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David Rumsey Map Collection
The Mountains of Kong, shown in
Africa on an 1839 American atlas, were 'discovered' by English
cartographer James Rennell in 1798. Rennell based his map showing the
fictional range on an erroneous account from a Scottish explorer. It
persisted on maps for almost a century—until it was discovered not to
exist.
Author Simon Garfield discusses his new book,
"On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks,"
with WSJ Weekend Review editor Gary Rosen.
It's not often that maps make headlines, but
they've been doing so with some regularity lately. Last week, tens of
millions of iPhone users found that they could suddenly leave their
homes again without getting either lost or cross. This was because
Google
GOOG -0.93%
finally released an app containing its own (fairly brilliant) mapping
system. Google Maps had been sorely missed for several months, ever
since
Apple
AAPL -0.46%
booted it in favor of the company's own inadequate alternative—a
cartographic dud blamed for everything from deleting Shakespeare's
birthplace to stranding Australian travelers in a desolate national park
43 miles away from their actual destination. As one Twitter wag
declared: "I wouldn't trade my Apple Maps for all the tea in Cuba."
Trustees of the British Museum
Among cartographic misfirings, the disaster of Apple Maps is rather minor compared to the history of map mistakes.
There was
one potential bright spot, though: Among the many mistakes found in
Apple Maps was a rather elegant solution to the continuing dispute
between Japan and China over the Senkaku islands. Japan controls them;
China claims them. Apple Maps, when released, simply duplicated the
islands, with two sets shown side-by-side—one for Japan, one for China.
Win-win. (At least until the software update.) Call it diplomacy by
digital dunderheadedness.
As some may recall, it was not so long ago that we got around by
using maps that folded. Occasionally, if we wanted a truly global
picture of our place in the world, we would pull shoulder-dislocating
atlases from shelves. The world was bigger back then. Experience and
cheaper travel have rendered it small, but nothing has shrunk the world
more than digital mapping.
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Photo Illustration by Stephen Webster; Sebastiano del Piombo/Art Resource (painting)
There is something valuable about getting lost occasionally, even in our pixilated, endlessly interconnected world.
In medieval Christian Europe, Jerusalem
was the center of the world, the ultimate end of a religious
pilgrimage. If we lived in China, that focal point was Youzhou. Later,
in the days of European empire, it might be Britain or France. Today, by
contrast, each of us now stands as an individual at the center of our
own map worlds. On our computers and phones, we plot a route not from A
to B but from ourselves ("Allow current location") to anywhere of our
choosing. Technology has enabled us to forget all about way-finding and
geography. This is some change, and some loss.
Maps have always related and realigned our history; increasingly,
we're ceding control of that history to the cold precision of the
computer. With this comes great responsibility. Leading mapmakers used
to be scattered around the world, all lending their distinctive talents
and interpretations. These days by far the most influential are
concentrated in one place—Mountain View, Calif., home of the Googleplex.
There is something disappointing about the austere potential
perfection of the new maps. The satellites above us have seen all there
is to see of the world; technically, they have mapped it all. But
satellites know nothing of the beauty of hand-drawn maps, with their
Spanish galleons and sea monsters, and they cannot comprehend wanderlust
and the desire for discovery. Today we can locate the smallest hamlet
in sub-Saharan Africa or the Yukon, but can we claim that we know them
any better? Do the irregular and unpredictable fancies of the older maps
more accurately reflect the strangeness of the world?
The uncertainty that was once an unavoidable part or our
relationship with maps has been replaced by a false sense of
Wi-Fi-enabled omnipotence. Digital maps are the enemies of wonder. They
suppress our urge to experiment and (usually) steer us from error—but
what could be more irrepressibly human than those very things?
Among cartographic misfirings, the disaster of Apple Maps is rather
minor, and may even have resulted in some happy accidents—in the same
way that Christopher Columbus discovered America when he was aiming for
somewhere more eastern and exotic. The history of cartography is nothing
if not a catalog of hit-and-miss, a combination of good fortune and
misdirection.
Project Gutenberg Australia
The map here, from explorer
Ernest Shackleton's account of his 1914-17 journey to the Antarctic,
notes the purported location of 'New South Greenland' (highlighted).
Described in 1823 by Capt. Benjamin Morrell, the island could not be
located.
The story starts at the Great Library
of Alexandria around 330 B.C., the place where the study of geography
really began. Its first scholars constructed an important proto-map of
the world, based largely on the writings of the Greek historian
Herodotus. His nine-volume "Researches" had been completed a century and
a half earlier, but his description of the rise and fall of the Persian
Empire and the Greco-Persian wars remained the most detailed source of
information on the shape of the known world.
These early scholars got a lot right—and inevitably a fair bit wrong.
The map they constructed depicted the world as round, or at least
roundish, which by the fourth century B.C. was commonly accepted
(dismissing the Homeric view that if you sailed long enough you would
eventually run out of sea and fall off the end).
Eratosthenes of Cyrene (in modern-day Libya) was one of the first
scholars to marshal the new geographical knowledge into the art of
cartography, making fullest use of the Library of Alexandria's scrolls,
the accounts of those who had swept through Europe and Persia in the
previous century, and the pertaining views of the leading contemporary
historians and astronomers.
His world map was drawn in about 194 B.C., and the shape of the
Victorian-era reconstruction of it (the original vanished long ago)
resembles nothing so much as a dinosaur skull. There are three
recognizable continents—Europe to the northeast, Africa (described as
Libya and Arabia) beneath it and Asia occupying the eastern half of the
map. The huge northern section of Asia is called Scythia, an area we
would now regard as encompassing Eastern Europe, the Ukraine and
southern Russia.
The map is sparse but sophisticated, and
noteworthy for its early use of parallels and meridians in a grid system
(with, bizarre as it seems to us now, the island of Rhodes—then a major
trading post—at the center of everything). The inhabited world
(something the Romans would later call "the civilized world") was
believed to occupy about one-third of the northern hemisphere and was
wholly contained within it.
The northernmost point, represented by the island of Thule (which may
have been Shetland or Iceland), was the last outpost before the world
became unbearably cold; the most southerly tip, labeled enticingly as
Cinnamon Country (corresponding to Ethiopia/Somaliland) was the point
beyond which the heat would burn your flesh. There are no poles, and the
three continents appear purposely huddled together, as if the huge
encroaching oceans and the vast areas of the unknown world are joining
forces against them. There is no New World, of course, no China, and
only a small section of Russia.
In the second century, the work of Eratosthenes would be one of the
templates used to produce what is traditionally regarded as the bridge
between the ancient and the modern world: Claudius Ptolemy's
"Geographia." This contained a vast list of names of cities and other
locations, each with a coordinate, and if the maps in a modern-day atlas
were described rather than drawn, they would look something like
Ptolemy's work, a laborious and exhausting undertaking based on a simple
grid system. He provided detailed descriptions for the construction of
not just a world map but 26 smaller areas.
As one would expect, Ptolemy still held a
skewed vision of the world, with distortions of Africa and India, and
the Mediterranean much too wide. But his projection of the shape of the
world is still something we would recognize today, and the placement of
cities and countries within the Greco-Roman empire is highly accurate.
He gives due credit to another key source, Marinus of Tyre, whose map
was the first to include both China and the Antarctic.
But Ptolemy was prone to the biggest and most contagious cartographic
vice: Lacking precise information, he just made things up. Like nature
itself, mapmakers have always abhorred a vacuum. White space on a map
reveals ignorance, and for some this has always been too much to bear.
Ptolemy could not resist filling blanks on his maps with theoretical
conceptions, something that plagues exploration to this day. The Indian
Ocean was displayed as a large sea surrounded by land, while many of his
measurements of longitude (something that was very hard to measure
accurately until John Harrison's timepiece won a famous competition in
the 18th century) were way off beam. The biggest miscalculation of all,
the longitudinal position of the Far East, would eventually suggest to
Columbus that Japan could be reached by sailing West from Europe.
But Ptolemy was at least attempting to map on scientific principles.
Not so the wonderful mappae mundi, a collection of large conceptions of
the world that filled our imaginations from the 11th century to the
Renaissance. These maps, which primarily adorned the world's churches
and other places of power and learning, succeeded in returning mapping
to the dark ages, getting much wrong and gleefully so. Their goal was
not navigation and accurate knowledge but rather religious instruction.
The maps contained places we seldom see on modern charts these
days—Paradise, for instance, and fiery Hell—and the sort of bestiary and
mythical imagery one might expect to find in Tolkien's Middle-earth. We
can marvel at the mythical bison-like Bonacon, for example, spreading
his acidic bodily waste over Turkey, and the Sciapod, a people whose
enormously swollen feet were said to make fine sun-shields.
The Renaissance and the golden age of exploration brought forth a
stricter regime and hot-off-the-deck maps from Portuguese and Spanish
explorers. Cumulatively, these resulted in the famous projection map of
Gerardus Mercator in 1569, a plan of the world that still forms the
basis of schoolroom teaching and Google Maps. The projection provided a
solution to a puzzle that had troubled mapmakers since the world was
recognized as a sphere: How does one represent the curved surface of the
globe on a flat chart? Mercator's solution remains a boon to sailors to
this day, even as it massively distorts the relative sizes of land
masses such as Africa and Greenland.
The catalog of cartographic inaccuracies goes on. Those living in
California may be curious to know that for more than two centuries their
homeland was not attached to the West Coast mainland but was thought to
be an island, drifting free in the Pacific. This wasn't a radical act
of political will, nor a single mistake (a slip of an engraver's hand,
perhaps), but a sustained act of misjudgment.
Stranger still, the error continued to appear on maps long after
navigators had tried to sail entirely around it and—with what must have
been a sense of utter bafflement—failed. Between its first appearance on
a Spanish map in 1622 and its fond farewell in a Japanese publication
of 1865, California appeared insular on at least 249 separate maps. Whom
should we blame for this misjudgment? Step forward one Antonio de la
Acensión, a Carmelite friar who noted the "island" in his journal after a
sailing trip in 1602-03.
But my favorite cartographic error is the Mountains of Kong, a range
that supposedly stretched like a belt from the west coast of Africa
through half the continent. It featured on world maps and atlases for
almost the entire 19th century. The mountains were first sketched in
1798 by the highly regarded English cartographer James Rennell, a man
already famous for mapping large parts of India.
The problem was, he had relied on erroneous reports from harried
explorers and his own imagined distant sightings. The Mountains of Kong
didn't actually exist, but like an unreliable Wikipedia entry that
appears in a million college essays, the range was reproduced on maps by
cartographers who should have known better. It was almost a century
before an enterprising Frenchman actually traveled to the site in 1889
and found that there were hardly even any hills there. As late as 1890,
the Mountains of Kong still featured in a Rand McNally map of Africa.
And then there was the case of Benjamin Morrell, who had drifted
around the southern hemisphere between 1822 and 1831 in search of
treasure, seals, wealth and fame. Having found little of the first
three, he apparently thought it amusing to invent a few islands en
route. The published accounts of his travels were so popular that his
findings—including Morrell Island (near Hawaii) and New South Greenland
(near Antarctica)—were entered on naval charts and world atlases. In
1875, a British naval captain named Sir Frederick Evans finally began
crossing some of these phantoms out, removing no fewer than 123 fake
islands from the British Admiralty Charts. It wasn't until Ernest
Shackleton's 1914-17 Endurance expedition, however, that the matter of
New South Greenland was put to rest. Shackleton found that the spot was
in fact deep sea, with soundings up to 1,900 fathoms. Morrell Island
came off maps not long after that.
But perhaps we shouldn't be too hard on the early mapmakers, these
pioneers of error. I would argue that Morrell and his misguided fellow
adventurers made the world a more exciting and romantic place in which
to live. Haven't we lost something important as mapmaking has become a
science of logarithms and apps and precisely calibrated directions?
Though those who gratefully downloaded Google Maps on their
smartphones last week might disagree, there is something valuable about
getting lost occasionally, even in our pixilated, endlessly
interconnected world. Children of the current generation will be poorer
for it if they never get to linger over a vast paper map and then try in
vain to fold it back into its original shape. They will miss
discovering that the world on a map is nothing if not an invitation to
dream.
—Mr. Garfield is the author of "On the Map: A
Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks," to be published
by Gotham next week.
A version of this article appeared December
22, 2012, on page C1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal,
with the headline: The Endof Map.
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