its houses described as predominantly damp, crowded and peopled with ‘lurchers’ who never pay rent. Westminster was dark blue, a dirty, bad lot. Greenwich, red, was a little more des res, teeming with caretakers, police sergeants and works inspectors. The reports also detected what we may now call gentrification and the reverse, the formation of slums. As Booth put it colourfully, ‘The red and yellow classes are leaving, and the streets which they occupied are becoming pink … whilst the streets which were formerly pink turn to purple and purple to light blue.’
Booth’s reports on the black and blue areas were less about poverty and more the degrees of crime. In the Woolwich ‘Dust Hole’ for example, blue and black on the map, the police refuse to attend incidents unaccompanied, and find that ‘missiles are showered on them from every window when they interfere.’ Elsewhere in the darkness, Borough High Street seemed to come straight out of Nicholas Nickleby: ‘Youths and middle-aged men of the lowest casual class loafing. Undergrown men. Women slouching with bedraggled skirts. A deformed boy with naked half-formed leg turned in the wrong direction …’
Booth’s colour-coding had many limitations, as he himself acknowledged, not least condemning nameless inhabitants on account of their neighbourhood; it did nothing for the ghettoisation of the Jewish and Irish populations in the East End. But the maps did lead to reform and the improvement of lives. In 1890, a year after his first map appeared, the Public Health Amendment Act prioritised the local provision of water and sanitation, while The Housing of the Working Classes Act of the same year enabled local authorities to purchase land for improvement and thus initiate slum clearance. Two of the causes Booth identified as the cause of poverty are so obvious to us now that they seem banal – low income and unemployment. But the third was more shocking in its generalisation: old age. Booth saw this last cause as the easiest to improve, and the statutory introduction of a non-contributory pension in 1908 owed much to his campaigning.
Booth’s cartography had solidified a fairly novel theory in the way we live our lives, namely that where we live does indeed determine how we behave. The layout of the city – its morphology – was itself a prime cause of misdemeanour. Booth advocated the provision of more open green spaces and the eradication of the cul-de-sacs, courts and alleys – a prime force in the fairly new concept of urban planning rooted in social justice.
One looks at the Booth maps today (and they have a fine, searchable website) with a mixture of disbelief and awe. Has there ever been a finer depiction of a more vibrant city? Has there ever been a map where the population it portrayed gazed upon it with so much anxiety?
