Oceans Apart: Contrasting Approaches to National Mapping
On the face of it these two books should make a valuable cross-national comparison of mapping in Britain and America. Both come from the pens of female academics, both focus on the nineteenth century, both start their accounts in the aftermath of battles and wars that affected cartography (in the British case, Culloden; in the American, independence). Yet the two could not be more different. Hewitt tells the story of topographical mapping and the early history of the Ordnance Survey; Schulten consciously eschews topography and looks instead at thematic mapping. Hewitt wears her scholarship very lightly; Schulten’s writing could not be mistaken for anything other than from the pen of a modern academic – perhaps their contrasting choices of an indefinite versus a definite article in their book titles are a giveaway!
Much has been written about the history of the Ordnance Survey (OS) and one wonders whether there is much more to say, but Hewitt’s book confounds any such scepticism. This is a really splendid read, beautifully written, full of passionate enthusiasm, and with a gripping chronological storyline that starts with the post-Culloden hunt for the Young Pretender in the unmapped wastes of the Scottish Highlands and the consequent appointment of William Roy to direct the Scottish military survey and ultimately to argue the case for a national map of Britain. Indeed, much of Hewitt’s saga is led through her focus on those whom she sees as significant (and heroic) individuals: Roy; Charles Lennox, who became master general of the OS; William Mudge and Thomas Colby, the two surveyors who played such key roles in the early decades of the survey; and Jesse Ramsden, whose instruments were fundamental to the triangulation process. Her story of the early years of the survey up to the long-delayed completion of the English 1-inch coverage in 1870 is set against a background, on one hand, of Enlightenment thought with its admiration for science and accuracy and on the other of a Romanticism that lauded feeling and perception in contrast to the “facts” of topographical science. “The connection between cartography and reason was undeniably powerful, but so too was the capacity of maps to give shape to dreams” (p. 212). The Enlightenment quest for accuracy is brilliantly illustrated by her account of the fastidious measurement of the baseline on Hounslow Heath and the recurrent jousting between the French and English over approaches to cartographic calculation. The Romanticism gives her ample scope to link the evolution of mapping to many of the notable literary characters of the age – not least to Wordsworth in the Lake District, to William Gilpin’s notion of the picturesque in his journeys down the Wye, to the paintings of Joshua Reynolds, and to William Blake’s hostility to the rational – even Jane Austen gets a mention. One of Hewitt’s most gripping accounts is of Wordsworth’s two poems that were prompted by Mudge’s ascent of Black Combe in southwest Cumberland and the triangulation from its summit – with a panoramic vista that was “not just a breathtaking and sublime experience; it provided a revelation of the entire United Kingdom” (p. 202).
But it is the sequence of the Ordnance Survey’s work that is the thread giving shape to her book. The “interlude” of the Irish survey in the 1820s and 1830s is covered especially fully. She traces the role of Thomas Larcom and his venture with Colby to produce not merely surveyed maps of Ireland but regional memoirs to accompany them; she also covers their preoccupation with toponymy and their attempt to identify the most appropriate historical Irish place names that should appear on the maps – a nuanced version of which appears in Friel’s play Translations. The interesting fact that I had not known was that, even though the survey initially insisted on employing only non-Irish military surveyors, as time progressed most surveyors were Irish. [End Page 148]
Her story probably had to continue up to the completion of the English 1-inch map coverage, but some of the book’s excitement and esprit rather dims after the deaths of three of her heroes in the same year of 1830 – Mudge, George III with his passion for maps, and Joseph Banks, who gave support from the Royal Society – “the end of an era for British map making” (p. 234). But the whole saga is told with passion and commitment; and it is underlain by substantial scholarship. Interestingly, while she avoids formal footnotes and references, her book has some 60 pages of notes and 70 pages of bibliography. It is all a modest but impressive triumph.
This makes a rather stark comparison with Schulten, whose book, by contrast, is more aggressively academic; in her words, it is a study of the new kind of thinking that thematic maps represented.
She is uninterested in topography (and, in fairness, the vast plains of much of America make topographic mapping rather less vital there than was the case in the highlands of Scotland or Wales, the densely settled patchwork of much of Britain, or the “invasion coast” of southern England). Her focus is on the use of maps for analysis and administration, and she explores this through several interesting forays. First is the use of historic mapping to trace the evolution of the nation – the continuous onward and upward expansion of settlement and colonization throughout the nineteenth century – hence the value of historical atlases plotting the evolution of areas rather than atlases of history. Much of this is seen through the work of Emma Willard in her use of maps and timelines to illuminate an evolutionary perspective that reinforced the notion of nationhood. Willard’s work dominates the first third of the book, but I suspect for many readers hers will remain a somewhat contrived attempt to produce maps and diagrams that blend the messages of history and geography. Her timeline figures are clunky representations with pillars and perspectives that need copious accompanying words to explain what they claim to illuminate. Yet under this was a genuine wider concern to use maps to bind together a growing and expanding nation and give its people a sense of their history. Schulten traces the growing interest in historical maps and the development of map collections in the Library of Congress, the Newberry, the Carter Brown, the Huntingdon, and elsewhere. In a similar vein unlikely organizations such as the Coast Survey began to produce maps of the history of American discovery.
Her second main example is the use of thematic maps of disease and the environment. Playing no small part in prompting the growth of such interest was the strong influence of German geographers, especially von Humboldt and Carl Richter, and cartographers such as August Petermann, who all argued for the greater use of maps to analyse spatial distribution and in a quest for laws of operation (hence the examples of mapping to plot the incidence and distribution of cholera and yellow fever and the role of the military in collecting detailed data on climate, which was used to map the agricultural potential of the American interior). The third example is the use of maps in the Civil War, both to plot the course of the North’s progress (e.g., one dramatic map shows the speed with which the Northern army advanced down the line of the Mississippi) and, most interestingly, to argue the merits of abolition and bolster the case against secession. Distribution maps were used to show the density of slave holdings and its relationship with agricultural productivity to argue the inefficiency of slavery.
Her final example is the growth of interest in statistical data and the role that maps played in illuminating the characteristics of American social and economic geography. The creation of the American Social Science Foundation and the American Geographical and Statistical Society were important offshoots of this trend; and it fed directly into one of the most striking aspects of American cartography, the massive and innovative use of national atlases based on census data. The 1874 Statistical Atlas, using 1870 census data, produced some groundbreaking maps that let Americans see themselves “in dazzling and provocative ways” (p. 173).
Schulten has produced a book of substantial scholarship. It can be annoyingly repetitive, occasionally grandiose, probably too ambitious in its range of coverage, and somewhat less critical than might be expected of some of the cartography that it extols. But there is lots of meat here that is worth hunting out. And, valuably, Schulten uses an accompanying Web site of coloured and expandable maps to get around the financial problems of using numerous illustrations in a printed book – a practice that one hopes might spread more widely to publications on cartography. [End Page 149]
