“On a recent trip to Taiwan, I purchased this bottle opener at the Taipei 101 building (technically still the tallest building in the world until the Burj Dubai opens),” writes John Sperling. “The functional part of the bottle opener is in the shape of Taiwan. It makes you wonder which other countries are suitable for everyday tasks like opening bottles.”Picture provided by Mr Sperling.
In 1852, when New Mexico was at its newest, the territory bearing that name was more than double the size of the eponymous present-day state. Of the many changes that were to follow, none was more dramatic – from a cartographic point of view, if you’ll allow – than the creation of the Union Territory of Arizona.
This destroyed a tradition of ‘horizontalism’ in the administrative divisions of the territory, still clearly visible on this map: the east-west-orientation of the counties creates elongated slices of land that are pleasingly improbable to govern. Just imagine being the sheriff of Bernalillo County. Or worse, his horse.
And yet it may not have been practicality, but spite that caused the Union to set up a ‘verticalist’ Arizona Territory, thus thwarting the ‘horizontalist’ Arizona Territory of the Confederacy. Or maybe it was a very practical spite, thus dividing the pro-Confederate south of the New Mexico Territory in two.
All this will make a bit more sense in its chronological context:
1852 - The US territory of New Mexico, acquired as spoils of the Mexican-American War, covers most of what were to become the states of New Mexico and Arizona and southern bits of the future states of Nevada and Colorado.
1853 - The US buys an additional 30,000 square miles (77,000 sq. km) of Mexican territory. This Gadsden Purchase, named after the US Minister to Mexico, cost the US $10 million, and allowed it to construct a southern transcontinental railroad. The original plan was for the purchase area to be much larger, even including all of the Baja California peninsula (and four Mexican states: Coahuila, Chihuahua, Sonora and Nuevo Leon). This was opposed by the Mexicans and by anti-slavery US politicians, but vehemently regretted by the filibuster William Walker, who marched into Mexico with a small army, and established the short-lived independent Republic of Sonora.
1855 – the Gadsden Purchase officially added to Dona Ana County in the New Mexico Territory.
1861 – After a gold rush, and to secure the area for the Union at the beginning of the Civil War, the Territory of Colorado is established. It replaces the provisional (and unrecognised) Territory of Jefferson, which was a much larger square than Colorado – including an eastern strip of Utah, a southern third of Wyoming and the western protrusion of Nebraska. The Territory of Colorado is made up of far-flung parts of the Territories of Utah, Nebraska, Kansas and New Mexico.
1861 – pro-Confederacy settlers in the southern half of the Territory proclaim the Confederate Territory of Arizona (identical to the areas of the Socorro and Dona Ana Counties on this map), aided by the fact that they are removed from the pro-Union administration in Santa Fe by the Jornada del Muerto (’the journey of the dead man’), a difficult stretch of desert. The CTA links the Confederacy all the way to California.
1863 – Having ousted Confederate forces from the area, the Union creates its own Arizona Territory, but does this by slicing the original New Mexico Territory in eastern and western halves (creating the present state border), rather than northern and southern ones.
1866 – Nevada absorbs the part of the Arizona Territory west of the Colorado River and south of the 37th parallel. The transfer followed a gold rush, with the government judging Nevada would be better suited to manage the influx of migrants.
1912 – In January, New Mexico is the penultimate state of the Lower 48 to receive statehood. In February, Arizona is the very last.
This map was sent in by Brian Fletcher (of Bernalillo County, NM), who found it at this page of the New Mexico Genealogical Society. “All of these counties (mentioned on the map) survive to this day in a different form except for Santa Ana,” he says.
On July 21, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the moon. He didn’t moonwalk alone – ‘Buzz’ Aldrin joined him on the surface – and he didn’t walk far.
After travelling hundreds of thousands of kilometers, the landing crew of the Apollo 11 lunar mission barely covered an area the size of a football pitch.
Many thanks to John Mark Boling for sending in this extremely cool map, found at this page of the NASA history division website.
If ‘football’ makes you think of a game played with helmets, please substitute ’soccer’. And if soccer is too alien for your liking, this map from the same website overlays the ground covered by the Apollo 11 landing team on a baseball diamond…
Except for some of the harsh, impermanently inhabited and sparsely visited inlands of Kerguélen, there are no places left on Earth to name.
Those with a penchant for baptising should look to the priesthood, or take a more literal interest in heaven – there are ever more known worlds out there, and precious little of those exoplanets have been explored, let alone provided with toponyms.Even within our own solar system, the field is still wide open. Although all planets and moons in our solar system have been named, many of their geograpical features haven’t.
Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, was discovered in 1655 by Christiaan Huygens. Titan is larger in diameter than the smallest planet, (Neptune) Mercury, and 50% larger than our own Moon. It is the only moon in our solar system to have a dense atmosphere – so dense that, in combination with its limited gravity, humans on Titan could fly by just flapping their arms.
The orange opacity of Titan’s atmosphere makes the moon appear bigger than it actually is – astronomers have since distinguished between permanent cloud cover and surface, and downgraded it from the first- to the second-largest moon in our system, after Jupiter’s satellite Ganymede.
Not until the flyby, in 2004, of the Cassini-Huygens mission could scientists confirm the speculation, first ignited by both Voyager missions and then heightened by Hubble observations, that Titan is the only heavenly body (save Earth) to contain large liquid surfaces – or seas, as non-astronomers would call them. For they seem a bit too small to be labelled oceans.
These seas, or lakes, most probably consisting of methane or another hydrocarbon, can be seen on this page of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
Cue Peter Minton, a teacher from San Diego with a thing for maps, for mapping and more precisely still for mapping shorelines. His website shows the many maps he has made, most with more conventional subjects than these seas on Titan. Mr Minton used the data at the JPL to create this map of Titan’s Unnamed Methane Sea (his relevant page here), detected in mid-2006 by Cassini probe (which is slated to make the last of its 21 flybys mid-May 2008).
Fascinating. It looks a bit like the Aral Sea, although that might just be me confusing this colour scheme with satellite pictures of the Central Asian lake, shrinking into the desert. The many rivulets and islets make it look like a nice lake to vacation at, until you remember that there’s something unpleasant in the air there (– 98% nitrogen). A shame: how nice it must be to flap your arms and fly over the Superior-sized lake. But then again, the sunlight hardly penetrates Titan’s cloud cover, so you wouldn’t see much. And the average temperature is -180°C (-290°F). Can we go home now?
The naming bit, then. First off, many features on Titan have already been named. To not offend anyone except scientists, and as is customary in extraplanetary toponymy, the names are chosen mainly from mythology: Xanadu is an Australia-sized hilly and craggy area near the Equator (and the fabled location of Kubla Khan’s stately pleasure dome), Menrva is a 440 km wide basin of impact craters (and the Etruscan version of the goddess Minerva), Guabonito is a partially buried impact crater (and a Taino goddess), etcetera.
A bit disappointingly, I just discovered that the lakes have also been named. Wikipedia lists the names of 12 potential lakes, all designated as lacus and named after existing Earth lakes (e.g. Ontario lacus), although it’s not clear which of those lakes is supposed to be the one drawn here by Mr (Burton) Minton. I say its shape looks a bit like that of the northern half of Greenland. But that’s hardly an appealing name – Lake North Greenland (although I don’t think there’s any tourist board out there to complain about it). How about Lake (Burton) Minton, in honour of its mapper? Although Unnamed Methane Sea has a nice, ominous ring to it. Any other ideas? Or should I just go to Kerguélen on my own?
This map was sent in by Paul Drye. With a name like that, he’d best not discover any lakes. Or seas.
Temperance not only is one of the four Cardinal Virtues of Catholicism (and one of the five Precepts of Buddhism), it’s also the name of a specific movement gathering steam throughout the 19th century, mainly in anglophone countries, aiming to reduce the consumption of alcohol.
In the US, much of the Temperance Movement was religiously inspired (although by Protestantism rather than Catholicism or Buddhism), and much of it was led by women (such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, founded in 1873 and still around today).
The most obvious way to ‘temper’ the consumption of alcohol is not to drink it at all; so the call for Temperance escalated into pleas for Abstinence. But the personal choice not to drink at all is much easier if there’s no temptation around. And thus the Movement moved inexorably from demanding Temperance through advocating Abstinence to pushing for Prohibition - “an intemperate denunciation of temperate drinking,” as G.K. Chesterton once derisively described it.
Temperance, now in the guise of Prohibition, was spread with a religious zeal bordering on the fanatical. In 1851, Maine became the first Prohibition state; four years later, there were already 12 ‘dry’ US states. In 1919, the 18th Amendment extended Prohibition to the entire US. Jubilant Temperance zealots were predicting the end of crime, and prepared to promote the benefits of Prohibition in other countries.
But this is where the Temperance wave crested. Far from reducing crime, Prohibition actually gave organised crime a serious boost - e.g. Al Capone and other ‘classic’ American gangsters. Prohibition was not only impopular, but eventually untenable. The 18th Amendment is the only one to have ever been rescinded (in 1933, by the 21st).
This ‘Map On Temperance’ was printed at Howe’s Sheet Anchors Press in Boston around 1846, thus dating from the ascendancy of the Temperance movement. It shows the straits, bays and channels of the Ocean of Life, which is dotted with islands, provinces, kingdoms, territories and regions. All features are named after aspects of alcoholism (in the West) and of Abstinence (in the East).
The Alcohol Islands lie in the northern part of the Ocean, separated by Dissipation Straits and Folly Straits from the wicked lands to the West. The islands are: Brandy Island, Rum Island, Cider Island, Wine Island, Malt Island, Gin Island, Whiskey Island and Cordial Island. Other features on or between these islands are: Rum Sellers Shoals, Temptation Straits, Cape Ale, and, towards the gloriously alcohol-free lands to the East, Moderation Passage and Temperance Straits.
The lands of drink are, north to south: Topers Possession, Sickness Province, Indolence Kingdom, Poverty Territory, Fury Region, Reprobate Empire, Dishonesty Kingdom, Crime Empire, Lunacy Province and Misery Regions. Each territory contains toponyms associated with each of the defects described by their name. The Misery Regions are dotted with Infamy, Ruin, Woe and Horror; Hatred, Malice and Revenge are contained in the Fury Region; and Sloth, Indigence and Lazy Harbour (a particular favourite of mine) can be found in Indolence Kingdom.
The ‘dry’ lands in the East are, north to south: Repentance Kingdom, Resolution Province, Fortitude Territory, Wisdom Empire, Friendship Regions, Industry Province, Morality Kingdom, Religious Possessions, Happiness Empire and Contentment Province. Vices are more colourful than virtues – but still, some interesting toponyms here are: the Religion Channel, Cape Sobriety and the Gulf of Reform.
Drifting in the southern Ocean of Life, almost as if it were on a mission due west is – yep – Missionary Island, with a Persuasion Bay and an Exhortation Coast. Between the island and the dry land are the Washingtonian Straits. This might be a reference to the politicians in Washington who still need to be convinced of the need for Temperance legislation, but I’m not sure.
Below the actual map is a rhyming road map explaining the route from the perilous ‘wet’ lands to the blessed ‘dry’ lands. An Explanation crowns the whole simile between map and life:
Life is an Ocean, both extant and wide;
Man’s the Ship, that doth o’er its surface glide;
Happiness the Port, we ever strive to find;
Temperance must be the Pilot, to navigate the mind;
Reason then takes the helm, free from doubt,
To steer the course – as by Heaven pointed out.
This map was sent in by Natalia Fisher and can be found on this page at Brown University in Providence (RI).
Switzerland is predominantly German-speaking, but far from completely so. The alpine confederation is officially quadrilingual: German (64%), French (20%), Italian (7%) and Romansh (0.5%). As the latter two languages are very minoritary, linguistic tension does tend to be a binary thing, between Deutschschweiz – a word only a germanophone could pronounce – and la Romandie, signifying the Swiss French west of the country.
The Romands call the ‘other’ side la Suisse alémannique and the Schweizerdeutsche call the francophone part of their country Welschschweiz (the root word being a Germanic term for ‘stranger’, identical to the one in ‘Wales’ and ‘Wallonia’).
The language border dividing these two areas is known jestingly as the Röstigraben (in German) or the rideau de rösti (in French). A Graben is a ditch and a rideau is a curtain, so you get the idea of separation – but what a Rösti is and why it is significant, requires a bit more explanation.
This dish is made mainly by frying grated potatoes in a pan. It was formerly eaten as breakfast by farmers in the (German-speaking) Bern canton. The original conceit of the Röstigraben was that it constituted the western limit of the German Swiss culture, beyond which people spoke (and ate) differently.
The Rösti has gained popularity as a side dish all over Switzerland, but the language and cultural differences persist. The French Swiss voters have traditionally been less averse of the international community (including potential EU membership) and more prone to support a more active role for the federal government. Recently, voting trends in French and German Switzerland have tended to converge more.
The Röstigraben isn’t the only gastronomically defined cultural border in central Europe. The northern and southern halves of germany are separated by what is called the Weisswurstäquator – the white sausage equator, after a favourite dish in Bavaria that’s rarely eaten in the north.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a map of this particular equator around. The book cover used here (and found here) shows a picture of a very literal Röstigraben – a Switzerland-shaped Rösti broken in two exactly where the language border runs. That the ditch wasn’t too hard to cross, is apparent by the name of the author, Laurent Flütsch: his French forename and German surname suggest his parents had a quite intimate knowledge of the ‘other’…
Just as light is not supposed to bend, so the Equator should not waver from its rectitude. The fact that it snakes across this map like a hose through a garden indicates that this is a very weird world indeed.
How weird? A first indication is the size of Alaska – way too big even if you allow for the distortion of the Mercator projection, which is also ballooning Russia to a size much bigger than its already huge actual surface, but this super-sized Russia is not out of line with accepted mercatorial deviance.
Closer inspection of the American continent reveals a gigantic Labrador, bordering on Mexico, to which is appended an atrophied version of South America. Not just atrophied, but completely missing are the United States and Canada (not to mention all other Central and South American countries, save Peru, which takes up all of its subcontinent).
Two para-American islands are affected by gigantism: Easter Island, which looks like a teddy bear pointing towards Peru, and Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of the Americas, looking like a lizard running west… the low resolution of this image leaves much to the imagination.
Asia and Oceania are similarly blighted by gigantism (Hebrides, New Guinea and an illegible archipel, China and Afghanistan) dwarfism (Australia, India) and not-there-ism (Japan, Sri Lanka, much of the Middle East).
Africa is tiny, Europe is almost entirely covered by Germany, Ireland is looking straight at Europe across the Britain-less North Sea. Only two cities are marked on the map: Paris and Constantinople…What’s the point of this map? Well – its point is that it hasn’t any, except to bewilder and shock bourgeois viewers by presenting a bizarre alternative to the stale normality of their expectations.
Which is a neat summary of the surrealist world view – not co-incidentally, the title of this work is Surrealist Map of the World. It first appeared in 1929 in a special issue of ‘Variétés’, a Belgian magazine, dedicated to surrealism – an art form remembered for its absurdity, but less for its political views.
In discussing this map in her excellent book You Are Here, Katharine Harmon quotes a Surrealist manifesto from 1925:
“Even more than patriotism – which is a quite commonplace sort of hysteria, though emptier and shorter-lived than most – we are disgusted by the idea of belonging to a country at all, which is the most bestial and least philosophic of the concepts to which we are all subjected.. Wherever Western civilization is dominant, all human contact has disappeared, except contact from which money can be made – payment in hard cash.”
This map was found here.
Have you ever seen the constellation named ‘The Tyrants’, spanning the stars Robespierre and Kubla Khan, stringing together Hitler, Mussolini and Attila along the way? Or how about the stars Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt in the constellation ‘United States’? And then there’s the stars Stalin, Lenin and Tolstoi sharing the constellation ‘Russia’….
You’ve seen all of these stars before, you’ve just never heard them called these names. Good thing A.P. Herbert isn’t around anymore to mourn the total oblivion of his plan for renaming the constellations. In 1944, the eccentric Englishman published ‘A Better Sky, or, Name This Star’, a book in which he expounded his proposal to change the names of stars and constellations in order for them to be more recognisable and easier to learn for the contemporary British student.
In 1944, the British government still had other things to worry about than renaming the heavens. Reviewing Mr Herbert’s book in a 1944 issue of The Observatory magazine, G.K. McArthur, retired Instructor-Commander in the Royal Navy, writes: “Should not an attempt be made to persuade the schools to include elementary astronomy and navigation in the curriculum? Here is an opportunity for a keen navigator and zealous reformer like Mr. Herbert; perhaps a more valuable exercise for his brilliant powers than hoisting Hitler and Mussolini with other mortals into the sky.”
Mr Herbert’s attempt to rename the stars was not the first one – equally unsuccesful attempts have been made to change them to the names of Christian apostles, slugs, ships and planes, apparently. Nevertheless, Alan Patrick Herbert can still be remembered for other things: he was a writer, humorist and law reformer, serving in the House of Commons for 15 years and in the Royal Navy during the First and Second World Wars.
He campaigned for modernising the laws on divorce, obscenity and alcohol licensing – once famously taking the House of Commons to court for the (illegal) sale of alcohol on its premises. As a writer, he is best remembered for his ‘Misleading Cases’, satirical law reports of fictional court cases, often written from the point of view of serial litigator A.P. Haddock, and adapted for television by the BBC. He also wrote eight novels and 15 plays, including a light opera.
This map of the heavens renamed has the following constellations –
Canada, The Tyrants, Europe Regained, China, The Airman, The Music Maker, Science, The Gorgeous East, The Story-Teller, The Poet, The Painter, The Islands, The Jester, South America, Australasia, The Player, The Doctor, Russia, The Philosopher, Great Britain, The Statesman, The Soldier, The Traveller, The Sailor, South Africa, The Rebels, The Heroes, King’s Cross, The Children’s Corner, The Women, United States.
I recognise Great Britain as Ursa Major and I suspect The Sailor to be Orion, but that’s as far as it goes, at first glance. A larger map can be viewed by clicking on it, but the names of the individual stars remain not entirely legible.
“I’m a female and a feminist. I dislike the usage of the word ‘ho’. However, as a geography major, I find this song hilarious, and had to map it,” says Stefanie Gray, referring to ‘Area Codes’ by the rap artist Ludacris.
Rap, for those less familiar with the term, is a genre in which the rhythmic delivery of rhyme and wordplay constitutes the main element of the music. Rap relates to singing as racewalking relates to running – but that’s just my inexpert opinion.
Rap music has been criticised for its content, which often consists of crude and ludicrous bragging about the rapper’s lyrical, financial, criminal, physical and sexual prowess. ‘Area Codes’ could be considered as an example of this phenomenon, sometimes referred to as gangsta rap:
“I’ll jump off the G4, we can meet outside/So control your hormones and keep your drawers on/’Til I close the door and I’m jumping your bones/3-1-2’s, 3-1-3’s (oh), 2-1-5’s, 8-0-three’s (oh)/Read your horoscope and eat some horderves (sic)/Ten on pump one, these hoes is self serve/7-5-7, 4-1-0’s, my cell phone just overloads.”
“In this song, Ludacris brags about the area codes where he knows women, whom he refers to as ‘hoes’,” says Ms Gray, who plotted out all the area codes mentioned in this song on a map of the United States. She arrived at some interesting conclusions as to the locations of this rapper’s preferred female companionship:
Ludacris is not deterred by clever and/or strong women? The concept of Ludacris’ song reminds me a bit of ‘I’ve Been Everywhere’ by Johnny Cash, which, come to think of it, probably shares some subtext with ‘Area Codes’.
Map kindly provided by Stefanie Gray.
The town of Büsingen am Hochrhein is one of two foreign enclaves enclosed within the territory of Switzerland (*). Büsingen has a long, intimate knowledge of borders, being located on the old limes between the Roman empire and the Germanic barbarians.
Ever since the mid 14th century, Büsingen has had Austrian overlords – at the end of the 17th century, the abduction, trial and death sentence of the Lord of Büsingen at the hands of the neighbouring Swiss canton of Schaffhausen almost led to war between Austria and Switzerland.
It’s said that due to this near-war, the Austrians decided to never relinquish control over Büsingen to the Swiss, just to spite them. When Austria sold its rights to the nearby villages of Ramsen and Dörflingen to the canton of Zürich in 1770, Büsingen effectively became an enclave within Switzerland.
In 1805, the Peace of Pressburg handed Büsingen to the kingdom of Württemberg, in southern Germany. Five years later, the town came under the overlordship of the Grand Duchy of Baden. Eventually, with German Unification in 1870, Büsingen became part of the German Empire.
A whopping 96% of the inhabitants voted for annexation by Switzerland in a 1919 referendum, but since the Swiss couldn’t offer Germany any territory in return, Büsingen remained, somewhat reluctantly, German.
As Büsingen is in a customs union with Switzerland, it is outside the European Customs Area. Other peculiarities caused by its exterritoriality:
• the common currency in Büsingen is not the euro, but the Swiss franc.
• Swiss police may pursue and arrest suspects in Büsingen, but no more than 10 Swiss police officers are allowed in the town at one time.
• Similarly, there may never be more than 3 German police officers per 100 inhabitants.
• There are two postal codes in this one town, a German one 78266 Büsingen; and a Swiss one: 8238 Büsingen (D). You can use Swiss or German stamps for your letters.
• Büsingen’s only petrol station advertises that it’s the cheapest in all of Germany – on average 30% cheaper.
(*) later more on Campione d’Italia, an Italian exclave in southern Switzerland.
Ever since the Mexican-American War (1845-49), the Rio Grande has been the border between the two nations from El Paso to the Gulf, giving Texas a natural southern boundary. Fixing the border on a river might seem a tidy solution. But while rivers last longer than most treaties, they are also bound by none. When a river shifts, it shifts, treaty or no.
Does the border then trace the old riverbed or the new one? Naturally, both parties would prefer the outcome that left them the most territory (and the other the least). A war, anyone? International law has a rule for this particular clash between fluctuation and demarcation: if the river changes course gradually, through erosion, the border follows. If the river radically changes course, through avulsion, the border should remain where it was before.
By 1895, the Rio Grande – and the US – had moved south about 600 acres (2,4 sq. km), a disputed area known as El Chamizal. Mexicans filed claims to the land south of the old riverbed (but north of the new one), an arbitration commission was established and it eventually proclaimed in 1911 that each country should receive part of the disputed area:
The US was to receive the area between the riverbed as originally surveyed in 1852 and the riverbed as it had shifted southwards by 1864, the rest going to Mexico, even though this was to the north of the later riverbed of the Rio Grande.
The US did not accept this split decision, leading to sustained tension with Mexico and the development of a curious zone in El Chamizal, called Cordova Island. This was a virtual Mexican island in the disputed zone, leading to a grey zone that fostered crime and illegal border crossings.
In 1963, US president JF Kennedy and Mexican president Adolfo Lopez Mateos agreed to settle the Chamizal Dispute along the lines of the 1911 recommendations.
• The US and Mexico each received 193 acres of Cordova Island;
• Mexico received 366 acres west of Cordova Island, and 264 acres to the east of it.
• Mexico and the US shared the cost of a man-made channel that would (or should) prevent further blurring of the border.
• US citizens in the Chamizal area were relocated and compensated for the loss of their homes and businesses.
• A Chamizal National Memorial, an amphitheatre, a bookstore and a museum were established in the area, which every October hosts several cultural events such as the Border Folk Festival and the Siglo del Oro drama festival.
This map, found at this page at answers.com, would have benefited from a better dating of the three sets of riverbeds, which I assume must be the ones from 1852 (’old boundary’), 1864 (’Relocated River Channel’) and around 1895 (’Rio Grande’).
“While on vacation in Dubrovnik, Croatia this summer, we ran across an old Yugoslav atlas which included this map on the entry for the US. My Serbo-Croatian isn’t so good so I don’t know the true details as to what it’s about, but it appears to be plans for a Russian invasion,” says Andrew, who sent in this map.
“Submarines labelled SSSR are on both coasts. The apparent flight paths of ICBMs are marked. Cuba’s soldiers and bases are indicated (…) If you can figure out more precisely what’s going on I’d certainly be curious, and I imagine that other readers would get a kick out of it.”
My Serbo-Croatian isn’t very good either, but the map does seem to speak the language of the Cold War. Guessing the exact year is complicated as national borders in the Americas have remained stable in the last few decades, unlike in other parts of the world, where they allow easier carto-dating.
A look at the actual legend of the map does allow for some closer dating. Item #3 (the red vertical stripes) indicates the pro-soviet regimes in the hemisphere – Cuba and Nicaragua. The inclusion of that second country limits the timeframe of the map to 1979-1990, the era when the Sandinistas were in control of Nicaragua.
Although the Soviet navy has got the North American continent completely surrounded, in my opinion, the map does not demonstrate a Soviet plan of attack, but restates the Communist ideological orthodoxy of the US as an aggressive, unstable monstrosity at near-collapse – a remarkable example of the pot calling the kettle black.
• Whereas blue indicates the US itself (Sjedinjene Americke Drzave, acronym SAD – but that is a coincidence, I presume), yellow indicates ’separatist’ forces at work in the North American continent, such as Quebec (although that is a Canadian, not a US issue) and Black Muslims (around Chicago) and Mexican-Americans (in Texas). Again, a pretty remarkable comment, coming from a Yugoslav atlas.
• Item #5 on the legend indicates, I think, ‘disputed’ marine boundaries, mainly between Canada and the US, thus misrepresenting the mainly friendly relations between those two countries – the disputes might be real, but their significance is relatively minor.
Anyone able to elucidate on the meaning of the other symbols? Please do!
“Hitler has often protested that his plans for conquest do not extend across the Atlantic Ocean. I have in my possession a secret map, made in Germany by Hitler’s government – by the planners of the new world order. It is a map of South America and a part of Central America as Hitler proposes to reorganize it,” revealed US President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his Navy Day address to the nation, broadcast on 27 October 1941.
The map, however, was a fake. World War II revisionists (not to put too fine a point on it: those who would have preferred the Nazis to win) claim this proves that FDR was a war-mongerer, prepared to lie shamelessly in order to drag the US into war. But in this case, FDR might have been more mongered against than mongering – the map most probably was a British forgery, not an American one.
While FDR indeed was a steadfast advocate for a more active US role in the unfolding conflict, he was up against formidable internal resistance to entry into war. It was the British who had more to gain from American involvement, because they had everything to lose. In this phase of the conflict, Britain stood virtually alone, Nazi Germany controlling most of the European continent and kicking Soviet butt in the early months of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The US would only be dragged into the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, later that same year, on December 7.
For Britain, desperate times called for desperate measures, one of which would have been the forgery of this map, the point of which was to instill in the Americans the notion that the Nazis, if victorious in Europe, would not leave the American continent alone, thus challenging the Monroe Doctrine. The story behind the map, as (probably, but not provably) produced by the British intelligence services, went like this:
In October 1941, a British agent managed to snatch this map from the bag of a German courier straight after the latter’s involvement in a car crash in Buenos Aires. The map showed how the Nazis intended to reorganise South America into five satellite states, each one a Gau with a German Gauleiter:
• Guyana (encompassing British, Dutch and French Guyana, but wholly under the tutelage of the – collaborating – French government headquartered in Vichy);
• Neuspanien (New Spain, an agglomeration of Venezuela, Colombia, Equador and Panama – meaning the Panama Canal, at that time under US sovereignty, would at least indirectly come under Nazi control);
• Chile (being a fusion of Peru, part of Bolivia and Chile itself, dissected halfway by an Argentinian corridor to the Pacific port of Antofagasta);
• Argentina (Argentina itself, Uruguay and Paraguay, and the aforementioned Antofagasta corridor);
• Brazil (being Brazil, plus part of Bolivia).
Interestingly, the map’s legend stresses: Luftverkehrsnetz der Vereinigten Staaten Süd-Amerikas – Hauptlinien. (’Air Routes in the United States of South America – Main Lines’), indicating that these states would be joined in a well-connected subcontinent-wide political union (most likely a Nazi-induced shotgun wedding). Such a unified behemoth under German control would inevitably pose a threat to the US, FDR proposed in his Navy Day speech: “This map makes clear the Nazi design, not only against South America but against the United States as well.”
As it turned out, World War II hardly touched South America. Only after the war did it gain some notoriety as the hideout of many top-level Nazis, including Eichmann (caught by the Israelis in Argentina) and Mengele (died peacefully in Brazil).
This map was sent in by Joseph Eros, who copied it from the article ‘FDR and the Secret Map’ by John F. Fratzel and Leslie B. Trout Jr. in the 1985 New Year’s edition of Wilson Quarterly.
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