159 - Squaring the Hexagon: France’s Rectangular Départements

Squaring the circle is a proverbial way of describing something impossible. Jacques-Guillaume Thouret set himself an even more daunting task: squaring the hexagône – in French, that word is shorthand for describing the roughly six-sided shape of France.

I’m not sure people used this clever eptithet back in Thouret’s 18th century. Thouret (1746-1794) was born into a bourgeois family in the French département of Calvados. Back then, in the Ancien Régime, there was no such territorial unit. The area was still part of the old province of Normandy. It was Thouret himself who instigated the change from provinces to the new system, still en vogue today.

Thouret was an exemplary revolutionary: anti-clerical, anti-royalist, anti-traditionalist, democrat, legalist, positivist. He was elected as a député for the Third Estate for Rouen to the Estates-General of 1789. This was in the year that the civil agitation in France erupted into the French Revolution. Thouret was elected president of the Estates-General three times in the following years.

The député for Rouen is credited for being one of the driving forces behind the ousting of the French monarchy. He also contributed greatly to revolutionary France’s new judicial system. Thouret drafted the 5th article of the Declaration of Human and Citizen’s Rights (stating that nobody can be put on trial without being able to rely on legal counsel). His bust is on display in the Cour de cassation, France’s highest law court, of which he was president in 1793.

In 1790, Thouret proposed dissolving the age-old provinces of France, replacing them with the now well-known administrative division into départements. The French Wikipedia entry on Thouret mentions that this was implemented non sans que quelques retouches aitent été apportées à son projet (“not without some modifications having been applied to his project”).

This is understating the case just a bit, as this map proves. In order to radically break with tradition, Thouret originally proposed dividing France into 80-odd perfectly rectangular départements, ignoring rivers, mountains, agglomerations of habitation (or lack thereof) and other aspects of the lay of the land. Furthermore, since France’s outer boundaries aren’t rectangular, this led to some very small slivers of territory for the départements near the border.

The French Revolution also entailed a revolution of measurements. The revolutionaries were obsessed with standardising, and replaced traditional, often regionally variable measurements with a universal metric system. Sometimes the changes proved to be a bridge too far: the revolutionary calendar was abolished after only a few years; and Thouret’s square départements – reminiscent of the rectangular methods of the Land Ordinance Survey in the US (see post #120) and of the proposals of Leopold Kohr (see post #18) – never made it off the drawing board.

Chances could turn quickly during the French Revolution (which was less a singular event than a years-long process). In 1794, during the Reign of Terror, Thouret was arrested, condemned and executed by the guillotine. It’s unclear whether he had the legal counsel he had provided for…

This map was kindly provided to me by Valéry Didelon.

158 - Total Solar Eclipse Map (2001-2025)

If you want to witness a total solar eclipse and you live in Europe, you’re out of luck until at least 2026. Unless you live in one of a few of Europe’s geographical extremities (i.e. the Faeroe Islands, Spitsbergen, Nova Zembla, Abkhazia and other parts of eastern Georgia or the southern part of Russia), the astronomical phenomenon will pass you by.

North Americans are in a bit more luck: on August 21, 2017, a solar eclipse will culminate in the sky close to Memphis, Tennessee. And on April 8, 2024, an eclipse will be visible in a band stretching from Maine to Mexico.

South America will have three solar eclipses. On July 11, 2010 and again on July 2, 2019, eclipses will be visible across two different bands of Chile and Argentina. The third one will culminate over Patagonia on December 14, 2020. Oh, and there is a small strip of Brazil that witnessed the very beginning of an eclipse culminating faraway over the Libyan-Chadian border on March 29, 2006.

Apart from that previous one, Africa witnessed two more eclipses, both over the southern part of the continent, in 2001 and 2002. But none until at least 2026.

Small areas in Australia’s Northern Territory and the state of Queensland will observe an eclipse on November 13, 2012.

In Asia, bands of darkness will travel across Indonesia on March 9, 2016, China, India, Eastern Nepal, Northern Bangladesh and the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan on July 2009 and China, Mongolia, the eastern tip of Kazakhstan and Siberia on August 8, 2008. That last one will culminate near the lands where the aboriginal Nenets tribe live. If you’re their shaman, you might want to note that date in your diary, and prepare a good speech.

Total solar eclipses occur when the Moon passes between the Earth and the Sun, obscuring the sunlight and leaving visible only a much fainter corona. This ´totality´is only ever visible in a narrow bands of the Earth´s surface, as this map demonstrates. Interestingly, the shape of those bands bends with their relative position on the map - from slight curves close to the equator to almost circular nearer the pole.

Don´t think that the Sun (and Moon) behave differently over different parts of the globe: it´s the globe that gets distorted when it gets stretched out over a flat map surface, especially over the polar areas.

This world map of solar eclipses from 2001 to 2025 was sent to me by Derek Jensen, and originates here at the NASA website.

157 - “Really, Miss Henderson!”

There´s a certain type of children´s literature that just positively requires a map at the end paper of the book. The map is there either to show an itinerary that is crucial to the story, or to enhance the ´piratesque´quality of the work – or both. This map is an example from a children´s book called ´Really, Miss Henderson´ from 1945. As you can see, the War had cost the lives of many, many good illustrators (unless this was an active attempt at creating a ´naive´-style map). I have never heard of the book, so if I had to surmise the story from this map alone, I´d guess that:

• a group of British eccentrics (women and men, most of whom in the military) was shipwrecked in a small, isolated archipelago in the South Seas called the Pongawabu Islands.
• One island is important because it has a freshwater well, but also dangerous because there are cannibals and at least one serpent – deadly, one supposes. This situation generates much of the tension and action in the story:
• Major Crick and Miss Henderson are stuck on Cod Island, together with a rather large mouse. Imagine the hilarious and semi-romantic storylines one could come up with, using only these ingredients.
• An unnamed island holds a cask of brandy and may thus be partially responsible for the sightings of mermaids by Colonel Farquhar, not to mention the flying pig.
• On an outlying island, there is a case of sardines. The shipwreck survivors have to get over their differences and band together to obtain the food that will sustain them during their ordeal.
• The lady in distress is very mysterious because of her immodest dress sense. She might be a native maiden, but then a very pale one. Surely,she can´t be English! Maybe she´s French?This map was found here at fulltable.com, a site that collects some interesting examples of end paper maps in books.

156 - China’s 1418 World Map

The Turks have Piri Reis, whose 1513 map shows parts of America and Antarctica with astonishing and, in the case of Antarctica, frankly inexplicable accuracy. The Chinese have this map to demonstrate that the story of how the ‘West’ discovered the World is only one of many versions of the very earliest form of globalisation.

The map is similar to many present-day Chinese world maps in that it positions at the centre of the map China (which used self-confidently to refer to itself as the “Middle Kingdom”), and not Europe. It states that it is a 1763 copy of a fifteenth-century original. Chinese characters written beside the map say it was drawn by Mo Yi Tong and copied from a map made in the 16th year of the Emperor Yongle, or 1418.

The double dating of this map implies that America was explored and mapped by the Chinese at least 70 years before Columbus made landfall in what he then still thought was India. Furthermore, it shows Africa and Australia in fairly accurate detail. Europeans only stumbled across Australia after 1600.

This map supports the controversial claim that a Chinese mega-flotilla under an admiral named Zheng He sailed around the world in 1421. Zheng He is an historical figure, and he is known to have visited South East Asia, India and Africa - his explorations span a 30-year period from 1405 to 1435. However, the claim that he visited America is not sufficiently proven, many experts hold.

Zheng He´s discovery of America is defended in Gavin Menzies’ book ‘1421 – The Year China Discovered the World’. But the story behind this map only works if one supposes an even earlier Chinese discovery of America - as the map predates Zheng He´s trip by three years. The Chinese admiral´s American voyage would therefore be to re-visited lands that were discovered earlier by Chinese explorers, or by himself.

This map was in the news at the beginning of 2006. It had been bought for $500 in Shanghai in 2001 by a Mr Liu Gang, a Chinese map collector. He at first suspected it to be a fake and only became aware of its possible significance after reading Mr Menzies’ book.

News reports in January 2006 stated the map would be examined to check the age of paper and ink. But even if it were proven the map was made in 1763, this would still not prove it wasn’t a contemporary forgery…

Tests on this map were supposed to be finished in February 2006, but I haven’t heard a peep since. A bad sign? It might not have been significant if the map were real, but the British Isles aren´t marked on this map. If it were a forgery, could it be a snub bythe (supposedly Chinese) forger at that little kingdom at the edge of the world that came to rule the waves and a quarter of the globe´s land surface, thus stealing mighty China´s thunder?

Another anomaly: California is presented as an island, which is a particularly European cartographic misconception, as it not only follows from the shape of the Baja California peninsula, but also from a Spanish literary tradition of an island called California,way out west (see post #71 on this blog on that very subject).

155 - The Norwegian Drop

This remarkable painting was made by the Norwegian artist Rolf Groven as a poster proposal for Norway’s pavilion at the World Exhibition in Seville (Spain) in 1992. The title is ‘Den Norske Dråpen’, which I guess can be translated as ‘The Norwegian Drop’.

Water is very significant indeed for Norwegians, as hydroelectric power produces 98,5% of the electric power generated in Norway – this in spite of Norway’s huge North Sea oil reserves, which consequently must be exploited mainly for export.

“This painting is aimed at visualizing how this energy source is entirely renewable and is a result of Norway’s distinct geography,” Mr Groven states on his website. And it does just that:

• Norway is a foaming mass of water gushing down a rocky mountainside that to the right looks like the rest of Scandinavia.
• A nice touch: Iceland is formed by a… spot of ice on the side of the mountain towering over the landscape.
• Rivulets of water form the boundaries of Finland and Sweden, Russia’s Kola peninsula is defined by the stagnant pond next to it.
• The ‘head’ of Norway at its southern end is a waterfall, perpetually showering Denmark’s Jutland peninsula with crystal clear Norwegian water.
• That water flows on to etch the edges of Europe out of its rocky landscape – clearly a reference to what the northern desolation of Norway must look like.
• A road winding down through northern Germany, past the Benelux countries and via France leads to where Italy should be. Instead, a road sign invites us to take the other direction, up towards Norway.
• To the left, a salmon and the British Isles are floating quite mysteriously above the water – perhaps all three of them have just leapt up out of the mountain stream.

On closer, or rather farther inspection, the landscape is situated not in a crystal ball, but in a lightbulb – appropriately referring to Norway’s sensible exploitation of its renewable hydroelectric resources.

Rolf Groven (°1943) studied art in Norway and architecture in Iran, worked as a builder, sailor, architect and teacher before settling on painting and illustrating his main occupation. This strange hybrid of a map and a painting was kindly sent to me by Harald Groven, Rolf’s son. This page links to Rolf and his kids, this is a direct link to his paintings (click on the palettes to go to the subcategories), and the one exhibited on this page can be found here.

154 - Britain In A Cloud

This is to my knowledge the only indisputable evidence of a nimbo-cartographic simulacrum, ever! You’ll find it on the website of the Fortean Times, a monthly magazine dedicated to reporting on anomalous phenomena (type in ‘simulacrum’ in the search box).

This particular picture of ‘Britain In A Cloud’ was sent in to Fortean Times by a Rob Gandy, who took the picture near Wadebridge in Cornwall on the morning of August 3, 1996. He writes: “It had been more ‘solid’ before I managed to get my camera, and as I watched, it slowly but surely broke up. Perhaps it was a portent of the effects of devolution following Tony Blair’s election victory the following year.”

The main cloud formation to the right does seem to give a quite good proportional representation of the island of Great Britain, with Scotland sprouting at the top, East Anglia bulging away to the right and Cornwall sticking out quite life-like (or should that be map-like?) on the left. The southern coast of England even follows the orientation it has in real life. Wales could have been done a bit better (*) and that separate cloud where Ireland ought to be is completely wrong (*) – and if it were just Ulster, then it would be too big. But all in all, not bad going for a simple morning cloud in August…

(*): insert your own Welsh and/or Irish jokes here.

153 - A Subway Map of Web Trends 2.0

Intangible and invisible, but omnipresent: that combination of qualities used to describe only God (or the sense of dread left by His absence). Now it also applies to cyberspace. Any attempt to map the internet is bound to fall frustratingly short of its true complexity, or to be so complex as to be illegible.

This map, suggested to me by Jezza Robinson, strikes a good balance between the web’s tentacularity and its interconnectedness, by cleverly using the conceit of a subway map. The map is a modification of this Tokyo subway map.

This is actually the second such map produced by Information Architects (here; their Web Trend Map 1.0 is here). As they themselves define it, this map shows “the 200 most successful websites on the web, ordered by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective.”

The map shows 15 distinct lines, organising the top websites into categories sucs as News, Sharing, Main Sites, Music, Political Blogs, Chinese Line, etc. Obviously, there is overlap. That’s where the Junctions come in: YouTube, for example, is on the Main Sites line, but also on the Movies and Knowhow lines. WordPress sits astride the Social News, Design and Technology lines.

An interesting innovation is a 6 month weather forecast for some of the stations (as the weather’s generally rather stable in a genuine subway), indicating their chances in an ever changing cyberspace. Google’s future is ‘unreal’, Xing’s is ‘insecure’, the Washington Post’s is ‘changing’, MSN is headed for ‘storm’. Whether the wheather may be wet or fine, is tied in with their being web sites of generation 1.0 or 2.0. A few stations are classified more specifically as 0.5, 1.5, 2.5.

For insiders, i.e. people familiar with the original Tokyo subway map, there are some jokes about the exact locations of some of these stations: YouTube hase moved into Shibuya station, “a humming place for young people”, pushing Google to Shinjuku, “a suspicious, messy, Yakuza-controlled (station), but still a pretty cool place to hang out.”

“If you’re a geek like us, you might just want to download the A3-PDF, print it out and hang it on the wall. So you can stare at it all day long.” Which is exactly what strange maps are there for, but… Information Architects also provides a clickable online map one can use as “a starting point on your daily data hunt.” Which is rather cool. An updated map is due for December 2007.

152 - A Map of the Truelove River

This early 20th century postcard, Shewing the Course of the Truelove River, charts that stream from its two headlands in the Fancy Free Plateau (Angelina River) and at Indifference Hill (Edwin River). Those two flows unite at the Falls of Dislike, follow a united course as the Truelove River through the Valley of Disdain – between the Mountains of Melancholy and Determination Hills.

After the Evasion Rapids, a river branch dead-ends at Despair Marsh, while its main flow turns sharply south at Pity Bend, then avoiding Friendship Corner to reach Tenderness Crossing, Kissing Ford and eventually Trothplight.

Then Opposition Bend, Angrysire, Separation Deep and Misery Marsh complete the encirclement of Sentimental Meadow. When the river flows out of Misery Marsh via Correspondence Outlet, it manages to slide by Richrival Bend, Sickbed and Sinking.

The localities of Fathersheart, Telegraph and Convalescence (all across the river from Bannshire), the Truelove River opens up into License Channel at Nameday. After Ring Cape, Altar Bay and Honeymoon Island, the Truelove River has morphed into the limitless Sea of Matrimony.

This map is reminiscent of other emotional cartography in a previous post, namely the A German Map of the Empire of Love (#59). However, whereas that map portrays love as any one of several different, static areas, the Truelove River presents love as a process in constant change, leading to a certain goal.

I found this map here at the excellent, imaginative, fascinating website Radical Cartography.

151- Exclaves of West Berlin (4): Steinstücken and Wüste Mark

Steinstücken is the southernmost part of the Berlin Ortsteil (borough) of Wannsee, almost adjacent to the UFA film studios. From east to west, it’s no more than 500 metres wide, north to south: 300 metres. About 200 people call Steinstücken home. Before 1972, it was completely isolated inside the territory of Potsdam, the capital of the neigbouring Land (state) of Brandenburg. This sleepy hamlet was a focal point of East-West tension, as it was one of the exclaves of West Berlin inside East Germany.

(for earlier references to Berlin exclaves: see #99 on Erlengrund and Fichtewiese, #102 on Laßzinswiesen and #114 on the three Böttcherberg exclaves)

The Steinstücken exclave dates from 1787, when farmers from Stolpe acquired 12 hectares of land outside of their town, and in 1817 set up a farming colony there. In 1898, Stolpe was incorporated into Wannsee, including the exclave of Steinstücken. The exclave situation persisted when Wannsee was incorporated into Greater Berlin in 1920: Steinstücken was now an exclave of Berlin itself, in the Potsdam suburb of Babelsberg.

Exclaves not being uncommon between mere communes, the situation remained irrelevant to daily life until after 1945. At the end of the Second World War, Berlin’s city limits became the boundaries of Zones of Occupation of the four powers (UK, US, France and Soviet Union). Steinstücken thus was part of the US Zone (of Berlin), and became an island in the Soviet Zone (of Eastern Germany).

This wasn’t a problem until 1951, when the East German government tried to annex Steinstücken. The Volkspolizei (’People’s Police’) physcally occupied the area. The inhabitants objected, the US protested, and the annexation was reversed four days later. But since then, Steinstücken was surrounded by a pole fence, preventing the exclave-dwellers from passing freely to Babelsberg and Potsdam. The only access was the Bernhard-Beyer-Strasse to Kohlhasenbrück in West-Berlin. This forested street lay on East German soil, so driving to Berlin involved passing two border crossings.

In 1952, East Germany restricted all West Berliners’ acces to East Berlin only. Steinstücken’s inhabitants in theory no longer could visit their immediate surroundings, which were outside East Berlin. Road blocks were erected on the border between West Berlin and East Germany, also at Steinstücken. Entry to Steinstücken was possible only after reporting to police precinct 162 in Wannsee.

Especially after the building of the Berlin Wall (1961), Steinstücken became a popular target for East German Fluchtwilliger (’those willing to flee’), because the only real barrier was constituted by chevaux de frise – although it’s unclear to me where those who fled into the exclave could go from there, as access to West Berlin was controlled by East German border guards.

And yet, it happened, as after more than 20 those border guards ’switched sides’ at Steinstücken, the GDR government constructed a separate wall around the exclave, making the border here equally impenetrable as at the ‘proper’ Berlin Wall.

In 1961, the Americans established a symbolic military outpost at Steinstücken consisting of three soldiers, choppering in and out of the exclave. A Hubschrauber-Denkmal (’Helicopter Memorial’) erected in 1976 commemorates this air bridge. This situation was resolved with the exchange of territories between West and East Germany of 1972, establishing a corridor of 100 metres wide and 1,2 km long between Steinstücken and Kohlhasenbrück, in West Berlin. This corridor corresponded with the Bernhard-Beyer-Strasse. Steinstücken was no longer an exclave, and a steady stream of tourists towards the cartographic anomaly ensued. Bus line 118 connected Steinstücken to West Berlin, and water and power could now be derived from West Berlin.

One of Steinstücken’s inhabitants was a farmer who owned several fields in GDR territory. He received permission from the East German authorities to drive his tractor on the Autobahn towards his fields, which also included pastures in the Wüste Mark, another western ‘island’ in the communist ’sea’; this uninhabited farmland became East German in an exchange of territories in 1988.

The border between Berlin and Potsdam lost its geopolitical significance the year after, when the Berlin Wall fell. German reunification occurred in 1990, but at Steinstücken the border still follows the old pattern, including the Cold War corridor of 1972.

This 1950 map, showing Steinstücken and the Wüste Mark to the east, was found here, at this page, collecting maps and information about West Berlin’s exclaves. The later corridor linking Steinstücken to West Berlin runs along the railway line.

150 - Pinsonia, An Imaginary Province of Brazil

 

Cândido Mendes de Almeida (1818-1881) was a Brazilian journalist, politician and author who in 1873 published the Atlas do Império do Brasil (‘Atlas of the Brazilian Empire’).

Included in that atlas is this map of the province of Pinsonia. But at the time there was no such state. And whether Mendes de Almeida’s map was a serious proposal or merely fanciful, such a province hasn’t materialized yet.

In this map, Pinsonia occupies the northern part of the present-day state of Pará, where the Amazonian rainforest meets the Atlantic Ocean. It borders French Guyana, which lies to the west of its northernmost extremity.

“The idea of creating Provinces in the Amazon was not strange at that time (or even today),” writes professor Leonardo Monasterio, who sent me this map. “In 1876, Colonel Fausto de Souza proposed dividing Brazil into 40 Provinces, and Pinsonia would have been one of them.”

Mr Monasterio is Brazilian himself, but unfortunately can’t provide any further background. In fact, he’s a bit puzzled by the inclusion of this fictional state in Mendes de Almeida’s atlas, which otherwise enjoys a reputation for accuracy. Anybody who can provide some more information on Pinsonia is more than welcome to do so.

149 - Germany-on-the-Volga (1924-1941)

In a place far from the geographic heart of German culture, on the lower reaches of the Volga River in the southern part of European Russia, there once existed a separate republic for Russia’s Germans. The story of how these Wolgadeutsche or Russlanddeutsche (Volga-Germans or Russian Germans) came to live in Russia and later leave it again, is a now largely forgotten part of European history.

That story starts with one of Russia’s most influential monarchs, Catherine II the Great (1729-1796), whose enlightened rule lasted for almost the entire last third of the 18^th century. Yekaterina, as she was known to her subjects, was born in Stettin as Sophie Fredericke Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst, a German princess. In 1762, she invited Western Europeans to immigrate to Russia to farm and develop the sparsely inhabited parts of her Empire, promising them they could maintain their language and culture.

Whether or not there was a special link between her country of birth and the direction of her plea, I do not know. Fact is, it was mainly Germans who responded to her offer – Germany suffering from large-scale poverty at the time, other European nationalities preferring emigration to America. Additionally appealing to religious communities such as the Mennonites was the promise of exclusion from military service – later revoked, causing an emigration wave of Volga-Germans to the Americas (where many settled in the Plains areas of the US and Canada, where they could practice agriculture in a similar way as in their ancestral areas).

The Nationalities Policy established after the Communist Revolution of 1917 provided for limited territorial autonomy for many of the 100-plus non-Russian peoples living in what was subsequently called the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). For the Volga-Germans, this meant the formation in 1924 of the Volga-German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (VGASSR; in German Autonome Sozialistische Sowjetrepublik der Wolgadeutschen – ASSWD; in Russian Avtonomnaya Sovietskaya Sotsialisticheskaya Respublika Nyemtsev Povolzhaya – ASSRNP; Communists preferred their acronyms without too many vowels).

The capital of the Volga-German Republic was Pokrovsk (known in German as Kosakenstadt), renamed Engels (after the German Communist theoretician) in 1931. The area counted about 2 million inhabitants – Germans, Russians and others - at the turn of the 20th century. When the Volga-German Republic was formed, the population was at least 1/3 lower: the deeply religious Volga-Germans (mainly Lutherans) came into conflict with the anti-religious Bolsheviks. Many Volga-Germans sided with the ‘Whites’ during the Russian Civil War (1917-1922) which was won by the ‘Reds’. Pastors were sent off to Siberia, many Volga-German towns were fiercely attacked by the Reds, many civilians died in the famines of that period.

After the Civil War, a limited amnesty was declared by the Communist authorities, and German language was promoted officially. According to the 1939 census, the Volga-German ASSR counted just over 600.000 German-speaking inhabitants. The death-knell of ‘Germany-on-the-Volga’ was sounded by Nazi-Germany, when it invaded the USSR in 1941. The Volga-German ASSR was disbanded. All Germans living in the Soviet Union were declared enemies of the state, and exiled further from the potential front, mainly to Kazakhstan. Other nationalities, notably the Krim Tatars and the Chechens, suffered the same fate. After the war, many Volga-Germans had to sign declarations promising never to return to the Volga area.

The Stalinist decrees of banishment and cultural oppression were reversed in the 1950s and ‘60s, but the Volga-German ASSR was never re-established. After the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, many ethnic Germans took advantage of a German law allowing an easy ‘return’ to the Heimat of people of German descent (mainly in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union), thus effectively ending the brief speculation of re-establishing some sort of Volga-German autonomy, and more broadly, several centuries of German presence in Russia.

The map shows the 14 cantons of the Volga-German ASSR, 10 of them carrying Russian names (such as Fjodorowka, Krasny-Kut, Tonkoschurowka, Krasnojar, Pokrowsk, Kukkus, Staraja Poltawka, Pallasowka, Kamenka, Solotoje) and 4 of them German names (Marxstadt, Frank, Seelmann, Balzer).

The map legend indicates German towns with a red dot, Tatar towns with a crescent, Russian towns in the ASSR with a black and without it with a white dot. A separate dot colour, unfortunately indistinguishable from the Russian black on this map, indicates Estonian towns. The map legend further seems to indicate that each canton either had a Russian or a German capital city.

Some towns with unmistakably German names include: Frankreich, Alt Weimar and Strassburg (in Pallasowka canton), Friedenberg (in the mainly Russian Staraja Poltawka canton), Brunnental and Warenburg (in the apparently bilingual Seelmann canton), Unterdorf and Rosenberg (in the heavily German Kamenka canton),and Schöndorf, Schönfeld and Schöntal (in what must be the very picturesque Krasny Kut canton).

This map was found here (where it can be seen in a higher, slightly more legible resolution) at Arwela, a bilingual German-Russian website apparently mainly dedicated to architecture. The annoying sidebar to the right, blocking out much of the map, can be circumvented by clicking on the map itself.

148 - Oh, Inverted World

As we’ve all learned in school, 70% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, only 30% is solid ground. What if everything was reversed? What if every land mass was a body of water, and vice versa?

This map explores that question, and it is fantastic in at least three definitions of that word: fanciful, implausible and marvelous. The interior of China is marked by a spouting whale, a sailboat ploughs the waves of the Brazilian Ocean, a school of fish traverse the watery wastes of Siberia, large cities dominate places rarely frequented by people in this universe…

The oceans in this inverted world are the Great Asian Ocean (the world’s largest), the African, Brazilian, United and Antarctica Oceans. These are punctuated by islands that in our world are lakes:
• Baikal Island: surely a mountainous place, as in our world it is the deepest, most voluminous fresh water lake on the planet, containing 20% of the world’s liquid fresh surface water.
• To the west of this vast ocean, close to the Mediterranean land mass, lies the unnamed Caspian Island – to the east thereof is the tiny (and if the reversal is symmetrical, rapidly sinking… or should that be emerging? Can’t work that one out) Aral Island.
• A similar island, unnamed in the map, perforates Africa; this must be Lake Victoria, or rather Victoria Island.
• Other similar land masses are the Great Islands, substituting for the Great Lakes… In this map, perhaps intentionally, they look like a dolphin doing a show jump.

The seas are merely dotted with boats and fish, but 70% of the planet’s surface is now walkable, arable, livable, mappable:

• The Gulfstream Mountains form the backbone of the North Atlantic States (I’m not sure whether the Eiffel Tower close to the African shore is part of them).
• The South Atlantic Kingdom is marked by Giraffes galloping near the Brazilian shore, a cactus and a burning sun. An important population centre is St. Helena City, close to our world’s British island dependency of Saint Helena.
• The narrows between the Brazilian and Antarctica Oceans is dominated by Drake City.
• At the western shores of the Brazilian Ocean lies the South Pacific Kingdom.
• To the north, on the Eastern shore, is Mexico Land (in our Gulf of Mexico).
• Bermuda City seems to form a separate entity from the North Atlantic States.
• Labrador City lies between the United Ocean and the Greenland Sea (shouldn’t that be frozen?)
• Celtic Land lies just to the south of English Lake.
• Surely, the Mediterranean Kingdom is a pivotal player, located between the western outlet of the Great Asian Ocean and the African Ocean – with a land bridge extending towards the Indian Kingdom.
• Flocks of sheep and windmills dominate the vast expanses of land towards the Australian Sea.
• The Philippine Kingdom rules the Far East, punctuated by the Japan, Taiwan and (erh) Philippine Lakes.
• On the far northern shores of the Great Asian Ocean, finally, lie Arctic Land and the East Siberian Kingdom.

This map, sent to me by Phil Rodgers, was made by Vlad Gerasimov, a graphics enthusiast and digital artist who designs and provides wallpapers and other stuff. Look for his website at vladstudio.com.

147 - The Stillborn State of Sequoyah

The US state of Oklahoma almost entered the Union as two states – Oklahoma and Sequoyah. The latter is the name of a failed attempt in the early 20th century by Native Americans, who formed (and still form) a large part of the population in eastern Oklahoma, to constitute a state of their own.

The US acquired most of Oklahoma from France in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 (the Oklahoma Panhandle came into US possession only after the Mexican-American war of 1846-’48). The area was set aside as Indian Territory by the Indian Removal Act (1830), which provided for resettlement (voluntary and forced) of Native American tribes east of the Mississippi.

In 1866, the Indian Territory was roughly halved when the US government forced new treaties on the tribes living there. The western and central parts of Indian Territory became government land. From the 1870s onward, prospective settlers began to push for opening these lands for Euro-American settlement under the 1862 Homestead Act. Even though the government resisted (attempting to honour the 1866 treaties), the settlers’ pressure became too great to resist. In 1884, a court in Kansas ruled that settling on these lands wasn’t a crime.

Congress followed by authorising settlement by the Dawes (General Allotment) Act of 1887. In 1889, President Benjamin Harrison opened up 8.000 sq. km of so-called Unassigned Lands (in central Oklahoma) for settlement by Euro-Americans by means of a land run. This involved dividing up the land on a first-come basis. In total, there were five major land runs in Oklahoma, although most of the rushes after the one of 1889 involved a lottery to counter cheating (some of the settlers were calles ‘Sooners’, because they had already literally staked their claim before the land was opened for settlement).

In 1890, the 1866 treaty lands plus No Man’s Land (nowadays known as the Oklahoma Panhandle) were joined into the Oklahoma Territory. The eastern part of present-day Oklahoma remained Indian Territory. In a convention at Eufaula in 1902, representatives of the Five Civilized Tribes started a drive towards statehood for the Indian Territory. The name for their proposed state was Sequoyah, a prominent Cherokee – in fact, the man who devised the Cherokee alphabet. In 1903, the delegates met again to organise a constitutional convention.

This convention met at Muskogee in 1905, presided over by General Pleasant Porter, Principal Chief of the Creek Nation. Vice-presidents were the high representatives of each of the five ‘civilized tribes’: William C. Rogers (Cherokee), William H. Murray (Chickasaw), Green McCurtain (Choctaw), John Brown (Seminole) and Charles N. Haskell (Creek). If Sequoyah never achieved statehood, it wasn’t for the efforts of the Convention: it drafted a constitution, established county boundaries for the new state, elected delegates to petition the US Congress for statehood and saw its proposals overwhelmingly endorsed in a referendum held in Indian Territory.

However, Eastern politicians pressured then US President Theodore Roosevelt against admitting two Western states (Sequoyah and Oklahoma) into the Union, fearing this would disproportionally diminish Eastern states’ political influence. Roosevelt then decided both territories could only enter the Union as a single state. Having already laid the groundwork for their own state, Indian Territory representatives had a big influence in establishing Oklahoma. The constitution of Oklahoma, admitted as the 46th state in 1907, is based largely on that of Sequoyah.

The tantalising concept of an ‘Indian’ state of the Union was recycled by alternate history writer Harry Turtledove, in whose novel ‘How Few Remain’ the Indian Territory enters the Confederate States of America as the Confederate State of Sequoyah.

Nowadays, Oklahoma is the 20th-largest (181.196 sq. km), 28th-most populous (3.45 million) state of the Union. Its name, chosen by Chief Allen Wright of the Choctaw Nation during the 1866 treaty negotiations means Red People in his native language. That name applied at first only to the aforementioned Unassigned Lands, in central Oklahoma. Oklahoma today is a blend of Western and Native (or, to use the less-varnished phrase of bygone days ‘cowboy’ and ‘indian’) cultures. The state has the US’s second-largest Native American population, both percentage-wise (11,4% compared with Alaska’s 19%) and in absolute terms (about 400.000, compared with California’s 680.000). Additionally, a quarter of the state’s white and black populations have some Native American ancestry. Oklahoma is home to about 50 Native tribal headquarters, more than any other state. Ten of the Native languages spoken in Oklahoma have over 10.000 speakers. Tahlequah in eastern Oklahoma, where Native Americans still predominate, is the Capital of the Cherokee Nation.

This map of the ‘State of Sequoyah’ - complete with a proposed State Seal - was compiled from the USGS Map of Indian Territory (1902), revised to include the county divisions made under direction of Sequoyah Statehood Convention (1905), by D.W. Bolich, a civil engineer at Muskogee. It was found at this page of the McCasland Digital Collection of Early Oklahoma & Indian Territory Maps at the Oklahoma State University Library, where it can be seen in greater detail.

146 - Comparing Wikipedia to China, Macedonia and Barbados

Frank San Miguel (“software geek, boat builder, musician and a veteran of a number of internet startups”, including what became mapquest.com) alerted me to this nifty little map he made, inspired by some maps on this site. The data for this map were culled from these Wikipedia contributor statistics.

“Compare the population of world countries to the Wikipedia contributors. In the hierarchy of users the vast majority of visitors to Wikipedia, 48 million of them, are readers; for the most part they don’t edit articles. Next are the regular contributors who contribute between 5 and 100 times per month. There are about 77,000 of those. Finally, there are the 10,000 anchor contributers (I’ve borrowed this phrase from retail marketing) who contribute more than 100 times per month.”

“So if Wikipedia readers are like China, then the regular contributors are like Macedonia and the anchor contributors are like Barbados. To extend this analogy to absurd extremes, Barbados and Macedonia do all of the work, have the highest GDP and provide humanitarian aid to China!”

Here’s Frank San Miguel’s business website. This is his blog. And here’s his post on the Wikipedia map.

145 - The Madonna Map Syndrome

The cyclist pauses amid fields of produce that stretch toward the horizon, punctuated only by farms and roads. He stares in bafflement at a road map far too elaborate for its featureless surroundings. This rather nice picture reminds me of that line in the Madonna song Like A Virgin: Didn’t know how lost I was until I found you.

The picture was taken here from this website, detailing the bike-trips of Bob Lucky in his native US and across the pond in Europe. This particular photo was taken while en route to the Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy (France).

“We took an arbitrary direction, and for the first and only time on our trip, we encountered a road map on a sign – right there in the middle of nowhere”, writes Mr Lucky. “Len stared at the map for a while and shrugged his shoulders. I took my turn trying to decipher it, and soon gave up. We had no idea where we were supposed to go to get to Mont-St-Michel. Once again we took an arbitrary direction.”

A perfect illustration, I think, of what I would like to call the Madonna Map Syndrome, in reference to the aforementioned song quote: the map is too complicated to ‘click’ with the map-reader, who is left feeling even more lost than before he consulted it. Fortunately for Mr Lucky, his name proved ominous:

“After the next turn, we got our first view of the abbey off in the distance. It was an exhilarating sight, and one that would be with us for the next day of traveling.”

2.000.000 Hits

On June 3, almost 9 months after the first post on September 10 last year, the hit counter on strangemaps went up to 1 million. Today, a bit over a month after the first million, the counter hit 2 million. At this rate of acceleration, strangemaps will hit its third million within a week. And will be up to a gazillion come September 10 this year.

Well, maybe not.

The map comparing US states to countries with similar GDPs (#131) was a gigantic crowd-puller, garnering a little over 160.000 hits in just one day, June 12. The speed with which the second million swung around is in large part due to the attention that map generated. To see a few thought-provoking spin-offs of the map and read some interesting background on its origin, please go to the follow-up post (#135).

I don’t know whether a similar big hit will come around. In any case, I’m not looking for one. I’ll keep doing what I did - look for ’strange maps’: maps that are ‘different’, tell a story, probably aren’t in any atlas and are nice to look at to boot. The search for those maps has become easier by the hundreds of suggestions that have flooded in via the strangemaps e-mail address (in the sidebar). I’m thankful for all those mails, but please understand I won’t be able to post each and every suggested map.

This might also be a good moment to answer the most frequently asked question: Is there an RSS feed for this blog? Even though I don’t quite know what an RSS feed is, I can tell you that yes, there is one: strangemaps.wordpress.com/feed should do it. And maybe one day soon I’ll figure out how to put that address in the sidebar.

I’m also in the process of categorising the 140-odd map entries so far, which should make for some interesting sub-collections… Please browse the categories and let me know what you think.

That’s it. Thanks for watching!

144 - Single Guys Live in LA, Single Girls in NYC

This map out of the National Geographic magazine was sent to me by Xyzzy, a name that gives nothing away as to gender affiliation or relationship status. If Xyzzy is female and single, she’s a bit more likely than average to live on the East Coast of the US. If he’s male and single, he might just live on the West Coast.

This map might explain why ‘Sex and the City’ is set in New York, and not in Los Angeles. And why there’s so much gang violence in LA. So why can’t all those single guys from LA and those thousands upon thousands of single girls from NYC meet up somewhere in the middle?

143 - Ex Unum Pluribus: New American Nations

The motto of the United States is E Pluribus Unum, Latin for ‘Out of Many, One’. Matt Kirkland, who provided me this map, thinks the US has become too unwieldy, and proposes to go the other way: Ex Unum Pluribus *, ‘Out of One, Many’.

Mr Kirkland’s website “is a bit of a grassroots movement, dedicated to breaking the US into smaller, more functional nations”. It provides some extra information on each of the new, smaller American nations, “and a fresh map so that anyone can submit a new proposal.”

The proposed new states are:

1. Côte d’Atlantique (Maine): “When the New Nations are born, Cd’A plans to ally herself with Canada, eventually opting for voluntary annexation. Official language: French. Capital: L’Amherst.” (Pop.: 1,3 million)
2. New England (New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and most of New York State): “New England expects to experience tense international relationships with its neighbors, New York, Jersey and Côte d’Atlantique.” (Pop.: 20 million)
3. New York (NYC and Long Island): “New Yorkers have neither the space nor the temperament for agriculture, and must import all foodstuffs.” (Pop.: 12,2 million)
4. Jersey: (Pennsylvania, Delaware, eastern Maryland, most of New Jersey): “Still smarting from losing Jersey City to the new nation of New York, Jerseyans plan to rebuild it – and call their capital New Jersey City.” (Pop.: 22,3 million)
5. The Confederate States of the Atlantic (most of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia): “The CSA is expected to adopt the Stars & Bars as a national flag at their first Confederation Conference.” (Pop.: 33,7 million)
6. The Magic Kingdom of Florida (Florida): “Somewhat astonishingly, the Kingdom plans to squeeze the entire executive branch of government inside Cinderella’s castle on the grounds of Walt Disney World.” (Pop.: 16,7 million)
7. West Kendiano (Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia and the western part of Virginia): “While most citizens assume that their new name is an amalgamation of its components, West Kendiano actually refers to the now-extinct Kendiano Native Americans who originally occupied this territory.” (Pop.: 29,3 million)
8. Soggy Bottom (Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana): “Soggy Bottom will lead the new nations among exporters of grits.” (Pop.: 11,8 million)
9. The Boundary Waters (Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota): “Revolutionary sentiment in ‘The Mitten’ (i.e. southern Michigan), as its citizens prefer to call it, is growing. Only time will tell if the Boundary Waters can hold together as a nation.” (Pop.: 20,5 million)
10. The People’s Republic of the Plains (Illinois, Kansas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa): “The PRP expects to dominate the annual International American Football Association championship tournament.” (Pop.: 31,8 million)
11. El Republico de Tejas (Texas): “Tejanos originally fought the proposals to dissolve the US, arguing they were never really part of the Union anyway.” (Pop.: 20,5 million)
12. Dakota (North and South Dakota): “With their share of the spoils of the defunct federal government, Dakotans plan to build a shining example of a well-planned capital. Dakota City will host 85% of the national population.”
Another fun fact: “Dakotans have proposed a revolutionary new system for their currency. Paper denominations of the ‘dakot’ will be numbered according to the primes and coins – one hundred ‘iotas’ equal a ‘dakot’ – will follow the fibonacci sequence. Math skills are expected to skyrocket as a result.” (Pop.: 1,4 million)
13. Northwest Territories (Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming): “Only in theory will Olympia’s governmental powers reach past the Sierra Nevada. Most of the eastern high plains will most likely be controlled (peacably) by independent militias.” (Pop.: 12,3 million)
14. Calivada (California and Nevada): “After the dissolution of the US, Calivada will hold title to the world’s second largest economy.” (Pop.: 37,2 million)
15. Four Corners (Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico): “Once construction is completed, the Parlia-Dome of the Four Corners Capitol building will sit exactly at the juncture of its component states. Members will be able to sit through an entire session of parliament without actually leaving their state’s territory.” (Pop.: 14,1 million)
16. Ha’awaska (Hawai’i and Alaska): “Ha’awaska employs a bicameral capital system, keeping governmental functions cordoned off in Honolulu and Anchorage).” (Pop.: 1,9 million)

* I’m not sure this is the right declension, but my Latin’s a bit rusty. Shouldn’t it be Ex Uno Plures?

142 - Redonda: Once, Twice, Nine Times A Micronation

The Kingdom of Redonda, as presented by King Leo I of Redonda

The Kingdom of Redonda, as presented by King Robert I the Bald of Redonda

On his second transatlantic journey in 1493, Christopher Columbus became the first in a long line of Europeans to lay claim to an island he named Isla Santa Maria la Redonda, Spanish for ‘St Mary’s Round Island’. Today, it is still known as Redonda.

Columbus didn’t land on the island, probably because of its forbiddingly steep slope, the remnant of an extinct volcano’s cone. Redonda’s highest point measures 296 m, pretty tall for an island this small – reports of Redonda’s land area vary from 1.6 to 2.6 km². The island lies about 55 km south-west of Antigua. It is administered as part of the Caribbean nation of Antigua & Barbuda since 1967.

Redonda’s economic relevance to the world reached a high point in the decades after 1860, when its guano deposits were mined for fertiliser, yielding about 7.000 tons annually. This bird-shit-mining period was the only one during which Redonda was inhabited. The population reached its apex in 1901, with about 120 Redondans. The mining operations and the island itself were abandoned during the First World War; Redonda has been uninhabited ever since.

That’s all there is to the official story. Its micronational history starts as Redonda was proclaimed a personal kingdom by a Matthew Dowdy Shiell in 1865. A wholly fanciful claim, which has nonetheless flourished. Currently, there are rumoured to be no less than nine claimants to the Redondan throne.

Shiell was a banker on the nearby island of Montserrat, at present still a British overseas territory. He bought the island when his first son Matthew Phipps Shiell was born. It is reported somewhat unbelievably that the elder Shiell requested and received the title of King of Redonda from Queen Victoria, who granted it on condition that there would be “no revolt against colonial power”.

The younger Shiell (1865-1947) was crowned as Felipe I, the second king of Redonda, on his 15^th birthday. He dropped the last –l of his family name when he moved to England in 1885, where he rapidly found a niche for his short or serialised stories in popular magazines. Shiel became a prolific writer of fantasy and sci-fi novels, short stories and serials, and is the reason why the history of Redonda has had a literary twist to it ever since. The villain in Shiel’s serialised novel The Yellow Danger, Dr. Yen How, is said to have helped shape the better-known Fu Manchu. Shiel’s most acclaimed book is The Purple Cloud, a sci-fi novel about a man who returns from a solo polar expedition to find himself the last man alive. Stephen King has said it was one of the inspirations for The Stand.

In 1931, Shiel befriended the young poet John Gawsworth, who became his literary executor and heir to the throne of Redonda. Gawsworth (1912-1970), a.k.a. Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong, a.k.a. Orpheus Scrannel, a.k.a. King Juan I of Redonda, seems to have taken his royal title more seriously than his predecessor – or at least he tried to capitalise on it more. For it seems the semi-permanently bankrupt Gawsworth sold his royal title several times over, which is the main reason why today there are so many different claimants to the Redondan throne.

All this didn’t stop Gawsworth from bestowing the title to his literary executor. This John Wynne-Tyson, an independent publisher, became King Juan II of Redonda in 1970.

Wynne-Tyson abdicated in 1997 in favour of the Spanish novelist and translator Javier Marías Franco (°1951), who became his and Shiel’s literary executor and King Xavier I of Redonda. Marías Franco tells the story of his ‘coronation’ in Negra espalda del tiempo (published as ‘Dark Back of Time’ in English). The current monarch of Redonda also runs a publishing house and has installed a literary prize, both called Reino de Redonda (‘Kingdom of Redonda’).

A website with much information, most of it in Spanish, can be found here. The prize amounts to several thousand euros and a Redondan duchy. Some of the famous artists that have been granted Redondan titles include Pedro Almodovar (Duke of Trémula), Francis Ford Coppola (Duke of Megalopolis) and J.M. Coetzee (Duke of Deshonra).

There are “at least nine” contenders to the Redondan throne, according to Wikipedia. Some of the alternate kings, contesting Xavier I’s claim, include:

William Leonard Gates, a.k.a. King Leo I (1989-present), who maintains the Redonda Foundation (Redonda Foundation).

Robert Williamson, a.k.a. King Robert the Bald (1984/5-present), who maintains this Redondan website.

Max Leggett, a.k.a. King Max I (1950-present)

Interesting to note are the differences in the maps of Redonda as shown on King Leo’s and King Robert the Bald’s websites.

Robert the Bald’s version = Leo’s version

Murphy’s Cliffs = North Cliffs

Rasta Cliffs = White Cliffs

Morse Mound = Matthew’s Mound

Mitchinson’s Cliffs = South Cliffs

Reynolds’ Rock = Fletcher’s Rock

Phipps Point = South Point

Named by Robert the Bald, not by Leo

Anton Gaudi Cathedral Point

Wheeler’s Gorge

Nicholson Nook

King Robert’s Bottom

Christian Cove

Nor’easter Arch

Centaur’s Cave

Named by Leo, not by Robert the Bald

The World’s End

Admiral’s Rock

The Monk’s Rock

Queen Margaret Sound

Landing Rock

Split Rock (completely missing from A)

Lady Georgiana’s Rock (“)

L’Angelier’s Rock (“)

Cockaigne Rock (“)

Pinnacle Rock (“)

Identical namings

Fytton Peak

Blowhole

King Juan’s Peak

Wild Goat Gorge (approx. the same area)

Shiell’s Summit

Howard’s End

Redonda came in the news in mid-2007 when the Wellington Pub in Southampton, England, attempted to declare itself an ‘embassy’ of the uninhabited island in order to gain diplomatic immunity from a nationwide smoking ban on enclosed workplaces, including pubs. The Foreign Office responded that since Redonda is not an official nation, no such exemption can apply.

I had heard of Redonda, but not of this latest story, to which I was alerted by Glenn Rice, who also kindly provided me with the links to some of the Redondan pretenders.

141 - Europe As A Queen

Europe and Queen were two pretty awful soft metal bands from the Eighties, but fortunately, neither has anything to do with this anthropomorphic map of Europe as a queen.

The map was made in 1570 in Basel (Switzerland) by cartographer Sebastian Munster and is/was to be had for a mere US$ 1.400 right here, one of many rather excellent maps and map-related prints on sale at www.raremaps.com (not affiliated with this humble blog).

In their description of this map, the sellers add: “During the late 16th century, a few map makers created these now highly prized map images, wherein countries and continents were given human or animal forms. Among the earliest examples is this map of Europa by Munster, which appeared in Munster’s Cosmography.”

It’s unclear if the correspondence between these nations and body parts is indicative of some kind of hierarchy among European states. Anyways, here’s an overview:

HISPANIA (Spain) constitutes the head of Europe;

GALLIA (France) is the upper chest;

GERMANIA is the bosom;

ITALIA is Europe’s right arm, with SICILIA being the globus cruciger, the cross-bearing orb signifying wordly power throughout the Middle Ages;

DANIA (Denmark) is the left arm of Europe, holding what appears to be a ceremonial sword, another classic piece of regalia;

BOHEMIA (the Czech lands) is a circular area close to Europe’s stomach;

VNGARIA (Hungary) and SCLAVONIA (land of the southern Slavs) are the right thigh and and VANDALIA (probably a reference to the Wends, a collective name for Slavic peoples in present-day eastern Germany) and POLONIA form the left thigh of Europe;

LITHVANIA must be about the spot of Europe’s left knee;

LIVONIA, MACEDONIA , BVLGARIA, MOSCOVIA, MOREA (the mediaeval name for the Peloponnese peninsula), GRAECIA, SCYTHIA (present-day Bulgaria), TARTARIA (parts of present-day Russia) are folds ever further down Europe’s flowing red dress.

140 - The Great Australian Inland Sea

The Americas have the Mississippi and the Amazon, Africa has the Nile and Asia has the Ganges and the Mekong, among others. So why wouldn’t Australia have a large river system – or an inland sea?

Early surveyors of the unexplored centre and west of Australia, fanning out from the earlier settled east, kept on the lookout for Australia’s Amazon, or at least a large body of water, possibly connected to the outside ocean.

In 1827, former East India Company officer Thomas J. Maslen published this map of that inland sea in his book The Friend of Australia, which provided instructions for surveying and exploring the island-continent’s interior.

In retrospect, those instructions aren’t very useful; Maslen extrapolated the Macquarie and Castlereagh Rivers as headwaters of a huge river flowing across Australia into the Indian Ocean at Australia’s nort-west coast. This river separated a northern land-mass (labelled ‘Australindia’) from a southern one (named ‘Anglicana’).

It took a few more decades for the explorers to realise that Australia’s interior is extremely hot, dry, waterless and deadly. In the mid-nineteenth century, the ‘Dead Heart of Australia’ became part of the explorers’ and settlers’ vocabulary.

I found this map here on a gorgeous blog called Bibliodyssey, devoted to “books, illustrations, science, history, visual materia obscura, eclectic bookart”, which includes some very curious maps, such as this one.

139 - The Anaconda Plan

“We propose a powerful movement down the Mississippi to the Ocean, with a cordon of posts at proper points (…) the object being to clear out and keep open this great line of communication in connection with the strict blockade of the seaboard, so as to envelop the insurgent States and bring them to terms with less bloodshed than by any other plan.”

(from a letter from General-in-Chief Winfield Scott to major-general George B. McClellan, dated May 3rd, 1861)

The war that caused the highest number of American casualties wasn’t one of the US’s foreign adventures, but a purely homegrown disaster. The American Civil War between the northern and the southern states lasted from 1861 to 1865 and cost over 600.000 lives.

If US Army (i.e. northern) General-in-Chief Winfield Scott (1786-1866) had had its way, the number of casualties would have been a lot lower. At the beginning of the war, he devised a plan that would have ended the Secession of the southern states with minimal loss of life.

This plan involved strangling the Southern economy by a twofold blockade: an economic blockade of Southern seaports, preventing the export of cash crops such as tobacco and cotton and the import of arms; and taking control of the Mississippi River, thus dividing the main part of the Confederated States of America from its westernmost parts on the right bank of the river.

After a popular newspaper cartoon (pictured here), Scott’s scheme was called the ‘Anaconda Plan’, after the giant snake that throttles its victims. Incidentally, the name is borne by four types of South American snake, which makes the etymology even more paradoxical. For the consensus is that the name originates in faraway Sri Lanka, but it’s doubted whether it is Sinhalese (‘Thunder Snake’) or Tamil (‘Elephant Killer’) in origin.

Scott’s plan was not well received; the public mood called for a large-scale invasion. President Lincoln didn’t choose: he implemented the blockade as proposed by Scott, and the large-scale invasion. A total of two million Union soldiers repeatedly tried to capture Richmond, the CSA capital in Virginia, contributing to the eventual heavy toll in lives.

Winfield Scott was also known as ‘Old Fuss and Feathers’ and the ‘Grand Old Man of the Army’. Here are Ten ‘fun’ facts on this interesting warhorse:

1. He was an active-duty general for over 47 years, longer than any other person in American history, serving under 14 presidents from Jefferson to Lincoln and commanding soldiers in 5 wars: the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Black Hawk War, the Second Seminole War and the American Civil War.
2. During the Mexican-American War, Scott commanded the southern army, landing at Veracruz and (on purpose) following the same route to Mexico City as Hernan Cortez in 1519.
3. Fat and vain, Scott was haunted by a quote from a letter from Mexico to the Secretary of War that was published to sabotage his reputation. “At about 6 PM as I sat down to take a hasty plate of soup” became a catch phrase that appeared in cartoons and folk songs for the rest of his life.
4. After the Mexican War, he served as military governor of Mexico City. He was nominated for US president by the Whig Party in 1852, but lost to Franklin Pierce. He was promoted to lieutenant general in 1856, the first American to hold that post since George Washington.
5. During the war of 1812, he urged that British POWs be executed as retaliation for the Brits’ executing 13 Irish-American POWs that they considered their own subjects, and therefore traitors. President James Madison refused.
6. He earned his nickname ‘Old Fuss and Feathers’ for his insistence on discipline and decorum in the US Army, at that time mostly a volunteer force.
7. In 1839, he helped defuse the territorial dispute between Maine (US) and New Brunswick (Britain), which caused the so-called ‘Bloodless Aroostook War’. In 1859, he travelled to the Northwest to settle another faux conflict with the British over San Juan Island, the so-called ‘Pig War’.
8. Scott translated several Napoleonic manuals into English, including Infantry Tactics, which was the standard drill manual for the US Army from 1840 to 1855.
9. The phrase ‘Great Scott!’ – an interjection akin to present-day favourite ‘Oh my God!’ – may refer to him, as in his later years, he weighed 137 kg.
10. Winfield Scott is not to be confused with Winfield Scott Hancock (1824-1886), who also served with distinction in the Mexican-American War, also was a Union general during the Civil War, and also ran unsuccessfully for president afterwards (defeated by Republican James Garfield in 1880). ‘Hancock the Superb’ was in fact named after the other Winfield Scott, by then already famous as a hero of the War of 1812. And the latter was the commander of the former during the Mexican War. Another Winfield Scott is the songwriter who wrote the song ‘Return to Sender’ for the eponymous Elvis Presley movie.

This map taken from the relevant Wikipedia page.

138 - The Schlieffen Plan

In 1905, count Alfred von Schlieffen, Chief of Staff of the German Army, developed a plan to win the impending war with France and Russia. In the time it would take Russia to mobilise, a swift campaign on the Western front would defeat France, allowing the troops to then be shipped to the Eastern front. Thus, a Blitzkrieg (‘lightning war’) in the West would prevent a ‘Zweifrontenkrieg’ (a war on two fronts) and ensure a German victory.

Shortly before the outbreak of the war in 1914, Schlieffen’s successor count Helmut von Moltke adapted the plan: German forces would attack France from the north and south, squeezing the French into submission and subsequently meeting at Paris. This adaptation required invading neutral Belgium, which as it turned out would result in Britain declaring war on Germany – upgrading what already was a big continental war into the First World War.

The Schlieffen Plan didn’t work as foreseen: the German offensive came to a standstill at the Marne, the Russians mobilised quicker than the Germans thought and invaded East Prussia. Germany’s Western offensive didn’t prove to be the ‘Blitzkrieg’ they thought it would be. The war ground to a halt and became a deadly stalemate for the next three years.

And yet, the Germans fought the Second World War broadly along the lines of the Schlieffen Plan. In 1940, the ‘Blitzkrieg’ did go according to plan: France and the Benelux were defeated in a matter of weeks – but the Eastern campaign proved disastrous, and All was less than Quiet on the Western front… perhaps proving the dictum that each war is fought with the tactics best suited for the previous one. Or something like that.

137 - Occupied Territories

Dominique Taléghani is a French scientific journalist by day, a designer of imaginary cartographies by night. On his or her (Dominique is one of those unisex first names) blog, several examples are listed, among which is this one, Territoires occupés

Dominique mailed me to explain his/her fascination with maps – a fascination that most mapophiles understand, if not share:

« I’ve always loved maps of all sorts, for their inherent beauty but also as a starting point for intense daydreaming – I remember a map of the Yukon that I scoured for its smallest details for hours on end. »

Some of Dominique’s imaginary cartographies can be found on his/her blog, aptly titled Cartomane.

136 - New Iceland - A Forgotten Nordic Colony In Canada

When it comes to the discovery and colonization of America, Iceland can claim a longer pedigree than all other European countries. The Icelandic explorer Leif Eriksson (970-1020) was the first European in recorded history to set foot in North America, where he named three areas:

Helluland (‘Flatstoneland’, probably Baffin Island);

Markland (‘Woodland’, probably Labrador); and

Vinland (often translated as ‘Vineland’ but more accurately translatable as ‘Meadowland’, possibly on Newfoundland).

The USA celebrates each October 9th as Leif Eriksson Day, although he probably never set foot on what is now US soil.

More speculative, or just plain wrong, are theories that hold that Norsemen penetrated as far inland as Minnesota (where the Kensington Runestone, dated at 1030 but in all likelihood a recent forgery, was long held to be a true artifact of such an incursion) via the Hudson Bay and/or the Great Lakes. It is intriguing, however, that exactly this area of the continent was to be later heavily colonized by Scandinavians. Many Minnesotans are of Scandinavian descent.

A bit further north, there even was a flourishing Icelandic colony that for a while functioned as a semi-independent republic within the still fluid framework of Canadian westward expansion. Nyja Island (‘New Iceland’) was located in the Canadian province of Manitoba, on the western shore of Lake Winnipeg. It was the result of large-scale Icelandic emigration to Canada, especially in the late nineteenth century (in 1875, a volcano on Iceland erupted, exacerbating already precarious living conditions).

The areas of Icelandic settlement covered the area north of Boundary Creek as far north as Hecla Island, with Gimli in the Riverton area the focal point of Icelandic immigration. This was mainly due to the efforts of Sigtryggur Jonasson, an earlier Icelandic migrant, who wrote a pamphlet on behalf of the Canadian government entitled Nyja Island I Kanada (‘New Iceland In Canada’) and went back to Iceland to convince Icelanders to join him across the ocean.

Jonasson was part of an expedition to the north of Manitoba to find a suitable location for the colony. New Iceland had to be isolated, have good soil for farming and be close to a lake, for fishing. The only drawback of the eventual site, 18 miles upstream from the Icelandic River: an abundance of grasshoppers. For his efforts, Jonasson is remembered as the ‘Father of New Iceland’.

The very first Icelandic town in New Iceland was named Gimli, Icelandic for ‘Paradise’. Conditions were far from idyllic, however: low on resources, many colonists didn’t survive the first, harsh winter. The following year, 1876, saw the arrival of the Stóri Hópurinn, the ‘Large Group’ of 1.200 immigrants, swelling the colony’s population to nearly 2.000. At the close of that same year, the colony was ravaged by a smallpox epidemic, killing off as many as 500 colonists and resulting in a quarantine on the whole of New Iceland that lasted until the middle of next year.

In order to help the ailing and despairing colony to survive, a form of self-government was set up, modeled on the Althing back home. The Vatnsthing (‘Lake Parliament’) ruled over four districts:

• Vidinesbygd (‘Willow Point Community’, now the Gimli District);
• Arnesbygd (‘Ames Community’);
• Fljotsbygd (‘Icelandic River Community’, now the Riverton District); and
• Mikleyjarbygd (‘Big Island Community’, now Hecla Island).

“The Colony of New Iceland was recognized by the Canadian government as a separate nation with full jurisdiction on immigration, taxation and legal matters,” the website mentioned under comment #2 claims. No evidence of this exists. In any case, emigration continued, however, to better lands as far south as Dakota. In 1881, New Iceland barely counted a hundred inhabitants. The local newspaper folded, the government of New Iceland disbanded itself.

New Iceland fell on better times a few years after the great exodus, when fishing, farming and freighting offered better job opportunities. New Icelandic immigrants set up the towns of Riverton and Arborg (Icelandic for ‘Riverton’). In 1893, New Iceland was almost back to its previous numbers. In 1887, all of New Iceland was incorporated into Manitoba as the Gimli Municipality, thus ending the brief, fledgling existence of the first neo-Scandinavian state on American soil since Leif Eriksson’s brief transatlantic adventure.

In over a century of its existence, Gimli has welcomed a steady trickle of Icelandic immigrants, but also many Ukranian and Native newcomers, lending the tourist town a multicultural ambiance. The Icelanders, in turn, have impressed their identity upon Manitoba; the local university offers courses in Icelandic language and culture.

This map, which covers the southern quarter of Lake Winnipeg’s western shore, was suggested to me by James L. Erwin, and can be found here: http://timelinks.merlin.mb.ca/imagere1/ref0172.htm

135 - Update On the GDP Map of the USA

I’m not in the habit of extensively revisiting strange maps already posted here, as there are so many more out there. But the map of the ‘US States Renamed For Countries With Similar GDPs’ (in the previous post) elicited such a deluge of interesting replies (including several cool spin-off maps) that it merits a second look.

First, a word about its origin. The map was suggested to me by a reader of the blog – the reference can be found at the end of the previous post. Trying to trace back the ultimate original source dead-ends; two fortuitous mails have since shed more light on the origin.

It turns out the map used in post #131 is a ‘remake’ of the original one. That map was entitled ‘The United States of the world’ and appeared in the Toronto newspaper the Globe & Mail, on March 8, 2005. It was sent to me by Ann El Khoury over at peoplesgeography (type in ‘petrol prices’ in the search field at the top of her page and check out the revelatory map of global price differences).

Here is that original map:

The small print at the bottom credits the concept of the map to a political scientist at Brigham Young University. This is contested by Douglas Coupland, who first mailed me to claim credit for the map, and then again after he found the map in his archives to express that he was “amazed and appaled” by the Globe and Mail’s apparent rogue crediting.

Mr Coupland quite adamantly states that he conceived this map, and spent “a lot of time” on the phone with the Globe and Mail’s magazine editor in the process. I have no reason to doubt him, and am very happy to hereby give him due credit - also because he kindly promised to send me another map he conceived.

Until then, let’s have a look at some of the spin-offs this map has generated.

One remark that crops up about the map mentioned above is that it doesn’t compare US economic size with that of its nearest competitors (as they’re all too big to ‘fit’ into just one state’s economy). This alternate map (found here) does just that, comparing the economies of the next four largest GDP countries to multiple states. Thus:

• China’s GDP equals that of California, Oregon, Washington State and Nevada – oh, and Alaska and Hawaii
• The UK’s GDP compares to that of New York State, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and (apparently) Washington DC
• Good ol’ Deutschland’s GDP is as big as that of Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia.
• Japan gobbles up all the remaining states, being all of New England, the Midwest and the West (minus the ‘Chinese’ coastal states and Nevada)

As remarked in the original post, the GDP comparison map is slightly misleading, since it might compare a state with a small population with a populous country, thus giving a skewed idea of personal wealth in both entities. A more individual criterium of wealth (or at least of development) is life expectancy at birth.

Leonardo Monasterio’s blog, about “regional economics, cliometrics and development” translates the map to that yardstick. Not easy, since “the differences in life expectancies at birth among US states (are) quite small and we had to repeat countries and even include the USA in the map.”

All states seem to be linked to countries that at first glance belong to the developmental top tier – except for Ohio and Delaware, which are on a par with Cuba, a relatively poor country but with excellent health-care.

Mr Monasterio, a Brazilian I’m sure, also posted this map (found here), revisiting the original idea on his home nation – itself a collection of states with greatly varying economic performance. More so than in the US, apparently: the range is from Finland to Sierra Leone. GDP is highest in the southern coastal states, lower everywhere else. This list of Brazilian states, ranked for GDP (found here at Wikipedia, quoting the 2004 GDP in the Brazilian currency, the real: 1 real currently buys you half a US dollar) links the states to the countries that replace them in the map reproduced here below:

1. Sao Paolo (BRL 546.607.616): Finland
2 Rio de Janeiro (BRL 222.564.408): Egypt
3 Minas Gerais (BRL 166.564.882): Kuwait
4 Rio Grande do Sul (BRL 142.874.611): Morocco
5 Parana (BRL 108.699.740): Croatia
6 Bahia (BRL 86.882.488): Ecuador
7 Santa Catarina (BRL 70.208.541): Bulgaria
8 Pernambuco (BRL 47.697.268): Kenya
9 Brasilia Distrito Federal (BRL 43.522.926): Cameroon
10 Goias (BRL 41.316.658): Panama
11 Amazonias (BRL 35.889.111): Iraq
12 Espirito Santo (BRL 34.488.268): Urugua