Mirrors of the Mind, The Interpretive Nature of Cartography

“ Nothing is more seductive than to let a spirit of dogmatism direct in the interpretation of the early maps, and there is no field of research in which predisposition to belief may lead one so wrongly. It was largely in the spirit of finding what they sought, that the early map-makers fashioned their charts; and their interpretation depends quite as much on geographical views current in those days as upon geographical facts patent in these days.
The study of early American cartography may be said to have begun with Humboldt ”

“ Its shape is no great improvement on the map of 1467, found at Warsaw. There was then no such constancy in the placing of mid-sea islands in maps, to interdict the random location of other islands at the cartographer’s will, without disturbing what at that day would have been deemed geographical probabilities, and there was all the necessary warranty in existing maps for the most wilfully depicted archipelago. The early Portuguese charts, not to name others, gave sufficient warrant for land where Estotiland and Drogeo appear. ”

“ When the compass came into general use on Italian ships in the thirteenth century, it naturally led to the development of an entirely new type of map, the Italian sea-charts or compass-charts, which were to be of fundamental importance to all future cartography. The mediæval maps of the world already mentioned were learned representations which were of no practical use to the navigator. The Greeks had drawn land-maps which were also of no great use at sea, and we do not know that they had sea-charts. ”

“ An excellent example of mediæval cartography, before these results and others like them began to show their influence on maps, is provided by the celebrated map preserved in Hereford4748 Cathedral, made about 1280 by Richard of Haldingham. Here is the world still shown as a round disk, with little conception of the form of the Mediterranean and its branch seas; while even the British Isles and north-west Europe are strangely distorted to fit the circle. Such is an illustration of the conception of the world still existing in western Europe. ”

“ In the sixteenth century scarcely any intellectual stimulus could be found more potent than the sight of such maps, revealing unknown lands, or cities and rivers with strange names, places of which many marvels had been recounted and almost anything might be believed. ”

“ Now that this world of ours has been so thoroughly explored that every bit of land and water is named and accurately noted, it is difficult for us to understand how the inaccurate, incomplete, fifteenth-century map could have been of any use whatever to an explorer. But we must always remember that our Genoese had a rich imagination. Our maps leave nothing to the imagination, either of the man who makes them or of us who look at them. Fifteenth- century maps, on the contrary, were a positive feast for the fifteenth- century imagination! ”

“ A curious survival of this custom lasted on in map-drawing almost to the beginning of this century, when the spare places in the ocean were adorned with pictures of sailing ships or spouting sea monsters.
When men desired to travel, they did not use such maps as these, but rather itineraries, or road-books, which did not profess to give the shape of the countries through which a traveller would pass, but only indicated the chief towns on the most-frequented roads. ”

“ The map will indicate how near he came to the main outlines of the Mediterranean, of Northwest Europe, of Arabia, and of the Black Sea. Beyond these regions he could only depend upon the rough indications and guesses of untutored merchants. But it is worth while referring to his method of determining latitude, as it was followed up by most succeeding geographers. Between the equator and the most northerly point known to him, he divides up the earth into horizontal strips, called by him "climates," and determined by the average length of the longest day in each. ”

“ But the renewal of the study of map-projection was mainly owing to German mathematicians, such as Werner of Nuremberg, and Apianus, in the first two decades of the century. In Mercator’s work there are to be observed various tendencies towards modern practice, such as the abolition of the old small sketches or miniatures representing towns and divers other subjects, and the introduction of symbols. On the other hand, the period of the application of criticism by the cartographer to the data before him was not yet come. Mercator was content to supplement data, where imperfect, by imagination ”

“ Geography was in his time a mixture of facts and fancies, much of what was taught in it having no better authority than old-time traditions and the fabulous stories of travelers who addressed themselves more to exciting wonder than to telling the truth. Maps were in a worse condition than the descriptive accounts, and gave the most erroneous possible views of the relative situation of the various parts of the earth. It was Mercator's work, to adapt an expression of Malte-Brun's, to demonstrate the extreme imperfection of the systems of the ancients and provoke their abolition. ”

“ He published at that place a large number of maps, but delayed the publication of his atlas for a considerable time, out of regard to his friend Ortelius, who had also prepared a set of maps, and through Mercator's accommodating spirit was given an opportunity to work off his stock without the embarrassment of competition. It is to Mercator and Ortelius that the world owes the enfranchisement of geography from the errors ingrafted upon it by Ptolemy ”

“ These names will be found affixed to their respective canals in the map at the end of the book, a map made upon what is called Mercator's projection. Mercator's projection I take to have been primarily an invention of the devil, although commonly credited to Mercator. It is not simple to construct and for popular purposes is eminently deceitful. It is intended for those at sea, whom we pray for on Sundays. It is certainly calculated to put any one entirely at sea who attempts to learn geography by means of it. ”

“ For topographical sheets it is obviously unsuitable; and in cases in which it is required to show large areas on small scales on an orthomorphic projection, that form should be chosen which gives two standard parallels (Lambert’s conical orthomorphic) . Mercator’s projection is often used in atlases for maps of the world. It is not a good projection to select for this purpose on account of the great exaggeration of scale near the poles. The misconceptions arising from this exaggeration of scale may, however, be corrected by the juxtaposition of a map of the world on an equal-area projection. ”

“ The plan has, however, the great practical advantage for sailors of causing the curve drawn on the sphere crossing all the meridians at the same angle—the loxodromatic curve, which a vessel would describe in sailing around the earth without changing its course—to be projected into a straight line. It thus furnishes a way in which the bearing of a vessel sailing directly between two distant ports can be clearly discerned on the map. While Mercator was successful in executing the designs of his maps on this method, he was not able to explain its theory, or at least did not explain it. ”

“ In 1554 Mercator published his great map of Europe in six sheets, three or four of which had already been pretty well worked out at Louvain; a copy of this was rediscovered at Breslau in 1889. Herein, though still greatly under Ptolemy’s influence, Mercator begins to emancipate himself; thus Ptolemy’s 62° for the length of the Mediterranean, reduced to 58° in the globe of 1541, he now cuts down to 53°. On the 28th of October 1556 he observed an eclipse at Duisburg; in 1563 he surveyed Lorraine, at the request of Duke Charles, and completed a map of the same (Lotharingiae descriptio) ”

“ For a long time mountains were supposed to be the limitations of rivers, and old maps represent them always as flowing along the valleys without ever passing through the mountain-chains that divide them; but geology is fast correcting the errors of geography, and a map which represents merely the external features of a country, without reference to their structural relations, is no longer of any scientific value. ”

“ All a political map is, then, is a map which pays relatively [48] more attention to the human side of geography than to the physical, and so, as it were, looks at the face of the continent from the point of view of man rather than nature. ”

“ Maps today are losing their attraction, for they permit of no escape, even to fancy. Maps do not allow us to forget that there are established and well-ordered governments up to the shores of the Arctic Ocean, waiting to restrict, to tax, and to punish us, and that their police patrol the tropical forests. But consider the legends on a chart even of the North Sea, of the world beneath the fathoms—the Silver Pits, the Dowsing Ground, the Leman Bank, the Great Fisher Ground, the Horn Reef, the Witch Ground, and the Great Dogger Bank! ”

“ It does not copy nature, but gives us a simplified representation of it, which is no misrepresentation, but such as sharpens our vision in view of the complexities of reality,—like the ideal picture which the geographer draws in his map, as a means not to deception but to more effective guidance, he meanwhile assuming, that they who are to profit by the map will know how to read it, i.e., to interpret it in accordance with nature. ”

“ Clearness and distinctness, every one must feel, are not the strong points of modern cartography, hence the use of sketch-maps: such as this of Spain, scribbled on a sheet of foolscap to keep him in mind of the graceful, swinging coastline and the proportions of the provinces.
The overloaded modern map is a work of reference—it is a dictionary, not a book. Ruskin felt that it was useless for educational or literary purposes, and he was continually trying to improve away the detail and to substitute graphic statistics. ”

“ RUSKIN'S MAPS
Reading the map is as great a pleasure to some people as reading a story-book. You will see them pore over the atlas for an hour together, going on dream-journeys. It is a cheap way of globe-trotting, and gets rid of the discomforts; only one must have imagination to turn the wriggling hair-lines into vistas of river scenery, and the woolly-bear shading into forested crests and peaks against the sunset. It needs a good deal of imagination to get over the ugliness of most modern maps; but why should maps be ugly? ”

“ Such a parallel of the historic survey of the city to that of its underlying geological area is thus in no wise a metaphoric one, but one which may be worked out upon maps sections and diagrams almost completely in the same way—in fact, with little change save that of colours and vertical scale. The attempt to express the characteristic and essential life and thought of a given region in each period upon a series of maps is in fact the best method of understanding the everyday map at which we commonly look so unthinkingly. ”

“ And like a diagram or map, it is in a way artificial since it gives weight to one element at the expense of the others. But again like the diagram or map, the thing it shows is a fact, a fact which is more readily grasped by this artificial device than by bald statement. Maps do not take the place of photographs, nevertheless they have their own peculiar place in making intelligible the make-up of the physical world. ”

“ Modern Cartography.—The compiler of maps of the present day enjoys many advantages not enjoyed by men similarly occupied a hundred years ago. Topographical surveys are gradually extending, and explorers of recent years are better trained for their work than they were a generation ago, whilst technical processes of recent invention—such as lithography, photography and heliogravure—facilitate or expedite the completion of his task. ”

“ The reduction and selection of details from a large-scale survey for use on a small general map, the methods of representing such details, the permissible limit of generalizing them, the choice of colours—these and other aspects of cartography really demand a scientific standard as exalted in its way as that of the surveyor. ”

“ The study of geography was advanced by improvements in cartography (see Map) , not only in the methods of survey and projection, but in the representation of the third dimension by means of contour lines introduced by Philippe Buache in 1737, and the more remarkable because less obvious invention of isotherms introduced by Humboldt in 1817. ”

“ Every good Geological Map ought to explain itself. It ought, in fact, to tell its own story regarding the features of the country it represents, and the rocks and formations of which the region is constructed; and if every person was acquainted with the principles of geology, and had been properly instructed in the plan according to which Geological Maps are prepared, no explanation would be required. ”

“ But science does not stand still. The most perfect geological map that can be made to-day will be capable of improvement thirty or forty years hence. The maps of the Geological Survey are no exception to this rule. ”

“ It is of great importance carefully to make these distinctions, because great mistakes as to the facts of history are often caused through men thinking and speaking as if the names of different countries, say for instance England, France, Burgundy, Austria, have always meant exactly the same extent of territory. Historical geography, in this sense, differs from physical geography which regards the natural features of the earth’s surface. ”

“ If we turn to politics for instances of the same fact, we again discover how much harder it is there than in religion, or morals, or education, to resist the habit of giving intellectual explanations of emotional experiences. For most men the central political entity is their country. When a man dies for his country, what does he die for? The reader in his chair thinks of the size and climate, the history and population, of some region in the atlas, and explains the action of the patriot by his relation to all these things. ”