Map of a Nation (40 page)

Coleridge’s use of maps during his 1802 exploration was prophetic. He demonstrated how invaluable maps were to travellers who did not want to be coupled to a guide, confined to a set route or chained to the road. A map
presented
the rambler with an image of the expansive terrain over which he or she could roam. As the nineteenth century progressed, guidebooks increasingly incorporated fold-out maps to assist this new leisure activity of rambling. But Ordnance Survey maps were too expensive and precious to be used in this way by a general readership, and it was not until the early twentieth century that its then director general Charles Close dramatically increased sales among hikers by producing a cheap series of folding maps with stylish, specially designed
covers by Ellis Martin. This tapped into the new appreciation of the British landscape in the interwar period. James Walker Tucker’s 1936 painting
Hiking
, which shows three young women in berets and shorts, eagerly consulting an Ordnance Survey map, testifies to that institution’s central role in the explosion of rambling. But the importance of maps to hiking can be traced all the way back to the earliest decades of the Ordnance Survey’s existence, when the British public first started to become truly ‘map-minded’ and discovered that maps could assist their hunger for freedom and fresh air.

The Enlightenment adopted maps as emblems of reason, but it is the power of maps to give shape to the desire and the imagination that made them so seductive to Coleridge and attracts so many readers today. The love of maps can work itself into the deep recesses of the psyche. Cartography is a language and one can easily start hallucinating the landscape as a map, seeing real hills imprinted with imaginary contours and vast plains traversed by visionary lines of triangulation. And vice versa, from those same icons on the map-sheet itself, one’s imagination can conjure up a seemingly living scene. The night before a long walk or run, I love to spread the map out on the table and trace my route with my finger, conjuring in my mind’s eye the rises and falls over which the path will ride, and anticipating my fatigue at the top of the bunched contour lines and my relief at the descent on the other side. On my return from overseas holidays, my stepfather will leap up from the sofa and grab his copy of the
Times Atlas of the World
and we’ll sit poring over the figures and lines that cartographically recall recently visited places. It was the same in the early years of the Ordnance Survey. Many map-
readers
would dream over charts of far-off places from their armchairs, and maps particularly stimulated children’s fantasy worlds. Coleridge’s son Hartley devised the kingdom of ‘Ejuxria’, to which he disappeared in his mind’s eye when pining for his often-absent father, and he drew a detailed fantastical map of the make-believe retreat. The connection between
cartography
and reason was undeniably powerful, but so too was the capacity of maps to give shape to dreams, and it was not only Wordsworth who expressly thought of himself as ‘dreaming o’er the map of things’.

 

 

 

C
HAPTER
N
INE

 

I
N
S
EPTEMBER
1811 William Mudge was mortified to find himself hauled before a Commission of Military Enquiry that had received an anonymous letter with the allegation that the Ordnance Survey’s costs were exceeding
£
10,000 a year. Mudge complained to Colby: ‘I cannot tell whether they imagine me to be a rogue or not, but they deal with me exactly as if they thought so. They gave me not a moment’s notice scarcely for preparation, taking me literally at the
ground hop
on my return … I believe they thought some great secrets were hidden and that torture would be necessary to find them out.’ He resolved to ‘appear before them rather with the hope of being allowed to assist them in [their] enquiries than as a subject for examination’. Indeed, he had little of which to be ashamed. By the end of 1809, both the primary and secondary triangulations had been completed throughout England and Wales, bar Norfolk, Suffolk and Lincolnshire. The trigonometrical skeleton on which the First Series of Ordnance Survey maps depended was very nearly completed and Mudge had the documentation to prove it was a cost-effective enterprise. Since his appointment to the Ordnance Survey in 1791, this parsimonious man had kept account of every single letter whose postage he had charged to the Board of Ordnance, proving that ‘from his entrance into office until the day of his decease, he had never placed the postage of a single private letter to the public account’.

The Commissioners examined Mudge ‘on all the essentials of the [Ordnance Survey’s] operation, and finally asked the pointed question of its utility and continuation’. Mudge later described to Colby how he ‘did [his] best to satisfy them in the first point’ and explained how ‘little time would be required’ to complete the Trigonometrical Survey. He stated his intention to take the triangulation into Scotland the following year, the completion of which he estimated ‘would not take more than 5 years’, and he presented the Commissioners with ‘the
Total
expence of the Trigonometrical Survey’ over twenty-one years, which ‘was stated at
£
21,000’. When they demanded more figures, Mudge reported: ‘
instantly
they had these further sums given’, and he described how the total cost of the entire project had reached
£
54,165 5s 7d, amounting to a average annual expense over twenty years of around
£
2708. ‘Everybody I have shown it to thinks the sum a fleabite,’ he confided to Colby, asserting rather defiantly: ‘I believe I have built my house upon a rock’ and ‘I am conscious that, to the best of my abilities, mental and
corporeal
, I have discharged every trust deputed to me in this undertaking like an honest man.’ Mudge was obsessively conscientious and later he would write that ‘it is not my desire to have more of the public money in my Hands than is actually wanted’. But in private he was racked with self-doubt and even entertained the prospect of his immediate dismissal. ‘I have shortly to look back on the long dream of 20 years,’ he wrote mournfully to his family, ‘and at the time I exclaim, in truth how has it flown, with the mortification to know that I have toiled to every purpose but that of growing rich.’

In the event, the Commissioners were said to be ‘strongly impressed with an idea of the extreme accuracy of the [Ordnance Survey’s] work’, and few adverse consequences arose from the Enquiry. However, in the name of
frugality
they did put a stop to the publication of future volumes of the
Account of the Trigonometrical Survey
, despite the fact that the existing books were said to be ‘approved of and sell[ing] well’ and the third volume was then in
preparation
. But the Military Enquiry could not have happened at a worse time for Mudge. In that year, he felt embattled and became consumed by a
depression
that would stay with him, on and off, for almost the next decade. Back in 1809 he had been delighted when the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich, his alma mater, had offered him the position of Lieutenant Governor.
Also in 1809, the East India Company had founded a training academy at Addiscombe in Surrey for cadets specialising in engineering and artillery, and had asked Mudge to take a prominent role as public examiner. He had proudly accepted both invitations, but the added responsibility on top of superintending the Ordnance Survey began to take a severe toll on Mudge’s health, spirits and general happiness. By 1811, this industrious map-maker felt himself to be much put upon and wrote dejectedly: ‘my labours are great and I am without strength to carry my chains. I can assure you that I am a slave, and not wearing a golden chain.’ He elaborated: ‘I have more business on my hands than I have strength for, or, if I had strength, even time to perform.’

There were further reasons behind Mudge’s depression. In 1810 Henry Phipps, 1st Earl of Mulgrave, had become the new Master-General of the Board of Ordnance. Phipps had been an early member of the Royal Society’s dining club and he may have fondly remembered conversations with William Roy about the prospect of instigating a national map back in the 1770s. In the second year of Phipps’s appointment, Britain had been at war with France for nearly twenty years and he decided that publication of the Ordnance Survey’s maps was too great a security threat, as Britain and France clashed during the Peninsular War. Following a command ‘to
withhold
every map from the public’, given on 2 September 1811, the same day as Mudge’s appearance before the Commission, the surveys were withdrawn from sale. The maps would not be made available again to the general public until long after the Battle of Waterloo and the end of the Napoleonic Wars, in the spring of 1816.

Mudge was dismayed by Phipps’s order. He predicted negative
consequences
for the quality of the surveys that were to be made during this period of prohibition and he lamented that the public would be deprived of their right to information about their nation’s geography. He also disliked an insinuation that he himself might not be entirely trustworthy. Until then early drafts and proofs of the Ordnance Survey’s maps had circulated freely among Mudge and Colby, the Interior Surveyors, the engravers and those involved in their revision, but now Mudge was instructed to ensure ‘that maps for correction were to be kept with the utmost privacy, and when
corrected
to be returned to the Tower’. It seemed possible that Mudge himself
might even have to apply for permission to consult the maps for whose
creation
he was largely responsible.

On top of all these worries, Mudge could not even take comfort in the knowledge of the Ordnance Survey’s unprecedented excellence. A few years earlier Thomas Hannaford Hurd had been appointed hydrographer to the Admiralty after Alexander Dalrymple’s death. Taking to task the quality of coastal charts of Britain, Hurd had discovered significant errors in the Ordnance Survey’s calculations of certain longitudinal and latitudinal
positions
. Mudge passed on Hurd’s anxieties to Thomas Colby. ‘Ponder the contents of his letter, and when you can speak decidedly on the question, let me hear from you,’ he commanded. ‘It is of consequence that Captain Hurd should be either proved wrong, or that the errata he has discovered may be acknowledged as such, and these errata put to rights.’

The hassles of 1811 had depressed Mudge. Writing to an officer engaged in the triangulation, he wrote mournfully: ‘I believe that I have more
difficulties
thrown in my way as to the progress of the map-making by Ignorance, Avarice, and Cupidity than you have by the intervention of Mountains [and] Morasses.’ The publication of the third volume of the doomed
Account of the
Trigonometrical Survey
was also proving unexpectedly problematic, and on 27 July 1811 Mudge had reported how ‘ten days have elapsed since I requested the Master General and Board permission to put the Account into the hands of Mr Faden without receiving any answer to my Letter. This silence augurs mischief! … I am quite dispirited and dismayed.’ When the volume finally arrived on the shelves of bookshops and libraries, even this did not ease Mudge’s anguish. It ignited a heated international dispute about the skill and accuracy of his observations that would only trouble him further.