On The Map
Speaking of maps, as I believe we were, I recently spent several happy days with a book that straddles the intersection between cartography and history.
Simon Garfield, author of the bestselling Just My Type, once again takes a subject that seems the province of a small group of enthusiasts and opens it for a larger audience. In On The Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks , Garfield tells the history of cartography, beginning with the Great Library at Alexandria and ending with Google Earth. Along the way, he links the development of maps to the larger history of human progress--from the theory that the first maps, drawn in the dust of Africa's Rift Valley, may have kickstarted the development of the human brain to modern efforts to map the brain itself.
Written in the breezy style of Just My Type, On The Map is structured as a series of engaging stories told in more or less chronological order. Each chapter uses a specific map, person, or idea to explore a bigger issue. Interspersed with the main chapters are smaller, more eccentric stories that Garfield calls Pocket Maps: detours that consider the origins of "here be dragons", the different ways man and women read maps and the difficulties of refolding a paper map. Whether dealing with familiar topics, such as the Lewis and Clark expedition, or introducing the reader to stories that are less well known, like the legendary (and imaginary) Mountains of Kong, Garfield consistently delivers "aha!" moments.
On The Map will appeal to mapheads, history buffs, the terminally curious, and anyone who enjoys a well-told story
This review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers
An Islamic Map for a Christian King
Most maps made in twelfth century Europe were based on tradition and myth rather than scientific information. The only practical maps were mariners’ charts that showed coastlines, ports of call, shallows and places to take on provisions and water. Roger II, the Christian king of Sicily, wanted a map of the known world that was a factual as a mariner’s chart. In 1138, he hired well-known Muslim scholar al-Sharif al-Idrisi to collect and evaluate all available geographic knowledge and organize it into an accurate picture of the world.
For 15 years, al-Idrisi and a group of scholars studied and compared the work of previous geographers. They interviewed the crews of ships who docked at Sicily’s busy ports. They sent scientific expeditions, including draftsmen and cartographers, to collect information about relatively unknown places.
Finally, al-Idrisi was ready to make his map. He began by making a working copy on a drawing board, using compasses to accurately site individual places. The final copy was engraved on a great silver disk that was almost eighty inches in diameter and weighed over 300 pounds. Al-Idrisi explained that the disk was just a symbol for the shape of the world: “the earth is round like a sphere, and the waters adhere to it and are maintained on it through natural equilibrium which suffers no variation”
Al-Idrisi's map was accompanied by a descriptive geography that contained all the information his college of geographers had collected. Its formal name was Nuzhat al-Mushtaq fi Ikhtiraq al-Afaq, or The Delight of One Who Wishes to Traverse the Regions of the World. It was more commonly known as Roger’s Book.
In 1160, the Sicilian barons revolted against Roger’s son, William. They looted the palace and burned the library, including Roger’s Book. Not surprisingly, the silver map disappeared. Al-Idrisi fled to North Africa with the Arabic text of Roger’s Book. His work survived in the Islamic world, but it was not available in Europe again until the Arabic text was printed in Rome in 1592.
In Search of Hiawatha
Several months ago, on a visit to Fort Michilimackinac, I was startled to read an exhibit sign that referred to Hiawatha as a real person.
As far as I knew, Hiawatha was the fictional hero of a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem: "By the shore of Gitche Gumee" and all that. On the other hand, as I thought about it I realized that much of what I know about Paul Revere also comes from a Longfellow poem. Perhaps Longfellow's mythical Indian chief wasn't so mythical after all and I was the only one who hadn't caught on.
When I finally got a chance to poke around, I discovered that the question of Hiawatha, Longfellow, and reality is a complicated one. I immediately found that there was indeed an historical, or at least semi-mythical, Hiawatha. He was a leader of the Onondaga (or possibly Mohawk) tribe who was one of the founders of the Iroquois Confederacy in the 16th (or possibly 15th) century, depending on who you read. Further research, however, made it absolutely clear that the historical Hiawatha was not the subject of the Longfellow poem
In the 1850s, Longfellow set out to write what he described as an "Indian Edda": an epic poem combining Native American themes with a structure and "primitive"* meter borrowed from the Finnish epic, the Kalevala.** He found his local material in large part in the ethnological writings of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. An Indian agent in the western wilds of Michigan whose wife was half-Ojibwe, Schoolcraft collected Native America lore, was the first to translate Native American poetry into English, and was a serious student of Native American religious legends.
Longfellow loosely based his story on Schoolcraft's account of an Ojibwe trickster-hero named Manabozho. Somewhere along the way he decided to change the name to Hiawatha, stating in his journal that it was "another name for the same personage". *** Obviously the confusion was Longfellow's, not mine.
I feel so much better.
* His term, not mine. If it makes the occasional Finnish reader feel any better, he also described the Kalevala as "charming".
** Itself a nineteenth-century creation, assembled from pre-Christian Finnish songs and folk tales by folklorist Elias Lönnrot in the early 1830s. The twisty relationship between national identity and folk culture is fascinating--and a topic for another day.
*** To be fair, some of my sources blame this confusion on Schoolcraft. I'm not prepared to track this down further. Take your choice.
Image courtesy of the Library of Congress