193 – The Border Between the ‘Two Englands’

 

 In Great Britain as in the US, two cultural sub-nations identify themselves (and the other) as North and South. The US’s North and South are quite clearly delineated, by the states’ affiliations during the Civil War (which in the east coincides with the Mason-Dixon line). That line has become so emblematic that the US South is referred to as ‘Dixieland’.

There’s no similarly precise border in Great Britain, maybe because the ‘Two Englands’ never fought a civil war against each other.There is, however, a place used as shorthand for describing the divide, with the rougher, poorer North and wealthier, middle-to-upper-class South referring to each other as ‘on the other side of the Watford Gap’.

Not to be confused with the sizeable town of Watford in Hertfordshire, Watford Gap is a small village in Northamptonshire. It was named for the eponymous hill pass that has facilitated travel east-west and north-south since at least Roman times (cf. Watling Street, now passing through it as the A5 motorway). Other routes passing through the Gap are the West Coast Main Line railway, the Grand Union Canal and the M1, the UK’s main North-South motorway.

In olden times, the Gap was the location of an important coaching inn (operating until closure in approximately 2000 as the Watford Gap Pub), and nowadays it has the modern equivalent in a service station – which happened to be the first one in the UK – on the M1, the main North-South motorway in the UK.

Because of its function as a crossroads, its location on the main road and its proximity to the perceived ‘border’ between North and South, the Watford Gap has become the colloquial separator between both. Other such markers don’t really exist, so the border between North and South is quite vague. Until now, that is.

It turns out the divide is more between the Northwest and the Southeast: on this map, the line (which, incidentally, does cross the Watford Gap –  somewhere in between Coventry and Leicester) runs from the estuary of the Severn (near the Welsh-English border) to the mouth of the Humber. Which means that a town like Worcester is firmly in the North, although it’s much farther south than the ‘southern’ town of Lincoln.

At least, that’s the result of a Sheffield University study, which ‘divided’ Britain according to statistics about education standards, life expectancy, death rates, unemployment levels, house prices and voting patterns. The result splits the Midlands in two. “The idea of the Midlands region adds more confusion than light,” the study says.

The line divides Britain according to health and wealth, separating upland from lowland Britain, Tory from Labour Britain, and indicates a £100.000 house price gap – and a year’s worth of difference in life expectancy (in case you’re wondering: those in the North live a year less than those in the South).

The line does not take into account ‘pockets of wealth’ in the North (such as the Vale of York) or ‘pockets of poverty’ in the South, especially in London.

The map was produced for the Myth of the North exhibition at the Lowry arts complex in Manchester, and was mentioned recently in the Daily Mail . I’m afraid I don’t have an exact link to the article, but here is the page at the Lowry for the aforementioned exhibition.

192 – Britain Seen From the North

British-born sculptor Tony Cragg (°1949, Liverpool) left his native land in 1977 to work on the Continent. He now resides in Wuppertal, Germany. This work, entitled ‘Britain Seen From the North’ (1981), is typical of a period when Cragg made floor and wall reliefs out of broken pieces of found rubbish.

It features the shape of Great Britain, oriented so that east is up, north is left. At that left is the figure of a person, possibly the artist himself, ‘seeing’ Britain from the north. Because of its components, the work has often been interpreted as a comment on the state of the nation at that time, when it went through considerable economic hardship – especially in the north.

Cragg was British representative at the (43rd) Venice Biennale (in 1988), where he earned a menzione speciale. In the same year, he won the Turner Prize. In 1994, he joined the Royal Academy and in 2002 he received a CBE. In 2007, he won the Praemium Imperiale. Not bad at all for a bloke who started out as a lab technician at the British National Rubber Producers Research Association.

Jantien van der Vet alerted me to the existence of Cragg’s strange wall map, acquired by and exhibited at the Tate Modern in London.

191 – Un-Austria

“This work uses real statistics on Austria to create an image of Austria,” Babak Fakhamzadeh here on his website about this work, ‘Numbers’, that he created for Paraflows in Vienna, demonstrating a concept called ‘un-space’:

“Statistics, representing a real-life environment are, by their very nature, an un-space, as they only exist on paper. For example, the statistic that 1% of Austrians are members of voluntary environmental organizations is nothing but a number and doesn’t say anything about each individual living in Austria, except in general terms, on an abstract level.”
“However, these numbers, these statistics, create a representation of a physical space, Austria, therefore pretending that statistics can actually be representative for a real life construct.”

To take ‘un-space’ up on its own premise, let’s just imagine an Austria in which, quite literally…

• All of the 4,9% Austrians who are unemployed live close to the Slovakian border, not far from Bratislava. For every 1.000 Austrians, a ghostly half-priest stalks an area enclaved in between this Arbeitslosenland and Slovakia.
• A small area just south of Unemployed Country houses the 2,2% of Austrians who are actually Serbians.
• In the south of the country, probably in a gated community and with screwed to the front of their houses the most expensive alarm installations their plundered coffers could afford, live the 3,1% of Austrians who’ve been the victim of a property crime – or theft, as they called it in the olden days.
• Rarther inconveniently located in Carinthia and Styria, some of the most vertically-challenging parts of the country, are the 9,1% who love their Apfelstrudel too much. Think of all those ample Austrians having tho heave themselves over hill and dale to get to the nearest shop. Fortunately, the Alp meadows are stocked with purple cows, made completely out of chocolate.
• The half percent of Austrians using amphetamines are tucked away near Bregenz, close to the Swiss border, next to that other undesirable element, the 7% “not proud of their nationality”, tucked away in Tyrol - which is ironic, since Tyroleans are usually a bit more nationalistic than the average Austrian (or so I’ve been told by an Austrian).

• Cannabis users (3%), Muslims (4,7%) and volunteers (3%) each occupy a slice of Austria’s north, with illiterates (2%) holding on to the core of the Heimat. Just for fun,

I’m trying to picture a border crossing between each of these entities inside ‘un-Austria’: The sternly disapproving gaze of pious, bearded customs officers in skullcaps and halal Lederhosen, directed at their giggling slacker colleagues in the nearby booth, actually encourages their incontrollable bouts of laughter. The volunteer side of the border crossing sits unmanned, allowing thousands to cross unchecked, while the illiterate officers, frustrated at not being able to find anything wrong with any of those passports, have to wave all of them through.

190 – World-Wide Web Map, From .ad to .za

The world can be sliced and diced in many ways, and one of them is by dividing it into the 245 ccTLDs that cover every country and territory in the world. ‘ccTLD’ stands for ‘country code top-level domain’, which refers to the extension behind the final dot in mail addresses and URLs – if they refer to countries or territories. There are about a dozen non-geographic TLDs (such as .com, .org and .edu), which are used extensively but numerically, the ccTLDs are vastly superior.

The 245 ccTLDs, all two-digit codes, cover all UN-recognised countries, plus several non-sovereign islands and territories. This map, designed by John Yunker (website here), presents those codes in a size relative to the population of each country or territory – except China and India, which were restrained by 30% to fit the layout. The smallest type size reflects all countries with 10 million inhabitants or less.

The map includes a list of the most popular ccTLDs, the top 10 being, in descending order: .de (Germany), .cn (China), .uk (UK), .nl (Netherlands), .it (Italy), .us (US), .ar (Argentina), .br (Brazil), .ru (Russia) and .ch (Switzerland).

This sample shows most abbreviations are easily recognisable, with the exception of countries’ abbreviations not related to their English name (.de for Deutschland, German for Germany; .ch for Confoederatio Helvetica, Latin for ‘Swiss Confederation’).

Some small countries (such as Tuvalu – .tv) have made a tidy profit because their country code could be used as a vanity ccTLD, often leading to strange, virtual associations between very disparate places. This list, from Wikipedia:

* ad is a ccTLD for Andorra, but has recently been increasingly used by advertising agencies.
* ag is a ccTLD for Antigua and Barbuda and is sometimes used for agricultural sites. In Germany, AG (short for Aktiengesellschaft) is appended to the name of a stock-based company, similar to Inc. in USA.
* am is a ccTLD for Armenia, but is often used for AM radio stations.
* as is a ccTLD for American Samoa. In Denmark and Norway, AS is appended to the name of a stock-based company, similar to Inc. in USA.
* be is a ccTLD for Belgium. Widely used by small Bulgarian websites because it’s cheaper than a bg ccTLD.
* cc is a ccTLD for Cocos (Keeling) Islands but is used for a wide variety of sites.
* cd is a ccTLD for Democratic Republic of Congo but is used for CD merchants and file sharing sites.
* dj is a ccTLD for Djibouti but is used for CD merchants and disc jockeys.
* fm is a ccTLD for the Federated States of Micronesia but it is often used for FM radio stations.
* gg is a ccTLD for Guernsey but it is often used by the gaming and gambling industry, particularly in relation to horse racing gee-gee.
* in is a ccTLD for India but is widely used in the internet industry.
* je is a ccTLD for Jersey but is often used as a diminutive in Dutch (e.g. “huis.je”), as “you” (”zoek.je” = “search ye!”), or as “I” in French (e.g. “moi.je”)
* la is a ccTLD for Laos but is marketed as the TLD for Los Angeles.
* nu is a ccTLD for Niue but marketed as resembling “new” in English and “now” in Nordic/Dutch. Also meaning “nude” in French/Portuguese.
* sc is a ccTLD for Seychelles but is often used as .Source
* tv is a ccTLD for Tuvalu but it is used for the tv/entertainment industry purposes.
* ws is a ccTLD for Samoa (earlier Western Samoa) is marketed as .Website
* vu is a ccTLD for Vanuatu but means “seen” in French.

189 – Painting Peru

Christa Dichgans (°1940 in Berlin) is a German painter who has shown a proclivity towards cartography in her work. Generally, her map paintings consist of a monochrome background surmounted with the contours of a country or continent, filled up with stuff of all sorts.

‘Amerika’ represents a gazillion dollar bills forming the Lower 48 States, contrasting with a yellow background. ‘Europa’ shows a continent consisting of an uncountable number of human faces against a blue background. Other examples of this technique are ‘Deutschland’, ‘Indien’, ‘Der schwarze Kontinent’ and this painting, ‘Peru’.

The 2004 oil painting shows the contours of this South American country. Inside its borders, small religious and folkloric figurines are pasted over the black background, creating the impression of something like a cigar label collection. Outside Peru’s borders, the yellow background is embroidered with button-like embellishments.

This map, and other examples of Dichgans’ work, can be found here.

188 – Panama Kiss

As early as 1534, king Charles V of Spain suggested a canal in Panama across the Central American isthmus. Even with the primitive state of cartography of the day, it wasn’t hard to see how such a canal would facilitate trade and travel by eliminating the lengthy, dangerous shipping route rounding Cape Horn.

One of the last acts of the independent Kingdom of Scotland was the ill-fated Darien Scheme, an attempt at setting up a colony on the isthmus, that would live off the overland trade route between Panama’s Pacific and Atlantic shores. Thousands died and the scheme’s collapse in 1700 is thought to have contributed to the Act of Union (1707), establishing the United Kingdom.

The Panama Railway, opened in 1855, was a more successful reprise of the same idea, and eventually led to the creation of the Panama Canal. The initially French scheme, headed by Ferdinand de Lesseps (of later Suez Canal fame) was quite literally plagued by malaria and yellow fever, to such an extent that it was abandoned in 1893, after 13 arduous, lethal years. Some 22.000 workers died.

The US undertook a second, more successful attempt at canal-digging from 1904 to 1914, completing the canal two years ahead of schedule and at a greatly smaller cost in human lives (‘only’ 5.600 died). The US retained sovereignty and control of the Panama Canal Zone – incidentally, Guantanamo Bay was ‘leased in perpetuity’ from Cuba to protect the trade routes to and from the Canal. By a 1977 treaty with the US, Panama gained control over the Canal Zone on New Year’s Eve, 1999. Some facts about the Panama Canal:

• A ship sailing from New York to San Francisco would have had to travel 22.500 km (14.000 mi) before 1914. The Canal more than halved the journey, to 9.500 km (6.000 mi).

• The Canal is 77 km (48 mi) long.

• Each year, more than 14.000 ships pass through the Canal, carrying more than 200 million tonnes of cargo.

• An average passage through the Canal takes about 9 hours.

• Due to the curling of the isthmus, the Canal counterintuitively runs from the northwest (Atlantic) to the southeast (Pacific).

• The canal consists of 2 sets of locks, several artifical channels and 17 artifical lakes.

• The smallest vessels (up to 50 ft) pay a toll of US$500, while the most expensive toll ever was charged to the container ship Maersk Dellys, paying US$249.165. The least expensive toll was paid by Richard Halliburton, who paid 36 cents to swim the Canal in 1928.

• A 1934 estimate of the maximum capacity was 80 million tonnes per year, while traffic in 2005 consisted of 279 million tonnes.

• Close to 50% of the vessels in the Canal are using its full width (‘Panamax’). By 2011, 37% of the world’s container ships will be too large for the Canal. These ‘post-Panamax’ ships can only be accomodated by major expansion works. An expansion proposal was approved by referendum in Panama at the end of 2006. The project, estimated to cost over US$5 billion, started on Sept. 3, 2007 with an explosion blowing the side off a mountain at Paraíso.

This postcard map, apparently dating from around the time of the canal’s completion in 1914, was found here at cardcow.com.

187 – A Map of the Apocalypse

Scientists predict the Earth will end 5 billion years from now, when the Sun becomes a red giant. Certain religious people are more alarmist, claiming the Apocalypse is just around the corner.

In some versions of Christian eschatology (i.e. the study of end times), the Apocalypse will spare a limited number of worthy believers, while destroying the rest of humanity. Some Christian thinkers have derived a very specific course of events that will lead up to the Apocalypse, mainly from Revelations, the last book of the Bible. The final battle between God and Satan is known as Armageddon, and is usually situated at the Megiddo Valley in Israel.

It should be noted that the interpretations of the end times mentioned in the Bible vary widely, some seeing the struggle described as a merely symbolic and allegorical one, others professing a very literal interpretation (although many variants of that ‘literal’ interpretation exist). This map, published on the website of evangelist Jack Van Impe and no doubt reflecting his beliefs, has some very specific predictions for events, apparently not too far ahead:

Israel – against whom Russia and her allies march during the Tribulation hour. Here “The Battle of Armageddon” takes place in the Valley of Jezreel on the Plain Esdraelon which is at the foot of Mount Megiddo.

Euphrates River – which will be dried up to prepare the way for the kings of the East (Revelations 16:12). Russia has constructed a dam at Tabqa, Syria, and two others in Turkey and Iraq, to stop the flow of water. Invading armies may either march across the Euphrates at given points or march up the dry riverbed after an amphibious landing from the Persian Gulf.

Suez Canal – providing access to/from the Mediterranean and Red Seas and ultimately the Indian Ocean. This is a vital link for naval support.

Yemen – Marxist-governed republic and Russia’s possible final stepping-stone to Israel. Currently, Russian and Cuban troops are stationed in Yemen, training for military action in the Middle East. A fleet of Russian naval vessels (including submarines) is stationed in the Indian Ocean/Arabian Sea.

Karakoram Highway – completed in 1982, this superhighway provided China with an overland route to Pakistan and the Middle East. Ironically, the road follows the ancient trans-Asian invasion route used by Alexander the Great, Gengis Khan and the Mogul emperors.

Dardanelles – the strait joining the Sea of Marmara with the Aegean Sea. A leading Jewish rabbi has stated: “When Russia prepares to cross the Dardanelles, Messiah will come.” (Reported in The Jerusalem Post).

EU (blue) – Member nation of the European Community or “European Union” – the ten-nation confederacy spoken of in Daniel 2:44.

EU (red) – Nation to join the “European Union”. Daniel 7:24 teaches that another leader will rise to power and cast three nations out of the ten-nation conferderacy – replacing them with his own and two others for the final ten-nations alliance. This leader is the world dictator and infamous Antichrist!

(Russian flag) – Nations prophesied to be allied with Russia in her march against Israel according to Ezekiel 38:2,5,6 and Daniel 11:44. Many others will also be involved (Ezekiel 36:6b).

(blue arrow) – Possible land, sea and air invasion routes used by Russia and her allies during the war leading to “The Battle of Armageddon”.

(red area) – Section of the map identifying the area incorporated by the old Roman Empire.

The nations who OPPPOSE Russia include “Sheba and Dedan” (non-aligned Arab nations), and “Tarshish and all the young lions thereof” (Great Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, and their possessions – Ezekiel 38:13) PLUS the ten-nation confederacy of the Antichrist who himself sits in the temple in Jerusalem at this time (Daniel 12:11; Matthew 24:15 and 2 Thessalonians 2:4).

NOTE: Zechariah 14:2 teaches that at a point just prior to “The Battle of Armageddon”, ALL nations turn against Israel at Jerusalem. “Then shall the Lord go forth and fight against those nations…” (Zechariah 14:3). This is Armageddon!

This map can be found here, on Mr Van Impe’s website.

186 – Europe, If the Nazis Had Won

One of the mainstays of speculative history (together with “What if the South had won the US Civil War?”) is: What would the world have looked like if the Nazis had won the Second World War? And yet I’ve never seen a map showing what the Nazis’ post-war plans (for Europe of for the world) were, neither from their own files or reconstructed by war historians.

Which is very strange, considering that the Second World War is one of the most studied conflicts in world history. Maybe that’s because the Nazis didn’t have any concrete plans for after their victory – not because they didn’t believe in it themselves, but because of the chaotic nature of Nazi governance. The institutional overlap, competition and resulting chaos in the Third Reich is a well-established historical fact that contradicts the traditional notion of Germans as careful and thorough planners and which may well have prevented a German victory.

How the world would have looked like if such a victory had occurred, is a question that has been answered often in fiction, for example in the (passable) Robert Harris novel ‘Fatherland’ and the (brilliant) Philip K. Dick book ‘The Man in the High Castle’. Harris’ book includes a map, of a 1960s Europe dominated by Germany. This Nazi state, greatly expanded towards the East, doesn’t include Alsace-Lorraine. This rather puts a dent in the map’s credibility: it’s quite unthinkable that a victorious Nazi state would not annex these territories on the Rhine’s left bank, for so long disputed between France and Germany. Dick’s book, which focuses on the Japan-dominated West Coast of the (former) USA, sadly isn’t illustrated with a map. Not my copy at least.

This map does give what seems to be a well-considered vision of a Europe-wide Nazi state as it might have emerged after a German victory. German supremacy is ‘concealed’ by the construct of Neuropa (’New Europe’), a sort of evil twin of the European Union in this universe.

• Linchpin of Neuropa is the Greater German Empire (Grossdeutsches Reich), consisting of Germany in its 1937 borders, plus Alsace-Lorraine (from France), the entire Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, the Belgian German-speaking area of Eupen-Malmédy (from Belgium), all of Austria (Ostmark in Nazi parlance), a large part of present-day Slovenia, the Sudeten areas of former Czechoslovakia, and large parts of pre-war Poland.
• Some areas are not part of the Reich, but nonetheless under direct ‘Protectorate’: Bohemia-Moravia and the Polish ‘General-Gouvernement’.
• So far, nothing deviates from the situation as it was at the height of Nazi power in Europe. Different are two Reich exclaves in the East, implying Germany won the war with Soviet Russia: Gotenland (on the Krim peninsula) and St Petersburg.
• Presumably outside the Reich in a technical sense, but still administered civilly by the NSDAP (Hitler’s National Socialist party) are large areas in the East: Estonia and Latvia, both enlarged by annexing parts of Russia, Lithuania, and Belarus.
• There are also three autonomous NSDAP areas in the west: the Netherlands, Flanders and Wallonia (those two successor-states to Belgium also gaining territory, in this case to the detriment of France).
• So far the areas under direct German control (either under the Reich or under the Party). Next in the map legend are other European states, major allies of the Nazis and “instigators of the New European Union”: Greater Finland (almost doubling in size by grabbing parts of Norway and Russia) and the Italian Social Republic, covering just the northern half of Italy but gaining the Savoy and Nice areas of France and the environs of Istria from Slovenia.
• This is where the map’s colour scheme gets a bit confusing: the states signing up to the European Declaration in 1946 and later are indicated in one of several shades of brown and green used in the legend. To the best of my visual abilities, the 1946 ones are: Norway, Denmark, France, Slovakia, (Greater) Hungary, (Greater) Croatia, (Greater) Romania and (Greater) Bulgaria – those last four Balkan states enlarged at the expense their neighbours (sometimes including each other).
• A second wave of member states signing the European Declaration in 1951 are (again, as far as I can see): Spain (also holding on to its possessions in Morocco), (Little) Serbia, Greece (losing part of Macedonia to Bulgaria and also some territory to Albania, but retaining an enclave at the Turkish border) and Ukraine, which, having lost some land to Romania and the General-Gouvernement, is extended eastward all the way to Saratov.
• Later in the 1950s, Albania (enlarged also with a good part of Kosovo) joins the European Declaration.
• A third wave of Neuropa members joins in the 1960s: Portugal, Montenegro, and several formerly Soviet areas in or near the Caucasus: Kuban, Kalmykia, Georgia (enlarged with North Ossetia), Armenia and Azerbaijan.
• In the 1970s, three new states join: Dagestan in the Caucasus, and Udmurtia and Volga-Tatarstan further north.
• Incorporated in Neuropa, but without voting rights are the areas of Moskova and an area in the Caucasus, somewhat conforming to where Chechnya is now (maybe corresponding with the former, larger Soviet autonomous area of Chechnya-Ingushetia).

This map was sent to me by Bruno De Cordier and is taken here from the Finnish site valtakunta.eu, dedicated to illustrating the parallel universe in which the Nazis have won the war.

Unfortunately mainly in Finnish, it’s impossible (for a non-Finnophone like me, anyway) to determine which is the POD (point of divergence) of this timeline: what was the turning point allowing the Nazis to win the war?

185 – The Patients Per Doctor Map of the World

“This poster (published in September 2007) hangs on the wall of waiting rooms at the doctor. This way we let Dutch people know how privileged they are when it comes to medical care, and thus how appropriate it would be for them to help Doctors of the World help the less privileged.”

Remarkably, Cuba leads the world (or at least those countries shown on this map) in the patients per doctor ratio. Other countries doing very well include the successor states to the communist bloc nations, which generally had good (and cheap) health care, and the developed (capitalist) nations in Europe and beyond – although the Netherlands is quite far down, and behind neighbouring countries such as Denmark, Belgium, France and Germany, if ever so slightly.

Here’s the complete list:

Cuba 170
Belarus 220
Belgium 220
Greece 230
Russia 230
Georgia 240
Italy 240
Turkmenistan 240
Ukraine 240
Lithuania 250
Uruguay 270
Bulgaria 280
Iceland 280
Kazakhstan 280
Switzerland 280
Portugal 290
France 300
Germany 300
Hungary 300
South Korea 300
Spain 300
Denmark 310
Sweden 310
Finland 320
Netherlands 320
Norway 320
Argentina 330
Latvia 330
Ireland 360
Uzbekistan 360
Mongolia 380
United States 390
Australia 400
Kirgizstan 400
Poland 400
New Zealand 420
Great Britain 440
Qatar 450
Canada 470
Jordan 490
Tajikistan 490
Japan 500
Mexico 500
Venezuela 500
Romania 550
Ecuador 650
North Korea 650
Panama 700
Syria 700
Bosnia-H. 750
Colombia 750
Lybia 750
Oman 750
Saudi Arabia 750
Tunisia 750
Turkey 750
Bolivia 800
Peru 850
Algeria 900
Bahrain 900
Brazil 900
Chile 900
Paraguay 900
China 950
Guatemala 1.100
Jamaica 1.200
South Africa 1.300
Malaysia 1.400
Pakistan 1.400
Iraq 1.500
India 1.700
Laos 1.700
Honduras 1.800
Philippines 1.800
Sri Lanka 1.800
Egypt 1.900
Vietnam 1.900
Morocco 2.000
Iran 2.200
Suriname 2.200
Botswana 2.500
Nicaragua 2.700
Thailand 2.700
Myanmar 2.800
Yemen 3.000
Namibia 3.300
Madagascar 3.400
Bangladesh 3.800
Haiti 4.000
Sudan 4.500
Nepal 4.800
Afghanistan 5.300
Cameroon 5.300
Cambodia 6.300
Zimbabwe 6.300
Kenia 7.100
Indonesia 7.700
Zambia 8.300
D.R. Congo 9.100
Gambia 9.100
Mauritani 9.100
Angola 12.500
C.A.R. 12.500
Mali 12.500
Uganda 12.500
Senegal 16.500
Bhutan 20.000
Eritrea 20.000
Lesotho 20.000
Papua NG 20.000
Rwanda 20.000
Benin 25.000
Chad 25.000
Niger 25.000
Somalia 25.000
Burundi 33.500
Ethiopia 33.500
Liberia 33.500
Mozambique 33.500
Malawi 50.000
Tanzania 50.000

This map was found here at adsoftheworld.com.

184 – A Belgocentric Map of Europe

A follow-up on map #176, portraying the end of Belgium via the drowning of Flanders. Considering that Belgium is a slightly surreal construction at the heart of Europe (Western Europe anyway), the other option to its utter annihilation can only be its expansion to superpower-size. As is done on this map, showing a Europe dominated by a ballooning Belgian superstate.

* Belgium occupies most of the European mainland, its usually tiny coastline expanded to cover the whole north of the continent, from De Panne to Knokke. Medium-sized Belgian towns such as Ghent, Leuven, Charleroi and Antwerp are portrayed as European megacities. South of Brussels (located near Munich in the real world) begin the Ardennes, the undulating hill country in the south of Belgium that is here identified with the Alps.

* Thus, Switzerland is the ‘Swiss Ardennes’, northern Italy is the ‘Italian Ardennes’ and of course there are also the ‘Austrian Ardennes’.

* The Netherlands, in real life slightly bigger than Belgium, has shrunk to a small, northern appendage that ‘speaks a dialect of Flemish’. Similarly, France ‘speaks a dialect of Walloon’, and West Germany (‘speaks dialect of Luxembourgeois’) – which is all sort of true, come to think of it.

* The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, in contrast to the relative shrinkage of the Netherlands, has grown together with Belgium, dominating South-Eastern Europe.

* The North Sea henceforth is called the ‘North Belgian Sea’ and the English Channel is renamed the ‘Belgian Channel’; the only locality named in England is the ‘Village of London’.

* Spain, finally, is labelled ‘Summer Belgium’, its Mediterranean coast called ‘Costa del Belges’.

This delightfully Belgocentric map of Europe was sent to me by Sarah Ratayczak, who is partially of Belgian descent. “I saw the map attached on the door of a Poli Sci professor’s office when I was an undergrad at Wisconsin about 10 years a go. I asked for a copy – its Belgocentric view of the world appealed to me because my mom’s family is from Belgium (long long ago).”

183 – Map of the USA, Made in Japan

“This map is basically what would happen if you got a bunch of Japanese guys in a room, got them drunk, and then asked them to draw what they could remember about America on a bar napkin. Hell, that’s probably how this game was originally designed,” says Andrew Vestal on Yukihime.com, here.

This map is included in Tengai Makyou: Daishi no Mokushiroku (The Fourth Apocalypse), a RPG (role-playing game) known for its historical parody humour, Vestal explains. The first three games take place in Japan, the fourth in an America that, cartographically at least, looks like it’s in or near Japan.

• Alaska is an island, including the fictional city of Ice Palace.
• Montana is located oceanside, under Seattle, which apparently has a thing with cats.
• Portland and Lake Tahoe are near the supersized San Francisco Bay, which contains an equally inflated Alcatraz.
• San Fran itself is placed on the wrong side of its bay.
• Los Angeles (under the sign still reading ‘Hollywoodland’) is just north of Arizona; close by are the cities of Las Vegas, Tombstone, Phoenix and Carlsbad Caverns.
• So great they named it twice: another Carlsbad Caverns appears near El Paso, which is separated from Houston by a large bay, near which can also be found the (Mexican) cities of Oaxaca and Mexico City.
• The north (labeled ‘Minnesota’) is dominated by St Paul, Minneapolis, Yellowstone and Chicago, which boasts an enormous skyscraper (probably but not recognizably the Sears Tower).
• The northwestern peninsula of America is called Michigan, and counts two major cities: Detroit and Indianapolis.
• New Jersey apparently is a hole in the ground, while New York is located on an island way off the mainland.
• New Orleans is placed about right, Atlanta is too far south (and south of Florida).
• The centre of the country is dominated by the gigantic monument of Mount Rushmore, not far from the town of Missouri. To the south, apparently surrounded by desert, is the city of Dallas.
• Oh yes, and there is no Canada! Makes one wonder where that waterfall on America’s northeastern peninsula comes from…

This map was suggested by Erik Wensstrom, Nils Jeppe, Lucian Smith, “Richardson”, Wil Grewe-Mullins, Stancel Spencer, Jeff Matthews and probably a few others I now forget.

182 – Sarajevo Siege Map

Unless you want to read some cosmic meaning into this, it’s just by sheer bloody coincidence that both the starting and parting shots of the 20th century were fired in and on Sarajevo, respectively.

Not in a literal sense of course: the previous century was already 14 years old when a Serbian nationalist assassinated the Austro-Hungarian crown prince Franz Ferdinand in the Bosnian capital; and it still had 8 years to go while ethnic militias started to tear apart the newly-independent state of Bosnia-Herzegovina, beginning with its capital.

But one might say that both events at least symbolically bookend the previous century, Gavrilo Princip’s bullets in 1914 shattering the uneasy European turn-of-the-century peace that felt more like a truce, and the Bosnian-Serb siege of the city from 1992 to 1996 indicating that the fall of communism wasn’t the ‘end of history’ some people expected it to be.

For the rest of Europe, the siege of Sarajevo was a brutal reminder that decades of calm and (relative) prosperity won’t dull the murderous tribal instinct of the human animal. For Sarajevo itself, the encirclement by Bosnian-Serb forces meant large-scale deprivation, hunger and death, its citizens picked off one by one by snipers on the surrounding hills, or slaughtered wholesale by artillery shells aimed at the thronging, understocked markets of the city.

The encirclement of Sarajevo lasted from April 5, 1992 to February 29, 1996. It was the longest siege in modern history and one of the main theatres of the wider Bosnian War, which pitted Bosnian forces (mainly Muslim Bosniaks, but also Catholic Croats and some Orthodox Serbs) of the newly-independent former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina against ethnically Serb Bosnians who didn’t want to live in a state separate from their Serbian motherland, and as a result wanted to carve out their own Republika Srpska from Bosnian territory, to be aligned or even reunited with Serbia proper (a similar separatism was at work in Croat-dominated areas of Bosnia-Herzegovina).

Estimates say more than 12.000 Sarajevans were killed and 50.000 were wounded during the siege – almost all of them civilians. By 1995, Sarajevo’s population had dropped by a third from pre-war levels, by death and migration, to just over a third of a million.

Shooting in Sarajevo started on the same day Bosnia declared its independence, with Bosnian Serb forced encircling the city implementing a blockade from May 2, 1992 onwards. Roads, utilities and shipments of food and medicine were cut off. The besiegers were better armed than the besieged, but the city’s defenders were more numerous; this prevented the Serb forces from taking over Sarajevo, so instead they intended to pummel it into submission by constant bormbardments. On average, besieged Sarajevo was hit by 329 shell impacts per day – with a record of 3.777 on July 22, 1993. At the end of 1993, virtually all buildings in the city had been hit, and 35.000 were competely destroyed. The biggest single massacre took place in Markale market on February 4, 1994: 68 civilians were killed and 200 wounded by a mortar attack.

The destruction of Sarajevo was so deliberate, so destructive that a new word was coined to describe it: urbicide – a term that since then also has been applied to Gaza and New Orleans. One of the grisliest developments of the Sarajevo siege was Sniper Alley, a street so exposed to Serbian firing positions that to walk it meant certain death; running provided some chance of survival. In fact, there were several Sniper Alleys in Sarajevo.

During the siege, Serbs managed to get hold of several outlying districts of Sarajevo, for example the suburb of Novo Sarajevo. UN airlifts into Sarajevo Airport, regular from June 1992 onwards, became essential for the survival of the besieged city. More essential still was the Sarajevo Tunnel, dug under the airport, which connected the capital with government-held territory beyond the city. The tunnel, completed in mid-1993, allowed the movement of people and arms in and out of the city.

After a second massacre at Markale, the besiegers became targets themselves: NATO strikes destroyed Serbian ammo dumps, and a Croat-Bosnian offensive drove back Serbs all over Bosnia. A cease-fire was agreed in October 1995, but the Bosnian government didn’t declare the siege over until the end of February 1996, after the Dayton Agreement was formalised.

Sarajevo hasn’t been in the news that often since the end of the Bosnian war; apparently, the place is recovering quite well from the war, with construction booming and population up to almost pre-war levels (despite the fact that most Serbian Sarajevans left, many for the Serb-controlled section of the city, East Sarajevo).

This map gives a bird’s eye view of Sarajevo during the siege, almost in the style of a naïve children’s painting.
* A red line indicates the border between the government-held city and Serbian-held surrounding areas.
* The Serbian side of that line is stocked with the diverse instruments of raining death on the city below.
* Many of Sarajevo’s landmarks are shown (mosques, churches, a football stadium), but not named; maybe someone familiar with the city can provide some help.
* In the bottom left-hand corner, the UN-held airport is shown inside the Sarajevo line; in reality, Sarajevans could only access the outside world by going below the airport, via the tunnel that is shown just to the left of the cargo plane on the runway.

The map can be found here on the site of famainternational.com, a Sarajevan publishing house.

181 – “Scotland – Land of Heroes and of Cakes”

A gallant piper, stuggling through the bogs,
His wind bag broken, wearing his clay clogs;
Yet, strong of heart, a fitting emblem makes
For Scotland – land of heroes and of cakes.

1869 saw the publication in London of a peculiar sort of atlas: ‘Geographical Fun: Being Humourous Outlines of Various Countries’. The book showed 12 anthropomorphic depictions of European nations, with as many stereotypes dressed in appropriately typical garb crouching and stretching to twist their bodies into a shape with the same outline as their countries.

The obvious intention was humourous, but in the introduction, ‘Aleph‘ (pseudonym of William Harvey) states that “it is believed that illustrations of Geography may be rendered educational, and prove of service to young Scholars who commonly think Globes and Maps but wearisome aids to knowledge (…) If these geographical puzzles excite the mirth of children, the amusement of the moment may lead to the profitable curiosity of youthful students and imbue the mind with a healthful taste for foreign lands.”

Those ‘foreign lands’ are:

• Wales, in the form of Owen Glendowr
• Ireland as a peasant woman, with child
• France as an Empress of cooks, fashions and the dance
• Spain and Portugal in an ‘eternal’ union
• Germany as a dancing lady
• Prussia in the form of king Friedrich Wilhelm and chancellor Bismarck
• Holland and Belgium as a pair of ladies (of greatly different size and stature)
• Denmark as a female ice skater
• England as Queen Victoria
• Russia, of course, as a bear
• Scotland, shown here, is a gallant piper, struggling through the bogs.
• Italy as a freedom fighter, complete with Phrygian head-gear, then en vogue with revolutionaries.

An interesting anecdote concerning ‘Geographical Fun’ was related to me by Mike Pearce, who pointed out the contribution to the book by Lillian Lancaster, a stage performer in Britain and America, best remembered for singing the song ‘Lardy Dah’ on stage in New York (the origin of the still current expression ‘la-di-dah’). It turns out Lancaster (a.k.a. Eliza Jane) drew those maps at age 15, to entertain her bedridden brother. After her stage career, and having returned to Britain, Lancaster produced many more maps. A Mr Rod Barron is doing further research on Lillian Lancaster, and can be reached at his website (www.barron.co.uk).

Many people have directed me to the ‘Geographical Fun’ maps, 9 of which can be seen here (plus accompanying poems and with a link to the introduction of the book) at themaphouse.com, a map auction website.

180 – 1937 Is A Foreign Country

“The past,” as English writer Leslie Poles Hartley once quite quotably quipped, “is a foreign country; they do things different there.” I thought of that line when I saw this map, sent in by Michael Goodwin. The map summarizes world events for the year 1937, a year known to us mainly for not being the beginning of the Second World War quite yet. The events of the 1939-1945 war are by comparison very familiar, which – bizarrely – makes the tense but (mainly) peaceful year of ’37 seem even more remote.

The map has a mysterious origin, as Mr Goodwin explains: “I found (this newspaper clipping) in an old atlas, bought at an estate sale in Philadelphia. It’s full of what people thought was important in 1937, some of which turned out to be important, some not so much.”

He adds, as to the strange label marking the Mediterranean as the ‘scene of (a) pirate hunt’: “It was a sideshow of the Spanish Civil War, when German or Italian submarines roamed the coasts off Loyalist-controlled Spain. Everyone knew whose submarines they were, but the German and Italian governments of course denied it. Which led to the diplomatic fiction that these were mysterious ‘pirate’ submarines.”

Below the map is this inscription: “Any year will turn up a good many big news developments which can be most readily understood only when seen on a map. But few years, map-makers probably would agree, have produced more map stories than 1937. Among them two groups stand out: 1. Territorial changes wrought by the year’s two wars, in Spain and China; 2. Trails blazed around and over the top of the world by the year’s aviation pioneers. The maps above bring these, and 1937’s other major map stories, into focus.”

Here follows a more detailed look at the map.

The main map:

• Indicates the Chinese territory held by the invading Japanese by 1937, from the coast up to the Mongolian border and another area around Nanking.
• Shows the path of a solar eclipse passing over the Pacific, from west of Canton Island all the way to Peru.
• Labels three brewing conflicts in Latin America: the Chaco dispute, over which Bolivia and Paraguay had already waged a war some years previously, the Ecuador-Peru boundary dispute which would erupt into war in 1941, and the ’stamp war’ between Honduras and Nicaragua, of which I unfortunately don’t know the first thing.
• Mentions the take-over in Brazil by “dictator” Vargas: that Brazilian president assuming dictatorial powers in ‘New State’ system reminiscent of European fascist regimes.
• Plots the last air voyage of Amelia Earhart, the pioneering aviatrix.
• Also shows the trajectories of ground-breaking Pacific and Atlantic transocean flights.

US: ‘Proposed Conservation Areas’

The Columbia Valley, Southwestern, Arkansas Valley, Missouri Valley, Mississippi Valley, Great Lakes – Ohio Valley, Tennessee Valley and Atlantic Seaboard were areas apparently marked out for conservation, although I couldn’t find any more information on why this would constitute so major a news story as to be included on this map. Some events are marked on the map:
• A school explosion in New London, Texas, which on March 18 killed over 300 people, mainly children. The gas explosion led to the mandatory addition of an easily identifiable smell to previously odourless gas.
• The Mattson kidnaping: young Charles Mattson (10) was kidnaped on December 27, 1936 by a masked, armed man who intruded into the family home in Tacoma, Washington. A ransom note for $28.000 was left, but Dr William Mattson isn’t able to contact the abductor of his son, whose lifeless body is found on January 11. The crime remains an open FBI case.
• The Hindenburg disaster probably is the best-known of all events marked on this map, as it was recorded on film: the eponymous Germain airship, the largest aircraft ever built, was destroyed by fire while docking at Lakehurst, NJ on May 6, 1937, killing 36.
• The map also indicates the ‘Auto and Steel Strike Area’, probably the result of socialist agitation (yes, there once were socialists in the US).

‘Europe chooses sides’

By 1937, the Old Continent was already divided into sides – not two, but three:
• (more or less) democratic states,
• communist countries and fascist and
• totalitarian ones.

France and the UK constituted a ‘democratic axis’, which would spring into action only after the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. Other democratic countries, nonaligned with this axis, were Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania (then still called ‘Rumania’) and Bulgaria.
Germany and Italy had already formed their Axis of Steel (here called the ‘fascist axis’), but other non-axis countries are also coloured in authoritarian black: Austria, had a totalitarian government practising ‘austrofascism’, aligning itself with Italy in the vain hope of staving off the momentum for annexation by Germany, which would happen in 1938. Poland’s authoritarian government ruled under the guiding principle of ‘Sanacja’ (’moral sanitation’), Albania was ruled iron-fistedly by the terrifically named Zog I, a former president who had proclaimed himself king. Greece was ruled by general Metaxas’ authoritarian August 4th Movement. Portugal was into the first years of Salazar’s right-wing ‘Estado Novo’ (‘New State’) which would continue until 1970.
Spain’s left-wing government (here branded communist) was fighting an insurgency by the authoritarian generalissimo Franco, who by then controlled more than half the country and would go on to win the Spanish Civil War (in 1939) and lead Spain until his death in 1975.

‘Russia’s New Polar Horizons’

1937 was a year of polar firsts – mainly for the Soviets, a development surely watched with apprehension by the US. There was the amazing July flight of Sergei Danilin, Mikhail Gromov and A.B. Yumashev from Moscow to San Jacinto via the North Pole. The non-stop flight covered an record-breaking 10.148 km (6.303 miles), so amazing that some sources later wondered whether the flight wasn’t a carefully constructed hoax. It wasn’t the only transpolar flight of the year, though: another Soviet crew made it to Vancouver Island, indicating that transpolar aviation was quite the thing to do in 1937.
The Soviets were very busy in the High North (as they are again now), since the drifting polar camp indicated on the map must be the one of Soviet explorer Otto Schmidt.

Palestine: ‘The proposed partition’

Already in 1937, there were proposals to partition the British mandate area of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. The proposal, probably drawn up under the aegis of the League of Nations, doesn’t quite look like the first one of its successor organisation, the United Nations, 10 years later. The new Jewish state would occupy Galilee in the north, and a coastal strip divided by a separate area including Jerusalem and the coastal town of Jaffa. These would apparently both remain under British mandate, with the rest of the territory (Cis- and Transjordan) becoming a new Arab state.