Map of a Nation (56 page)

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EPTEMBER
1864 a party of six map-makers departed from Southampton to make two maps of Jerusalem, on scales of 1:2000 and 1:10,000. Upon arrival, they found the city’s sanitary state every bit as bad as they had been led to expect. ‘The city is at present supplied with water from the numerous cisterns under the houses in the city, in which the rainwater is collected,’ one map-maker explained. ‘But as the water which … runs through the filthy streets is also collected in some of these cisterns, the
quality
of the water may be well imagined, and can only be drunk with safety after it is filtered and freed from the numerous worms and insects which are bred in it.’ ‘Of the drainage of the city,’ he commented brusquely, ‘it is sufficient to say, that there is none in our acceptation of the word, for there are no drains of any kind in the city, and the accumulation of filth of every description in the streets is most disgraceful to the authorities.’ The map-makers quickly set about selecting and measuring their baselines and conducting a triangulation that stretched across Jerusalem, before beginning the Interior Survey.

It was very hard work. The Survey Act of 1841 had given the men carte blanche to enter private property in Britain, but no such power existed in Jerusalem, and the Turkish governor advised the surveyors to ‘proceed with caution’ amid the city’s ‘diversities of religion and population’. Furthermore, the terrain was rough, the air hot and dry, and the conditions dirty. Later the Ordnance Survey would consider that only map-makers who had
previously
worked among the rugged territory of Highland Scotland were hardy enough to survey in such conditions in the Middle East. The surveyors were forced to ascertain the position and depth of Jerusalem’s cisterns with a ruler or tape measure and compass by descending into the holes on rope
ladders
. One map-maker noted: ‘in some of the smaller cisterns the shaft was not large enough for this, and a rope tied around the breast was used, the arms being held well above the head to diminish the width of the shoulders
as much as possible’. ‘It is no easy matter to work with a candle in one hand and up to the knees in water,’ he emphasised.

But there were significant consolations to the Middle Eastern mapping project. Henry James had instructed the men to attend to ‘the geological structure of the country, and to bring home specimens of all the rocks, with their fossils’. And he had also provided them with a relatively newfangled toy, a camera, ‘to enable Serj. McDonald, who is both a very good surveyor and a very good photographer, to take photographs of the most interesting places in and around Jerusalem’. This sort of activity paved the way for the
widespread
adoption of photography in surveying in the early twentieth century. After their arrival back in Britain in July 1865, James and another
map-maker
, Charles Wilson, wrote up and published an account of the expedition, the
Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem
. The text could not hide the
surveyors
’ excitement and fascination with their task. They may have been initially scathing about Jerusalem’s drainage system, but they recounted how:

They described mosques and fortresses in detail, especially Haram-es-Sherif, ‘the name now commonly applied to the sacred enclosure of the Moslems at Jerusalem, which, besides containing the buildings of the Dome of the Rock and Aksa, has always been supposed to include within its area the site of the Jewish Temple’. The map-makers were hopeful that their researches allowed scholars to exactly pinpoint biblical locations in the contemporary Middle Eastern landscape.

So it was not with displeasure that the Ordnance Survey received the news that it would be back in the region between 1868 and 1869, this time to map the Sinai Peninsula. The Royal Society and Royal Geographical Society
collected
public donations to fund the expedition, driven by the idea that detailed knowledge of the area’s geology, botany and zoology might elucidate the precise route that had been followed during the biblical Exodus. The resulting account of the mapping adventure explained ‘that there is a great
need to carry out such a survey [which] must be manifest to all students of Old Testament history; among the most important and interesting questions which are now subjects of inquiry are the locations of the Passage of the Red Sea, the Route and Encampments of the Israelites, and the identification of the Mountain of the Law Giving’. The knowledge that the Indian Navy had recently made a map of Sinai’s coast may also have been significant in
persuading
the War Office of the project’s military utility. A map-making party arrived in Sinai in November 1868, with the aim of producing a map of the area on the scale of two inches to a mile. By April 1869 their project was complete and they were back in Britain by the end of May. The maps and an accompanying written memoir were published in three parts in March 1872.

 

T
HE
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INAI MAP-MAKERS
returned to Britain in time for a momentous day. On 1 January 1870 the single remaining map of the First Series, sheet number 108 of south-west Northumberland, was finally published. One can imagine the maps being delicately carried from the printing room at Southampton by military engineers flushed with excitement, and placed in carriages that distributed them to map-sellers across the land. For by now there were around 150 official ‘agents for the sale of Ordnance maps’ in the United Kingdom’s major towns. Six famous publishers in London, Edinburgh and Dublin also sold the charts, including Stanford’s (to this day a popular London map-retailer), and we can imagine the crowds clustering around this historic artefact as shopkeepers proudly positioned them in their windows. A journalist for the
Northern Echo
hailed the fact that ‘the
trigonometrical
survey of England and Wales on the scale of one inch to one mile has just been completed’. He added wryly that ‘the circumstance that it was eighty years ago since this survey was ordered to be made may be taken as an instance of the speed at which things sometimes move in official
quarters
’. But he acknowledged the rapidly changing landscape with which the surveyors had contended, pointing out that the ‘railway system itself had no existence when first the Ordnance Survey of England and Wales was
authorised
by Parliament’. Two years before the completion of the First Series, the
Ordnance Survey’s work had been put on show at the Paris Exhibition, where it had been commented that ‘the Ordnance Survey is a work without precedent and should be taken as a model by every civilised nation’.

The publication of Sheet 108 marked the conclusion to the Ordnance Survey’s project to map England and Wales for the first time, from scratch, with utmost accuracy, on a uniform scale of one inch to one mile. (Sheet 100, of the Isle of Man, would not be published until 1873, however.) The First Series was completed 123 years after William Roy had taken his first steps in the Scottish Highlands, there developing the skills that would ultimately lead to this momentous event. Prior to the initial landmark of the Military Survey of Scotland, the inhabitants of the British Isles had only been able to
contemplate
their respective regions in a shattered looking-glass of fragmentary and defective maps. But by 1870, English and Welsh citizens owned a lifelike cartographical mirror of their countries, whose sheets were then retailing at the modest price of 2s 6d, which was considered to be ‘within the reach of all who may require such aid’. Although the Ordnance Survey’s sheets were usually experienced individually, it seemed to be important to readers that someone, somewhere could piece them all together into a complete image of a unified nation. The
Daily News
described with satisfaction: ‘the maps fit together at the edges without any overlapping or duplicate engraving, so that they form, not merely separate maps, but … one map’.

Over the same period that William Roy, William Mudge, Thomas Colby and a host of other talented contributors had dedicated themselves to the
creation
of this complete map of England and Wales, the United Kingdom itself had come into being as a country that was integrated through, among other factors, regional unions, the development of state-wide networks of transport and communication, and the fostering of a strong sense of nationalism during a long period of warfare. The changing nature of the national state created applications for the Ordnance Survey that meant that the consumers of the First Series of maps ranged from economists, civil servants and aristocrats to estate agents, walkers and industrialists. They were privileged to possess a mapping agency whose outlook was centralised and national, intent on
supplying
readers from a host of civilian and military backgrounds with maps of every mile of the British Isles. Despite its name, which had well and truly
stuck, the Ordnance Survey was clearly no longer just a military map, and this was reflected by the decision in 1870 to transfer the mapping agency to the government department known as the Office of Works, within the Office of Woods, Forests, Land Revenues, Works and Buildings.

When one spreads out an array of First Series maps over the broad tables of map-reading rooms in libraries across the country, and casts one’s eye over their sheets, the attention flits from the thin parallel lines that denote where the south coast meets the sea and resemble gentle ripples in a pond, to the dramatic hachures of the rolling hills of Hampshire. The eye can travel upwards, across sheet piled on sheet, roughly following the meridian arc that Mudge himself measured, through dark forests speckled with miniature trees, along
invariably
empty roads and oil-black rivers, to the exposed summit of Arbury Hill in the Midlands, then through meticulous grids of settlements in
Nottinghamshire
to the dense clusters of parallel lines that evoke the undulations of the Yorkshire landscape. There the eye races through a flock of carefully engraved place names and scattered icons of churches and tiny ruins, until it finally meets the sea once again, just north of Burleigh, where the solid markings of the land disappear into a blank space on the map.

Despite the years that separate us from their creators, each First Series map still provides enough information to translate its language of lines and symbols into a three-dimensional landscape in the mind’s eye. And the sheer pleasure that many find in the act of map-reading today draws us into
sympathy
with the earliest purchasers of the Ordnance Survey’s maps. I, for one, cannot help but be moved when I read of how one such map-lover described in 1862 that he could ‘stand an hour at a time’ in front of one of its sheets, ‘tracing a good run, or, if that wasn’t his line, planning rides and drives. Every glance at a name on the map recalled pleasant days, reminded him of an acquaintanceship falling a little in the rear, and suggested pleasant visions.’ This besotted enthusiast for the early Ordnance Survey was delighted to find ‘how many unexpected bearings of the country are disclosed in a good map, and how many mysteries of the landscape reveal themselves in it!’

 

 

 

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