On the Map

1) ''[The Mappa Mundi] is frantic---alive with activity and achievement. Once you grow accustomed to it, it is hard to pull yourself away. There are approximately eleven hundred place-names, figurative drawings and inscriptions, sourced from biblical, classical, and Christian texts, from the elder Pliny, Strabo and Solinus to St. Jerome and Isidore of Seville. In its distillation of geographical, historical and religious knowledge the mappa serves as an itinerary, a gazetteer, a parable, a bestiary and an educational aid. Indeed, all history is here, happening at the same time: the Tower of Babe; Noah's Ark as it comes to rest on dry land; the Golden Fleece; the Labyrinth in Crete where the Minotaur lived. And surely for contemporaries---locals and pilgrims---it must have constituted the most arresting freak show in town. With its parade of dung-firing animals, dog-headed or bat-eared humans, a winged sphinx with a young woman's face, it seems closer to Hieronymus Bosch than to the scientific Greek cartographers.''

2) ''But the way this landmark map looked spread out on a table---the impression it gave---was its greatest achievement. It was accurate, and it set a high watermark in civic pride. It reflected what Ogilby had observed when work on the map began, that the swift transformation of London after the fire was a 'Stupendous Miracle!' He saw how the 'Raising from a Confused Heap of Ruines' had occured 'sooner than some believ'd they could remove the Rubbish.' One can see why Charles II and his courtiers were so supportive of his work: with its broader streets, with its hungry Thames and new docks, the map announced to the world that London was open for business again.''

3) ''The Great Trigonometrical Survey of India---conceived in 1799, commenced in 1802, but only officially titled in 1818---was a close cousin of the Ordnance Survey, and was almost as transformative as its British counterpart. It marked the switch from broad Italian route mapping (the descriptive, landmark-based type useful for a traveler or trader) to the strict mathematical technique based on triangulation (the sort better suited to military planning, establishing a standard cartographical grid over which other maps could be matched or compared). It consolidated British dominance wherever a theodolite and trig point was placed, and the East India Company, the survey's initial sponsor, took full advantage in claiming new territory under the guise of scientific progress.''

4) ''In 1894 Stevenson wrote that all authors needed a map: 'Better if the country be real, and he has walked every foot of it and knows every milestone. But even with imaginary places, he will do well in the beginning to provide a map; as he studies it, relations will appear that he had not thought upon; he will discover obvious, though unsuspected, shortcuts and footprints for his messengers; and even when a map is not all the plot, as it was in Treasure Island, it will be found to be a mine of suggestion.''

5) ''There is, of course, still quite a lot to be said for getting lost. This is a harder task these days, but it's a downside we can tolerate. We may always turn off our phones, fairly safe in the knowledge that maps will still be there when we need them. We are searching souls, and the values we long ago entrusted in maps as guides and inspirations are still vibrant in the age of the Googleplex. For when we gaze at a map---any map, in any format, from any era---we still find nothing so much as history and ourselves.''