233 - The Dutch Moisturize Mars

The pessimist mourns the glass’s half-emptiness, the optimist rejoices that it’s semi-full and the engineer just thinks the glass is twice the size it should be. I wonder what a space engineer would think of this map of Mars, half underwater.

Although the latest scientific evidence seems to indicate there once was water on Mars - laying to rest a controversy that has raged ever since ‘canals’ were detected on its surface – The Red Planet nowadays is rather rocky and definitely dusty, and not even close to moist. To map Mars as if it’s covered with oceans, seas and bays is clearly too Terra-centric.

It might help to know that this map of of a semi-submerged Mars is of Dutch origin. As the Dutch have always struggled to keep their country above sea-level, they might find it impossible to imagine a world without encroaching seas. This map therefore may say less about the precarious environment of Mars than about that of the Netherlands itself, a country not coincidentally named for its disadvantageous position vis-à-vis the North Sea.

None of which explains, however, why this vision of Mars would be upside down, with the Zuidpool (South Pole) at the top and the Noordpool (North Pole) at the bottom of the map. Maybe Dutch engineering isn’t what it used to be.

The map shows several continents protruding from the Martian waves. In the southern (top) hemisphere, these are:
• Gillland (which has far too many l’s in its name for a continent on any planet; and seeing its coast is a dotted line, probably is an ice-island)
• Burchardtland
• Cassiniland
• Lockyerland
• Jacobland
• Keplerland
• Webbland
• Huygensland (ostensibly the biggest continent, extending way down north)

In the northern (bottom) hemisphere, the continents are:
• Fontanaland
• Herschelland
• Dawesland
• Mädlerland
• Rosseland (a protrusion from the polar ice in the north)

From the few names I recognise, the continents seem to be named after astronomers (Keppler, Huyghens, Cassini, Herschel). I’m unsure whether the same applies for the bodies of water, these ones on the western (or is that eastern, since it’s upside down; in any case, the left) hemisphere:
• Maraldi Sea
• Huggins Bay
• Hook Sea
• Zöllner Sea
• Beer Sea
• Lambert Sea
• Newton Strait
• Arago Strait
• Herschell Strait
• Dawes Ocean
• Kaiser Sea

On the other hemisphere, there are:
• De la Rue Ocean
• De la Rue Strait
• Dawes Sea
• Maunder Sea
• Ariy Sea
• Faye Sea
• Tycho Sea

Apart from Isaac Newton and Tycho Brahe (the Danish astronomer with the bronze nose) and names previously used for the continents, I don’t recognise anyone. The tropics are called tropic of Lion (Leeuwskeerkring) and tropic of Aquarius (Watermanskeerkring).

This map, unfortunately undated and unsourced, was taken from the Agile Rabbit Book of Historical and Curious Maps.

232 - Willkommen in Neu-York (?)

One could call it cautionary cartography, this map of a thoroughly germanified New York – something that might have happened in an alternate universe, where the Nazis not only won the World War in Europe, but managed to cross the ocean and subdue the United States.

Neu-York is a project by artist Melissa Gould, who writes on the project’s website about its disorienting side-effects, beyond the obvious “horrifying counterfactual proposition”: “(this) is an exploration of psychological transport, place, displacement and memory. This re-imagining of the city plays with comparison and misrecognition, exploring the coexistence of past and present, fiction and reality.”

Gould’s Neu-York is based on several pre-1940 maps of Manhattan, thus excluding post-war developments, and digitally manipulating the material – erasing the synagogues, for one. Street and location names were replaced by names taken from contemporary Berlin maps. Thus, this Manhattan isn’t so much a city conquered and renamed, but one transported across an ocean and transposed on another one – Berlin-am-Hudson, so to speak.

The artist chose methods and colours to give her work a ‘vintage’ feel, resulting in an uncanny, pseudo-historical piece of psycho-geography.

• The project’s website shows 21 detailed maps of Neu-York
• Also, extensive bi-lingual listings of the renamed streets, sights and locations. Some of the renaming is problematic: why does Central Park become Tiergarten when it obviously isn’t a zoo? Others are plain unsettling: the Croton Reservoir in Central Park becomes Wannsee, a Berlin locale forever infamously linked with the conference held there to set up the Endlösung, the extermination of European Jewry.
• The avenues are all named after German kings and emperors.
• The streets are named, in clusters, for birds, wildflowers, plants, grains and herbs, flowers, trees, animals, German composers, operas, ancient German first names, foreign cities, German rivers and German cities. More info on the renaming on the website.

Thanks to Melissa Gould and Larry Sawh for alerting me to this project.