The Mapmakers

Dates Covered: -
ISBN: 0375409297
HH Rating:

Our Take

In 1971 Homer Jansen and a team of experienced aviators using new radar mapping technology did something completely new: they provided a complete map of the Amazon basin. Homer's thoughts turned immediately to the benefits his cartographic breakthrough had enabled: thousands of stone age tribes living in isolated pockets of Earth's most impenetrable jungle would start receiving the benefits of modern health care and education. Some years later as tens of thousands of acres of rainforest were cut, burned and bulldozed by ranchers, Jensen had more mixed emotions. The map didn't cause the clearcutting, but it definitely aided the process. Summing up the sentiment well, Jensen noted, "The fact that you have complete information, permits intelligent people to make decisions which will protect, as well as aggressive people to make decisions which will destroy." One suspects the American Indians, Australian Aboriginals, and countless native peoples feel similarly about the turn of events brought about by the revolution in mapmaking and discovery during the European Age of Exploration.

In his newly released revised edition of the classic The Mapmakers, New York Times science correspondent John Noble Wilford is at his best when describing the human element of mapmaking. To wit, we should probably not be surprised that one of the most furious debates in geodesy (the study of the size and shape of the Earth) involved the British and the French. In fact here at History House, we'd be quite disappointed if we couldn't find something important that the French didn't botch at least once. Interestingly, the national energies of these perennial squabblers were tied up in something that ought really have been a fairly dispassionate matter: the size of one degree of latitude. Were this measure to be different at different points on the Earth it would suggest our planet was not perfectly spherical. The British, thanks to the teachings of local hero Isaac Newton, were down with this. Earth would be fat around the middle thanks to centrifugal force. The French were more attached to a pet theory put forth by their home team captain, Rene Descartes, which had something to say about cosmic whirlpools and not much about gravity, but in any case did not agree with Newton's predictions. ("Those silly English with their trousers and their gravity," we imagine the puffed up French opining.) The national scientific bodies of each proud nation sponsored a contest to figure out the answer.

The chapter Wilford devotes to this entertaining feud ("The Matter of a Degree") is representative of the ambition and quality of the book as a whole. The purely scientific aspects of the dispute, such as measurement of latitude by astronomical observations, or instruments for angular measurements (sextant, octants, and the like), are handled in a clear and precise manner. With the basics in place, Wilford takes the reader through the amazingly difficult adventures the early mapmakers had to undertake to get accurate measurements. In the case of the argument about the shape of the Earth, this involved sending intrepid explorers to Peru and Lapland -- no easy task in the eighteenth century, especially when you have to baby sit a bunch of mapmakers and their fragile equipment. In one difficult incident, an entire survey team sat on the sidelines for a week while they waited for the smoke from a forest fire started by one of their signal fires to clear. In addition, Wilford points out that by the time mapmaking got to be strategically important, various nations decided each others' cartographers were spies; map makers would not only scale treacherous peaks in the dead of winter to get a good survey point, they would also disguise themselves and go under cover for years in hostile territory. The Mapmakers reads more like an adventure novel at times. This is important, because unless you are an accountant by trade, the sheer mathematics of building a map is really the least interesting part of the whole process.

Wilford allows the book to get a little slow at times, but the wonderfully dense and carefully researched information more than make up for it. With the same measured pace, the author takes his reader from the earliest maps known (in China & Mesopotamia) to the revolutions of mapping that computer modeling, space travel, and global positioning have enabled in the late twentieth century. Would Lewis and Clarke ever have thought that within two centuries of their great exploration of the American West that we would have detailed maps of other bodies of our solar system?

Like a good biography, The Mapmakers can get bogged down in some subject specific detail (such as the mechanics of aerial radar technology), but more than make up in the way that the focus creates an alternate view of a well-known history. Reading about the Age of Discovery through the eyes of the great mapmakers, rather than their mercantilist kings and queens is certainly fascinating.

And this is ultimately where the real value of The Mapmakers lies. In 473 surprisingly fast-moving pages, John Wilford exposes the reader to a truly under-appreciated way of looking at history. Maps are historical documents the same as the manuscripts over which historians love to pore, yet they do not get the same attention in classical history texts or classes. One must only look at the maps produced by the Catholic Church during the Age of Discovery to understand the wildly differing motivations of the church and the state at that time. (For those keeping score: the former fanciful pictures of paradise and the flat earth meant for theological indoctrination, and the latter full of mercilessly precise navigation routes meant for efficient economic plundering of the New World) Full of the prejudices of the societies that created them, and belying the heroism of the men who create them, Wilford reminds us that maps are subjective history -- and about as fascinating as it comes.

By the way, the English were right, of course.

Read More at Amazon.com

Discuss this book in our forums