Simon Garfield has chosen an apt double entendre as the title for his delightful paean to maps: To be On the Map is to have arrived. To discourse On the Map is to ponder cartography’s course through history and throughout the cultural milieu. With pleasure, I accept the invitation he offers any reader of this book – to lose oneself in map perusal.
I love maps. I do not collect them, unless you count the ones in the box under my desk, which I’ve saved as souvenirs from the cities they walked me through or cross-country trips they guided. The maps I covet – early renderings of the known world before the New World came to light, mariner’s portolans bearing wind roses and sea monsters – are all beyond my means, anyway. They belong where they are, in museums and libraries, and not confined to the walls (or condemned to the humidity) of my house.
I think about maps a lot. When working on a book project, I must keep a map of the territory at hand, to help the characters find their roots. Even at odd moments, say while clearing spam from the junk folders of my email accounts, it occurs to me that ‘spam’ is ‘maps’ spelled backward, and how maps, the true opposite of spam, do not arrive unbidden, but only beckon.
A map will lead you to the brink of Terra Incognita, and leave you there, or communicate the comfort of knowing, ‘You are here.’
Maps look down, as I do, watching my step. Their downward perspective seems so obvious, so familiar as to make one forget how much looking-up they entail. Ptolemy’s rules of cartography, written out in the second century, descended from his prior study of astronomy. He called down the moon and stars to help him align the world’s eight thousand known locations. Thus he drew the tropic lines and equator through the places where the planets passed directly overhead, making his best guess of east–west distances by the light of a lunar eclipse. And it was Ptolemy who set North at the top of the map, where the pole pointed to a lone star that held still through the night.
Like everyone else these days, I rely on quick computer-generated maps for driving directions, and often find my way on foot or public transportation via the maps app on my smart phone. But for serious travel preparation I need a plat. Only a map can give me a sense of where I’m going. If I fail to see, before setting off, whether the destination is shaped like a boot or a fish tail or an animal hide, I will never gain a sense of the place once I’m there. Seeing ahead of time that streets obey a grid layout – or they circle around a hub, or follow no discernible plan – already tells me something of what wandering them will be like.
If I’m not really going anywhere, then travel by map of course provides the only possible route – to everywhere, to nowhere in particular, to the folds of the human genome, the summit of Everest, the paths of future transits of Venus for the next three thousand years. Even buried treasure, lost continents and phantom islands are all accessible by map.
What difference does it make if I never reach my map-dream destinations, when even the most admired map-makers of old stayed home? I think of Fra Mauro, immured in his Venetian monastery, spinning the thin yarns of untrustworthy travellers into his own gorgeous geography.
I revel in the visual luxury of maps. The so-called four-colour map conjecture, which defines the minimum number of pigments required for constructing a world map, sets no upper bounds on artistic licence.
The language of maps sounds no less colourful to my ear. Words like ‘latitude’ and ‘graticule’ rattle out of the mouth to cast a net around the world. And ‘cartouche’, the map’s decorative title block or legend, whooshes off the tongue with a breeze. Some names of places yodel; others click or sing. Gladly would I go from Grand-Bassam to Tabou along the coast of the Côte d’Ivoire, if only to say so out loud.
Maps are guilty of distortion, it’s true, but I forgive them for it. How could one wrestle the round world down to a flattened image on the page without sacrificing some proportion? The various methods of map projection, from the eponymous Mercator to the orthographic, gnomonic or azimuthal, all cause one continent or another to morph. Just because I grew up seeing Greenland the equal of Africa in land mass doesn’t mean I believed them to be that way, any more than I fretted over the misnomer of Greenland, a place white with ice, near Iceland, green with flora. Maps are only human, after all.
Every map tells a story. The picturesque antique ones speak of quest and conquest, of discovery, claim and glory, not to mention the horror tales about exploitation of native populations. Story lines may blur in modern maps, under a welter of natural and manmade features, yet up-to-date maps make great templates for new stories: swept clean of their topographical details, and with various data superimposed, they can make a statement about the voting patterns in the latest election, say, or the spread of disease at epidemic’s first threat.
The only thing better than a map is an atlas. Atlas himself, the Titan who once held the heavens on his shoulders, has lent his name to a family of rockets as well as to book-length compendia of maps. I own several of these worthy Atlas namesakes, all requiring strong arms to bear them from shelf to table.
I could enthuse about globes, too, especially the bygone ones built and sold in pairs, one orb for earth and one for sky (also depicted from above, with the geometry of all constellations reversed). A globe, though, is merely an inflated, reincarnated map. It starts out flat, as a series of painted or printed gores, and these need to be fitted around and pasted on a ball to make the ends of the earth meet. If maps be the fuel of wanderlust, read on.