Map of a Nation (11 page)

A question that troubles map historians to this day is what exactly the Military Survey was for. It began as one element of the post-Culloden
project
of Highland reform, after the soldiers charged with rooting out rebels from the deepest recesses of the Highlands had keenly felt the lack of a good map of that region. A small-scale chart of Highland Scotland was also useful to the engineers involved in the extension of roads and to officers tasked with the transportation of heavy artillery and troops from the Lowlands up to forts and barracks at places like Fort Augustus or Inversnaid. But there is no evidence that the Military Survey was ever actually employed. Locked away in libraries for half a century after its completion, the maps were only temporarily excavated from a dusty basement by a road surveyor when an Act of Parliament in 1803 decreed the building of more highways and bridges in Scotland. The Military Survey was never published, and it has only been exposed to a mass audience in exhibition spaces in the last century.

Moreover, none of these practical motives for making the map explain why in 1752 William Roy and his surveyors turned their attention to Lowland Scotland. That the project benefited from private funding implies that it was attractive to the nobility of Enlightenment Scotland, and this is supported by the fact that William Roy and David Watson produced a unique
hand-painted
presentation copy of the Military Survey’s map of the area around Arniston especially for the Dundases. The sculpted geometry of Arniston’s avenues and paths imprints a neat geometric cluster at the centre of this map and a scribbled note on the reverse explains that the survey was ‘drawn by Roy, and given by him to Lord President Dundas, sometime about the year 1755. It is an Excerpt from the Survey of Scotland executed at that Time by the General & other Officers under the Direction of General David Watson.’ Scotland’s noblemen may have seen in the Military Survey a response to heated criticisms of the poor and fragmentary state of that nation’s maps, such as those voiced by the surveyor George Mark back in the 1720s. Furthermore,
the purchase, sponsorship or making of maps was likely to have been a badge of Enlightenment. In mapping Scotland, the King’s engineers may have
considered
themselves vitally differentiated from ‘barbarian’ Highlanders who had no choice
but to be mapped
(pointedly ignoring the fact that the Jacobites were extremely cartographically literate – the exiled Stuart court in France had made a point of collecting maps of Scotland). There is also something enduringly powerful in an image of a complete map of a nation. Men like Dundas considered that Scotland’s political disunity weakened the resistance it posed to England’s ‘unsufferable tyranny’ in the Anglo-Scottish Union. A picture of a unified nation was a picture of a strong Scotland and this idea was so potent that the adventure-writer Robert Louis Stevenson later
proclaimed
that ‘Scotland has no unity
except on the map
’.

The Enlightenment raised the bar for cartography higher than it had ever been before. But as the Military Survey’s example showed, map-makers’ attempts to attain the ideal of perfect measurement, a one-to-one replication of the physical world, could not take place overnight. The history of
cartography
’s
progress is a story of trial and error in which every inaccuracy, every shortcoming, every failure of expectations forms a stepping stone on the path to success. Despite its shortcomings, the Military Survey was one of the first national maps to be constructed through actual measurement of the ground, rather than by amalgamating existing charts. It became what we might call a ‘public-private partnership’, and we shall see how this marriage of military concerns with civil and idiosyncratic preoccupations was a feature of the mapping projects by which it was superseded. Perhaps most importantly of all, the Military Survey sparked in William Roy the dream of making a complete and accurate national map of the entire British Isles. But this was an ambition that would not begin to be realised for almost half a century.

 

 

 

C
HAPTER
T
WO

 

W
ILLIAM
R
OY PROBABLY
greeted the news of the Military Survey’s enforced end in 1755 with some trepidation. For the last eight years, this unassuming map-maker had been grateful to find himself accepted into a world of blue woollen uniforms, shiny buttons and strange habits of
salutation
. When Britain’s politicians led the nation into war, and his friends were called away from their Scottish escapade to more pressing matters, the
29-year
-old Roy may have feared he would be left in Scotland, unemployed and alone. If so, he need not have worried. His erstwhile mentor David Watson came to the rescue. By December, he had wangled a position for his young charge in the Corps of Engineers on the lowest rung of that establishment’s hierarchy, which commanded a respectable annual salary of
£
54 15s. Many officers in the Corps of Engineers held positions in the regular army too, and on 24 January 1756 the
London Gazette
reported that the name of ‘Engineer William Roy’ had been included on a list of lieutenants appointed to a new regiment raised at Exeter. For the first time in his life, Roy enjoyed
permanent
employment with a regular income, and thrilling prospects. Over the next forty years he would work his way up the ranks to become Britain’s most famous military map-maker.

In the months that followed the Military Survey, Watson was asked to
conduct
a reconnaissance of sections of England’s south coast between Dover in Kent and Milford Haven in the far south-west corner of Wales. This was intended to help the Army prepare for a feared French invasion amid the
turmoil
of the Seven Years War, and Watson chose his two favourite assistants, his nephew David Dundas and Roy, to help him. Existing maps were particularly poor at showing what was known as ‘relief’, the landscape’s three-dimensional characteristics, its undulations and declivities. Roy and Dundas were
commanded
to trace the rise and fall of southern England’s scenery in words and images, and their resulting descriptions and maps were designed to help tacticians assess the strength and weakness of various locations, depending on their vulnerability to attack. Roy learnt these military techniques quickly and was soon reporting how ‘the Position in front of Dorking’ was ‘very Strong indeed’, as it ‘is cover’d by a Ridge of Heights that takes the Shape of a Bow’, which meant that ‘the Circumstances of the Adjoining Country would Render a Combin’d Attack upon it, a most Hazardous … Enterprise’. Roy developed a habit of conjuring in his mind’s eye a picture of southern England’s
abundant
orchards, fertile pastures and tranquil hedgerows overrun by marauding French invaders. And he was later asked to do the same for Ireland too.

William Roy had grown up amid quietly handsome mansions separated by fields that gently sloped towards the wooded banks of the Clyde, and he had mapped the rugged Highlands too. He owned a more intimate knowledge of Scotland’s extremes of landscape than anyone else alive and it is intriguing to reflect on how this reserved, inquisitive man might have approached the very different surroundings of London, Kent, Sussex and Hampshire. When Roy looked at the ‘deep valleys and intervening ridges’ of the South Downs and found a shape that resembled ‘the fingers of a hand’ (as he wrote in his ‘Military Description of the South-East of England’), perhaps this account served as his way of offering a friendly handshake to his new home. Over the decades that followed, Roy would spend the greater part of his time here. On southern England’s estuaries, marshes, plains, clearings and hills, and amid the press and bustle of its capital, Roy would make friends, achieve promotions and foster interests that would lead him to formulate a vision of founding Britain’s first national mapping agency.

His mentor, David Watson, did not enjoy the same happiness, however. Immediately after the Military Survey, before heading south, he helped to found a Commission to confiscate the estates of Jacobite rebels and establish schools and manufacturing works on their sites. By the late 1750s, this
military
engineer was in his late forties and was living in Westminster. Watson had suffered with gout for a long while but it grew worse and the suffering eroded his good looks and charming bonhomie. By July 1761, Watson was forced to admit that his health was ‘very indifferent’ and that he was ‘oblige[d] to keep [to] my Room from severe Attacks of the Gravel [
gallstones
] that immediately follow’d my Gout’. Watson’s housekeeper, a woman called Sophia Wilson, tended to him with great compassion as his malady worsened. He also had an illegitimate son around this time, on whom he bestowed his own name.

Shortly before 1 November 1761, David Watson died. His death was reported in the
Gentleman’s Magazine
, a monthly digest of news for an
educated
reading public. Prior to his demise, a friend had celebrated what he considered to be Watson’s greatest achievement: the pacification of the Highlands. Watson ‘has made [Scotland] more his study than any man alive,’ he reflected. ‘He knows every Corner of the Kingdom, he is acquainted personally w[i]t[h] all Ranks & Degrees, knows their principles, views, Connections & importance, in what they can be trusted & where they cannot. In case of any disturbance in this Country, there is no person of what rank soever can be of such service to his majesties interest as Collonel Watson.’ Shortly before his death, Watson’s portrait had been painted by the Italian artist Andrea Soldi: it shows a world-weary soldier in the grip of disease, with tired eyes and an equivocal mouth. But although it is a picture of a dying man, it is also that of a proud lover of maps. Watson is shown pointing to his crowning glory: a military survey of a complex, beautiful and sometimes unruly landscape.

David Watson’s last will and testament left his housekeeper a generous annuity of
£
30 which he specified was ‘for her own separate use … and noways subject to the disposal of her Husband’. He left his ‘natural son’ an annuity of
£
12 ‘to assist in paying for his Maintenance & Education’. To his nephew David Dundas, Watson bequeathed half of his furniture and ‘to
Captain William Roy’ he left ‘all my Mathematical Instruments’. He thus passed on his baton to a deserving heir.