The WONDERFUL WORLD of MAPS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 927, 17 May 1957, Page 4

The WONDERFUL WORLD of MAPS

"ITF you were a cockroach crawling across a Turkey carpet, you might have a very good idea of the red and blue threads right under your nose, but you wouldn’t be able to understand the beautiful pattern of the whole carpet; your field of view would be too small, You wouldn’t really find out what the pattern was unless_you_ made a picture of the carpet small enough to be seen by your cockroach eye-that is, a map of the carpet. How small you'd have to make the picture would be the scale of the map; what the map showed would be the kind of map, for your picture might be a general pattern of the carpet, or it might be one showing some special feature-the tracks to where crumbs were likely to be dropped near arm chairs, or something like that. Man is like the cockroach; unless he reduces the world about him to a picture the lines of which he can comprehend at once, the great patterns of life escape him. The map gives him a new and wider vision." In the first of a series of eight talks, The Wonderful World of Maps, D. W. McKenzie, Senior Lecturer in Geo- ‘ graphy at Victoria University College, uses the simile of the insect and the carpet to point the fundamental necessity of maps to man. Our intellect is so shaped that in observation we proceed from the particular to the general, imposing patterns where we can; and maps are perhaps the most satisfactory of these patterns, for they limit the unknown, and tell us where we are in relation to home, and where home is in relation to the world. . The story of the development of maps, especially in their earlier stages, relies a lot on the arts of detection. For, as'Mr McKenzie explains, a lot of the ~ -_

early maps are known only by the arguments that raged about them, or by the hearsay of contemporaries-‘For the sad fact is that maps are, to use a war word, expendable. They disappear for all sorts of reasons. For a start,.-most of the earlier maps were for travellers and so they would tend to be worn out by use and thrown away. Then travelling wasn’t always safe, and many a-map decayed with its owner’s bones; and many a chart was worn out at sea or lost in wreck." Another reason for their non-survival was the continuous assumption (probably still rife today) that a new map is always superior to an old one. The danger of this can be seen, especially if, as so often happened, the old one was based on some observation and the new only on the idea that things should be in a certain order. This happened when the accumulated work of Greek map-makers like Eratosthenes, Marinus of Tyre, and Ptolemy was disregarded in favour of Biblical authority during the Middle Ages. The Book of Ezekiel reads: "This is Jerusalem: I have set it in the midst of the nations and countries that are round about her." By a literal interpretation of this text Jerusalem became the centre of the world in the maps of the mecieval cartographers. Apart from portalan charts-remark-ably accurate charts that possibly originated with the sailors of Genoa-little accuracy was shown by maps of this time; rather imagination and ill authority ruled the day. This imagination took the form of peopling the outermost regions with monsters, "fantastic creatures," says Mr McKenzie, "that the medieval mind loved. A man with one eye in his forehead shades himself with an enormous foot held up in the air. On other maps there are men with faces in their chests, heads like donkeys, or feet turned backward-as well as

satyrs, griffins and goodness knows what." At the end of the 15th century dawned the heroic age of map making, the sun in this instance being the rediscovery of Ptolemy and the geography of the Greeks. Other factors contributing were the growing use of the compass "and the development of sailing vessels which could beat against the wind and didn’t have to carry oarsmen," and, of course, this was the age of printing. The Netherlands was to lead the world during this period, through their superiority in the art of line engraving, and through the possession of such men as Gerard Mercator and Abraham Ortelius. The former (remembered best for his projection-drummed into school geography classes) was for over 50 years the foremost map-maker of Europe, and did much to change the emphasis from pictorial art to scientific measurement. On May 20, 1570, the first edition of a first modern book of maps was published in Antwerp. This was the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World), compiled by Ortelius, which was to go through some 28 edi4

tions before that cartographer’s death. Though himself slowly accumulating data for his own book of maps, Mercator wrote to his friend, and technical rival, and commended him for the accuracy which he remarked was all too rare in those days. Mercator’s own work came out in three sec"tions during the next 25 years. The second part was published first (in 1585), the third next (1590), and the first part last, a year after Mercator died (1595). His son Rumbold explained in the dedicatory epistie (it was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth) that the title of "Atlas" for the first part was his father’s choice. This was the first use 4f a title which is now a commonplace. Of the persistence of his main contribution to map-making Mr McKenzie comments that the Mercator projection of the world is 22146." "2

"the one which | suppose four-fiths 0 our population regard as the way the world really looks." : About this same time, 1585, was published the first collection of marine maps, the Spiegel der Zeevaart, or Mariners’ Mirror, which was destined to go through many editions and be translated into other languages. The title page reproduced here shows something of the magnificent decoration popular with the Dutch. "The Dutch School declined towards the end of the 17th century, and with the coming of the 18th century ‘Age of Reason’ a new attitude to maps was developed in England and France." Of the French map makers Mr McKenzie says that they brought to their work that "cold light of reason which is perhaps the finest product of the French mind. Where they had no information they left their maps blank to show it. They had more accurate knowledge of latitude and longitude, and were already making instrumental surveys." While the French were engaged in reforming land maps by surveys and careful analysis, the English preoccupa-

tion with the sea led them to tackle one. of the most urgent of unsolved problems, the measurement of longitude at sea. The method of finding latitude by measurement of the altitude of the sun or a star had been in use since the days of the Greeks, and is still essentially the same in our own day; the measurement of longitude or distance east and west, however, was a vastly more difficult problem. For some two thousand years the problem had been shelved, the mariner relying on dead reckoning (the estimation of distance covered) to bring him safe to port. "All sorts of suggestions had been made, from anchoring a row of ships across the Atlantic to the use of the delightful popular remedy called the ‘powder of sympathy,’ which was applied, not to the wound, but to the weapon which caused it. The idea was to take on board ship a wounded dog and leave on land the ‘knife which wounded him. At Greenwich noon every day someone would dip the knife in the ‘powder of sympathy,’ whereupon the dog would yelp and the seaman know Greenwich time. Not a very accurate clock." And what was needed was an accurate clock, one that would keep the time of some place of reference accurately, no matter how long the voyage. On the solution of this the whole matter rested, until the son of a Yorkshire carpenter,

one John Harrison (after a lifetime of work and frustration by authority) produced his fourth chronometer, the prototype of all the chronometers found on ships plying the seas today. Harrison’s’ chronometer No. 4 was five inches in diameter, beat five to the second, and ran thirty hours without rewinding. On a testing voyage to Jamaica and back its total error in distance calculated was under 30 miles, in time, a minute and a bit. The world that Man thus slowly discovered and learned to map has spun a long way since then, and a circular map of the Middle Ages with Jerusalem in the middle and Mount Sinai drawn in as big as three Everests would look strange beside the modern American plastic model-maps whose hills and valleys pressed by machine into rigid relief, can be traced with the tip of a finger. This development and other modern developments in relief and model | making will all be treated in later talks in The Wonderful World of Maps. The series starts with "The Map Unrolls," to be heard from 4YA on Monday, May 20, at 7.15 p.m., and from 2YA the next day at 830 p.m. Other talks in the series are: ‘The Maps of the Greeks," "Maps in the Middle Ages," "Where Am I?" "All Maps are Liars," "The Camera Comes to Help," "Round Into Flat,’ and "Map and Model."