Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (14 page)

A one-of-a-kind Italian copy of Willem Blaeu’s famous world map, making it a $150,000 item. Check out “Terra Australis” in the lower right, nonexistent but nevertheless drawn large enough to dwarf Eurasia and Africa combined.

“Why old maps?” I ask Jonathan Potter, the veteran London map dealer who is running the fair’s largest setup. Potter recently announced that he was retiring from the map game and has put his prodigious collection, which has been valued at more than $6 million, up for sale. He laughs, as if he’s been ambushed by a question too big to answer. “Well, they combine all sorts of facets of art, history, scarcity, antiquity, intrinsic interest—it’s all in one. There aren’t many things that have all of that.”

The antiquity and historical importance of these maps are certainly behind much of their popularity. Map collectors tend to specialize in a particular niche: they collect only maps of Australia, say, or Scandinavia or Texas. And they don’t just
accumulate
like a man with a giant ball of string in his attic; they become scholarly authorities on their niche, intently studying the period and the region the maps come from. The definitive book on niggly cartographic subjects is most often written not by a curator or an academic but by some enthusiastic amateur. Map collectors are history buffs, in other words, and often ones with deep pockets. The world’s most valuable maps aren’t necessarily the beautiful ones but rather the ones that, like the Library of Congress’s $10 million Waldseemüller map, changed history in some way. In February 2010, a Maine auction house sold a map of the siege of Yorktown for $1.15 million,
a record price
for a map at auction. The map is creased, somewhat roughly sketched, and not particularly colorful—but that doesn’t matter much when you find out it was George Washington’s personal copy of his most crucial victory.

But it’s not just cold matters of historical fact that give old maps their allure. Most maps on the market are, when you think about it, of comparatively recent vintage. Almost none are more than five hundred years old—a mere blip in the march of time. Yet old maps come
to us with an aura of ancient mystery and romance wildly out of proportion to their actual age. Their mottled parchment is the tawny color of sandstone and mummy linen. Their novel and faintly untrust-worthy coastlines seem to have arrived from another world altogether: Atlantis, maybe, or ancient Mu. They’re not just artifacts; they are relics. National Geographic recently unveiled an “earth-toned” version of its standard world map, based on the faded palette of old sea charts. Envisioned as a bit of a novelty, it now outsells the familiar schoolroom-blue version. The message is clear: we count on our maps to be up to the minute, but we like them to seem venerable as well.

Studying the six-figure Blaeu world map in the Altea booth, my eye is immediately drawn to the parts that aren’t quite right, the way you might find yourself awkwardly unable, in conversation, to stop staring at a wart or a scar. Australia is connected to New Guinea and then extends southward to the pole, forming a landmass larger than Asia that the mapmaker called “Terra Australis Incognita.” A broad, imaginary swath through Canada, the so-called Strait of Anian, provides a northerly route from the Atlantic to Asia, the mythical “Northwest Passage” that many Europeans died trying to find.

But to the collector, these aren’t warts. Time has freed antique maps from the shackles of serving as reference objects, so their mistakes are lovingly prized by collectors, the way a printing error can add a zero or two to a stamp’s value. Dealers’ catalogs carefully enumerate these little quirks as major selling points. “California appears an island,” reads Altea’s description of a neighboring New World map.
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Or “Australia is connected to Tasmania,” or “the Great Lakes are open-ended to the west.” I’m a little alarmed to find that, if you go by most eighteenth-century French maps, my Seattle home is underwater, part of a vast “Bay of the West” that the Pacific Ocean has apparently carved out of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, British Columbia, and Alberta.

Why pay more for a map that’s wrong? Some of it is sheer novelty value: a map where California is floating in the middle of the Pacific makes a great conversation piece in an L.A. living room. But it’s also a charming memento of human ignorance and imperfection. It reminds us that maps are never completely reliable, should never be mistaken for the actual territory. Once drawn on one map, a fanciful invention like the “Bay of the West” would propagate through decades of later maps like a virus, sometimes appearing long after actual exploration had corrected the original goof. The tiny sickle-shaped island of Mayda first appeared on sixteenth-century maps just southwest of Ireland; as the oceans were more carefully charted, it gradually moved westward, toward Bermuda. Remarkably, it stuck around for four hundred years,
making its final appearance
on a Rand McNally map of 1906.
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The Mountains of Kong
, an imaginary range in western Africa, appeared in
Goode’s World Atlas
as late as 1995!

Jean Janvier included the “Baye de l’Ouest” on his 1782 map of North America. The Pacific Northwest may be wet, but it’s not
that
wet.

Mayda’s odd westward drift isn’t unusual in the annals of map errata. The crazily awesome stuff on old maps always gets pushed to the edge of the paper as time goes on. The Garden of Eden started out in Asia Minor and kept drifting over the horizon until finally it landed outside the map altogether. The fabled Seven Cities of Gold were originally believed to sit on an island in the North Atlantic,
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before being relocated to the American plains and finally winding up in the Southwest. You have to admire the dogged confidence of the mapmaker, never daunted by actual real-world evidence. “Okay, so nobody who goes to Turkey has managed to find Eden where we drew it on the last map. Well, it’s got to be over there somewhere . . . hey, how about Armenia? Are you guys cool with Armenia? All righty, then.” It’s easy to see this process as a metaphor for almighty reason sweeping superstition away from the center of human thought into the dustbin of history—or, if you’re a little more sentimental, for the tragedy of lost dreams and invention. According to that school of thought, Mayda’s final winking out of the North Atlantic in 1906 would be the equivalent of a child’s disillusionment at recognizing Daddy under Santa’s beard or Tinkerbell’s light fading because the audience refuses to applaud. In the case of the Seven Cities of Gold—an ideal ever receding just past the frontier of civilization until it comes to rest in the bleakest, least hospitable bit of the desert—you could even draw a parallel with the endless relocations of native people as Europeans advanced across the globe.

Perhaps these old maps seem to have more personality because they’re credited to actual personalities. Modern maps have, essentially, no origin at all: they simply emerge—fully formed, as if from the mind of Zeus—onto computer screens and chain bookstore remainder tables. They are maps
of
something—Tuscany or Antarctica or Philadelphia—but not maps
by
anyone. At best, a connoisseur can
glance at an atlas and derive its corporate parentage—Goode’s, Hammond, Oxford University Press—from the fonts and color scheme, but we still know nothing, imagine nothing about the hands that prepared it. Today, we might suppose (correctly, to a degree) that
no
hands really prepared it—that, instead of careful men with green eyeshades airbrushing artboard and scratching acetate overlays with crow-quill pens, the map was immaculately conceived of a GIS database.

By contrast, the maps at this fair are
by
someone. The name of the mapmaker appears in the largest type on every placard and first in every catalog listing: Pieter Goos, Nicolas de Fer, Thomas Kitchin. I’ve never heard of any of these people; they all sound to me like the fake names on Jason Bourne’s passports. But the right name on a map—Speed or Ortelius or Mercator—allows a seller to bump up its price substantially. This is the auteur theory of cartography. It draws on the memory of a time when mapmakers left fingerprints all over their maps, and it requires the expertise to tell the craftsmen from the true artists. No matter how important they were in their field, none of these mapmakers ever became a household name (except perhaps for Gerardus “Hey, ladies, how’d you like to come up and take a look at my projection?” Mercator), but in this room they are the Old Masters: the map collectors’ da Vinci and Rembrandt and van Gogh.

The early mapmakers deserve every bit of this attention. Today we’re so surrounded by high-quality maps that we have the tendency to take them for granted. Well, of course this is what my hometown looks like! See, here it is on Google Earth. Maybe we can remember or imagine a time when there was no aerial imagery or airborne radar or GPS, but 250 years ago, before John Harrison invented the marine chronometer, there wasn’t even a reliable way for sailors to measure their own longitude. Think about that for a moment: the best technology on Earth couldn’t tell you how far east or west you were at any given moment. That’s a wee bit of an obstacle when it comes to drawing reliable maps. When Ptolemy mapped the known world in the second century, he had to rely on oral histories and a series of rough mathematical guesses to gauge east-west distances. As a result, he drastically elongated the Mediterranean, making it half again as wide as it is in reality. A millennium passed without any
improvement on his method, and so
Columbus relied
on Ptolemy’s fuzzy math to calculate the length of his proposed voyage to India. He was about ten thousand miles off, and was very lucky there was a huge unknown continent in his way, or he would never have been heard from again.

Without modern mapmaking tools, scale can be tricky. Francis Billington was a teenager when his family landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, and records of the time make him out to be the colony’s Bart Simpson, an incorrigible juvenile delinquent. He nearly blew up the
Mayflower
in harbor by firing his father’s musket inside a cabin where flints and gunpowder were stored.
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On January 8 of the following year, Francis climbed a tree on a nearby hilltop and was surprised to see “a great sea” three miles away. This discovery led to a good deal of pilgrim excitement—could this be the famous Northwest Passage?—but when the vast “Billington Sea” (as it is still known) was explored, it turned out to be a pond only seven feet deep. Oops.

When soldiers like Zebulon Pike and Stephen Long first explored the high plains of Kansas and Nebraska, they thought the region “wholly unfit for cultivation and, of course, uninhabitable.” Pike wrote that the plains “may become in time equally celebrated as the sandy deserts of Africa,” and Long’s map even labeled the area “
The Great American Desert
.” As a result, the plains were held to be valueless and settlers avoided them for decades. As it turned out, the explorers had visited during a dry period in the region’s drought cycle, and of course they had no idea of
the vast
aquifers under their feet that made the area ideal for irrigation farming. Today, the same region is called “America’s breadbasket.”

I mention these misconceptions not to discredit the early map-makers but to show what they were up against: they were writing the first records of every single thing they saw. Their horizon was only three miles away, and they had no way to transcend the limits
of their own viewpoint. Consider the laborious process of making the first survey of a region using eighteenth- or nineteenth-century technology. First you need to establish a baseline—a precisely known distance between two points. Today you’d do that with a laser; measure the time it takes light to reflect off a prism, and within seconds you’d have the distance. But back then it meant inching across the countryside with a sixty-six-foot chain, moving the chain like a football referee every time it got fully extended and always taking great care to keep it straight and at a constant elevation (on wooden trestles, if necessary). Marking off a single seven-mile baseline could take weeks.

And
then
the fun would really start. From both ends of your baseline, you use a bulky instrument called a theodolite to measure the angle to a single landmark—a hilltop, maybe, or a distant church steeple. With a little tenth-grade trigonometry, you use the baseline length and the two angles to compute the distances from each endpoint to the third landmark. Well done! You have just surveyed a single triangle! Now take one of your endpoints and the new landmark, and make that distance the baseline of a second triangle, and one of that triangle’s sides the baseline of a third triangle, and so on. Now please try to resist blowing your brains out when I tell you that the Great Trigonometrical Survey that mapped British India two centuries ago required more than
forty thousand triangles
to complete and stretched from a five-year project into an eighty-year one.
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