378 – X M-Aarrrh-ks the Spot

Despite recent outbreaks off the Horn of Africa, piracy still conjures up other images than freebooting Somali fishermen.Your standard-issue pirate from Central Casting will have an eyepatch, an earring, a parrot on his shoulder or a wooden leg – or any combination of the above. He will almost inevitably have the accent of the English West Country (which explains all the Aarrrh-ing), and will surely be on a quest for treasure.

We owe this persistent stereotype to, and can blame its most recent incarnation in the increasingly awful Pirates of the Caribbean-franchise, on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), the classic adventure novel about pirates and buried treasure. Stevenson’s book also spawned, in later derivations and imitations, the trope of the treasure map as an essential part of the story.

Which makes the question all the more interesting: was there a real-life model for the generically named Treasure Island – and if so, where was it? It seems to have been a chance invention by Lloyd Osbourne, RLS’s stepson, while holidaying with the family in a Scottish Highland cottage. As Osbourne later recalled:

“… busy with a box of paints I happened to be tinting a map of an island I had drawn. Stevenson came in as I was finishing it, and with his affectionate interest in everything I was doing, leaned over my shoulder, and was soon elaborating the map and naming it. I shall never forget the thrill of Skeleton Island, Spyglass Hill, nor the heart-stirring climax of the three red crosses! And the greater climax still when he wrote down the words “Treasure Island” at the top right-hand corner! And he seemed to know so much about it too – the pirates, the buried treasure, the man who had been marooned on the island … . “Oh, for a story about it”, I exclaimed, in a heaven of enchantment …”

And that is how Stevenson got started writing Treasure Island - as a back story to the map originally drawn by his stepson. Curiously, the map reprinted in all subsequent editions of the book is not that first map. That got lost when he sent it to his publisher. Stevenson had to redraw his map from scratch, and although he got the chance to match the map to the story, he never was as satisfied with the copy as with the orginal.

Stevenson didn’t write his novel ex nihilo: he acknowledged the inspiration of works by Washington Irving and others, and of real-life characters and stories as inspirations for Treasure Island. But in how far does this also hold true for the Treasure Island depicted on the crucial map?

A number of speculations and suggestions have been made as to islands that might have inspired Treasure Island.

• A seafaring uncle might have told Stevenson about Norman Island, a tiny uninhabited island in the British Virgin Islands. The island is the subject of many stories of hidden treasure, some of which might have some basis in reality.
• Confusingly, a nearby island called Dead Man’s Chest Island might be named directly after piratey rumours of treasure (Blackbeard’s, no less) and thus have co-inspired Stevenson or be named indirectly, after… a song in Stevenson’s Treasure Island.
• The shape of Treasure Island looks a bit like Unst, one of the Shetland Islands. Stevenson visited the area as a child, when his father and uncle were building a lighthouse on Muckle Flugga.
• * In The Silverado Squatters (1883), Stevenson describes the scenery in Napa Valley (California), which would prove an inspiration for Treasure Island.
• * Stevenson visited Osborn Island in New Jersey’s Manasquan River and rechristened it Treasure Island. Unfortunately, he did so 5 years after writing the book.The island is now known as Nienstedt Island.

The map itself, then, is drawn to the scale of 3 English miles, and shows such landmarks as Foremast Hill, Spyeglass Hill, Cape of the Woods, Mazenmast Hill and Hautbowline Head. Off the small Skeleton Island, south of the main island, is Foul Ground. Off the west coast is the warning: Strong tide here. On the island itself are mentioned mainly Swamps and Graves, and of course an X that marks the spot: Bulk of treasure buried here. Not all of the lettering is easily readable.

This map was taken here from Kellscraft Studio, a website dedicated to presenting hard to find, previously printed books now in t he public domain, such as Treasure Island.

377 – Planet of the Grapes

What a great way this map is to present global levels of wine consumption (red wine, 2006). A shame there’s no legend to provide context (by way of litres consumed per country, a ranking and a bit of explanation).

Why did the Luxembourgers consume such an inordinate amount of red wine in 2006? Was it the Grand Duke’s jubilee, perhaps? Or did the local, tiny wine industry have a bumper crop in 2005? And why is Brazil so tiny by comparison? Doesn’t the South American giant have a wine industry of its own? Or at least a wine-drinking culture – it’s hard to imagine the laid-back Brazilians not having one.

But what do those numbers mean? If this is litres per head per year, then those Luxembourgers haven’t exactly been swilling in the stuff, and the 0,17 litres ingested by the Brazilians suggests far too much sobriety than they can be suspected of.

All this graph/map teaches us, therefore, is relative wine consumption. Apart from the aforementioned Grand-Ducals (who seem to be world champions), other red wine aficionados appear to be the French (unsurprisingly), the Italians (also no shock there), followed by the Portuguese, the Swiss (bet you didn’t think of them), the Croatians, the Spanish, the Danish, the Austrians, the Greeks, the Argentinians, the Georgians (the Sakartvelo kind obviously, not those of Atlanta and environs) and the Hungarians.

Left behind by a whole slew of middle-tier red wine consumers are tiny drinkers such as the Polish, Paraguayans, Russians, Bosnians, Japanese, Lebanese, Estonians, Israelis and Kazakhs. Some of the more striking conclusions:

• red wine consumption can vary hugely between neighbouring countries. Paraguay is a tiny consumer, Uruguay a huge one. Maybe the latter has a wine industry while the former hasn’t?
• then again, Chile has a well-known viticultural sector, but is a tiny consumer. Maybe because all the stuff is exported? Other countries with a history of, or at least the appropriate climate for wine-growing are also conspicuously small consumers.
• Germany is a huge wine country, but an average red wine consumer. Do Germans prefer the white variety?
• Low red wine consumption should not be equated by low alcohol consumption per se. Local alcoholic drinks might simply have a bigger hold on the market. Russia, for example, consumes a tiny amount of red wine per capita. Which cannot be said of the amount of wodka.

A final note on the sonorous quality of the Portuguese language. Doesn’t Cazaquistao sound fantastically exotic, and even more so than Kazakhstan already does? Portuguese, the other Iberian language, is dwarfed by Spanish, which has 350 million speakers worldwide. That is not to say that Portuguese isn’t a world language in its own right, both in numbers (190 to 230  million, largely thanks to Brazil’s 196 million) and global reach (the Lusophone community numbers 8 countries on 4 continents, among which the world’s second-newest nation, East Timor).

Many thanks to Brazilian graphic designer Alexandre Suannes for sending in this map, which he produced for Expand, a wine producer/importer in Brazil.

376 – Pipe Dreams, or the Rochester Ghost Subway

 

“I was researching the town that I’m going to college in next year,” Duane Thomas Fields writes (about Rochester, New York), “and I came across the fact that the city had a subway for a time in the early 20th century. It hasn’t run since 1956 and the tunnels sit abandoned today. But in researching whether there was support for modern revival, I came about a map of what the subway map could look like today, with the original line plus proposed extensions.”

For much of late 19th and early 20th century, Rochester was among America’s two dozen biggest cities. But not anymore, not by a long shot: the former economic powerhouse by Lake Ontario’s southern shores has slipped to 97th place, and into relative obscurity. At its peak, Rochester had a third of a million inhabitants; now, at just over 200,000, it at least has the consolation to be still the biggest Rochester in the world. It out-sizes all 18 other Rochesters, including the original one (in England, with under 30,000 inhabitants). More importantly, metropolitan Rochester (about 1 million inhabitants) still is the second major economic hub in New York State, after – obviously – New York City.

One of those second-tier metropolises that made the American hinterland hum with industry, Rochester’s history can be gleaned from the epitheta it has strung together in its nearly 200 years of existence.

• Young Lion of the West: founded in 1811 and numbering a few hundred people for the first few years, Rochester’s population quickly soared to around 10,000 in 1830 – making it the original boomtown (that it was labelled ‘western’ shows how much expanding the US still had to do).
• Flour City: the flour mills along the Genesee river waterfalls, pouring out their production via the Erie Canal, made Rochester the largest flour-producing city in the world by 1838.
• Flower City: the next industry to take off in Rochester were flower nurseries, some of which would grow to global prominence by mid-19th century.
• The World’s Image Centre: photographic multinational Eastman Kodak was founded in Rochester, as well as Bausch & Lomb, the (less famous) erstwhile parent company of Ray-Ban sunglasses, and other eyecare products.
• Smugtown USA: Rochester also attracted a significant amount of garment factories, became the centre of copying industry as the headquarters of Xerox and generally was a hub post-world-war-two high-tech – creating a self-confident culture mocked in the novel Smugtown USA (1957).
• Most Livable City: Despite population drops due to suburbanisation and a race riot in 1964 that set off a nationwide wave of racial violence, Rochester in more recent years has focused on urban renewal and consistently ranked high in list of best US cities to live in (ranking #1 in Expansion Management Magazine’s quality of life list in 1997).

Strangely enough, Rochester owed its subway to the banishment from town of an earlier mode of transport. In 1900, the city fathers found the Erie Canal’s route straight through the city centre to be an unnecessary eyesore, and decided to divert it away from the urban agglomeration. The disused canal bed thus became the prime location for Rochester’s subway route. The last ship sailed through town in 1919, the first train travelled on the Rochester Industrial & Rapid Transit Route (RI&RTR) in 1927 (the overhead serving as Broad Street). For three decades, Rochester would be served by a subway, apparently the smallest city in the world ever to possess one.

Subway is a bit of a misleading term for the Rochester transit system, as only two miles of it were actually in the (ex-canal) tunnel; but it could be taken to refer to the fact that it was a separate, rapid-transit system. And in fact, most of it ran in an open cut below the surface, crossed by bridges. The last passenger service was in 1956, although freight transports continued for some time after this. The tunnels continue to form part of Rochester’s historical legacy, if only for the controversy they generate: should they be used for a new public transport system (be it a pedestrian tunnel, or even a re-instated passage of the Erie Canal) or should they be filled up, finally relieving the city of maintenance costs? The discussion recently seems to have tilted the latter way.

On this map, the blue line represents the Rochester Subway as it existed in the former Erie Canal bed, with the actual stations (from General Motors in the northwest to Rowlands in the southeast). The geometrically inclined map possibly distorts actual distance, as the station named Halfway seems much closer to the southeastern terminus than to the other one. The yellow, red and orange lines were all at some time proposed as extensions to the Subway, and would have greatly enlarged the scope of the original transit system.

• The red line would have branched out from Driving Park, near the northwestern terminus, towards Charlotte Beach on the lakeshore, with stops at Kodak Park (already included in the original system), Ridge Road, Dewey Avenue, Boxart Street and Latta Road.
• The yellow line was to branch south from Driving Park, looping through the city’s southern districts to reconnect with the original line at City Hall, stopping off at Emerson Street West, Lyell Avenue West, Chili Avenue, Airport-Brooks Avenue, Genesee Street, Violetta Street, and Corn Hill.
• The orange line would head south from Court Street on the main line through stops at South Avenue, Mount Hope, the University of Rochester, and Elmwood-Strong. Future extensions would take the orange line to Genesee Valley Park, Southtown Plaza and the Rochester Institute of Technology.
• Possible future extensions of the blue mainline would have taken it to Monroe Avenue East and all the way to Pittsford.

This beautiful map, then, is an exercise in nostalgic futurism: it imagines what the world would have looked like if the center had held, if crises had not intervened and growth could have continued. But Rochester will never look like this. With the tunnels slated to be put beyond use, this extended Rochester Subway will be condemned to a ghostlike existence, only on maps and in the imagination - no more than an engineer’s pipe dream.

Many thanks for Duane Thomas Fields for pointing me in the direction of rochestersubway.com, a site devoted to the part-defunct and part-fictional transit system. Special thanks to that site’s webmaster, Mike Governale, for providing me with this map.

375 – Europe Beyond ASCII

 

“Thanks to Unicode and OpenType, modern fonts are overcoming the limitations of traditional European typography. The size of the countries on this map does not correspond to their geographical area, but to the foreign language level of their official languages in Unicode – in this instance FontFonts (FF). A standard OT font from the FontFont library covers the yellow regions, FF-Pro fonts also support CE languages, including Turkish, Romanian and the Baltic languages (green). Well-equipped FF-Pro fonts also include Greek (pink) and/or Cyrillic (pink) characters. The legend shows a selection of typical characters for these languages.”

If you think fonts are for baptisms, or more generally, if you’re not into typography, the above paragraph might as well not have been translated from its original German. Some vocabulary, to get us up to speed:

• Font: a complete set of letters, numbers and other characters that would be needed to typeset any text. A font is specific as to size (e.g. 10 or 12 points) and style (e.g. upright, bold, italic). Courier 12 point italic is a different font from Courier 10 point bold.
• Typeface: a ‘family’ of one or more related fonts. The aforementioned fonts belong to one typeface, Courier.
• Typography: the art of designing and arranging typefaces, the artists being graphic designers, typesetters, lay-outers, etc.
• Unicode and OpenType: computer industry standards encompassing most of the world’s alphabets, thus allowing for consistency in the representation of scripts other than one’s own.
• FontFont:a major library for digital typefaces, the name of each of them starting with with FF-.
• ASCII: short for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, a coding standard consisting of 94 printable characters, based on the English alphabet and much in use on the internet, for example.

This map, quite simply put, distorts the size of countries proportionate to the ‘distance’ of their writing systems to ASCII code. Countries with a lot of ‘exotic’ characters are biggest, while countries adhering closely to the ‘regular’ western (i.c. English, i.e. Latin) alphabet, are normal-sized. The legend on the left of the map shows some of the diacritical signs and special letters ‘added’ to the ASCII (English) alphabet in other European languages. Each diacritical sign and special letter has a story to tell. Here are just a few of those:

The Icelandic letters eth (ð, Ð) and thorn (þ, Þ), both also occurred in Old Anglo-Saxon (where they were used interchangeably). An Icelandic eth is a voiced dental fricative similar to the modern English th-sound (in ‘them’, for example), while thorn is a voiceless dental fricative as in ‘thick’. The letter eth disappeared from English around 1300, the thorn holding out until about 1500.

The cedille is a hook-shaped appendage, most familiarly used under a -c- (ç), representing (in French, Portuguese and Catalan) an s-sound where a written -c- would otherwise presuppose a k-sound. Its Spanish name – cedilla – is a clue to its curious origin, as a Visigothic zed minuscule: cedilla means little ceda (zeta). C-cedille is also used in Albanian, Kurdish and Turkish (plus related languages) to represent the voiceless postalveolar affricate ch- as in ‘church’.

Remarkably, the map not alone provides an Atlantic alphabet (identical to Greek), it also shows an outline of Atlantis itself — a very oblique way of announcing its oft-posited existence (most recently earlier this year, when Google’s new ocean-surface viewing service Google Ocean turned up a submarine grid of surprising regularity).

The map is dominated by Russia, due to its original size and the distance between Russian and ASCII, and, by extension, Eastern Europe. Western European and Scandinavian languages apparently deviate less from ASCII. Another font-giant is Greece, which is ironic: the Greek at the origin of all European alphabets, be they Latin, Cyrillic or otherwise. One could rightly consider those as deviations from the original Greek alphabet (the two first letters of which are still called alpha and beta).

Many thanks to Derek Jensen for sending in this link to Fontblog, a German-language typography page.

374 – Superior, the Heart of the Man of Commerce

“The American Geographical Society Library has acquired an extremely rare and unusual map, The Man of Commerce, published in 1889 in Superior, Wisconsin. The highly detailed 31” x 50” map/chart conflates human anatomy with the American transportation system, in an apparent attempt to promote Superior as a transportation hub.”

“Its metaphor makes West Superior ‘the center of cardiac or heart circulation’; the railways become major arteries; and New York is ‘the umbilicus through which this man of commerce was developed’. “

“The explanatory notes conclude: ‘It is an interesting fact that in no other portion of the known world can any such analogy be found between the natural and artificial channels of commerce and circulatory and digestive apparatus of man’. “

“Only one other copy of this map is known to exist. The map’s cartographer was A.F. McKay; the publisher (probably) Land & River Improvement Co.; and the printer Rand, McNally and Co.”

Many thanks to Lloyd Daub for providing me with this link to the map, at the UWM Libraries of the University of Wisconsin, which also hosts the American Geographical Society Library.

373 – A Map of the Land of Books

This map by German illustrator Alphons Woelfle (1938) shows the extent and the divisions of Bücherland (the Land of Books). The Land consists of about half a dozen distinct territories, most of which are explicitly named: Leserrepublik (Reader’s Republic), Vereinigte Buchhandelsstaaten (United States of Booksellers), Recensentia (a realm for Reviewers), Makulaturia (Waste Paper Land), and Poesia (Poetry). The capital of the US of B is the city of Officina (Latin for workshop, and the origin of our ‘office’; the name seems remarkably unremarkable. Possibly there is an old reference or a German word-joke here we’re not getting).

Plotting out imagined places on a map as if they were “real” countries is a favourite trope in curious cartography. The artificial equation of place and meaning allows for double-entendres and other humorous leaps of the imagination on which this allegorical form of cartography thrives. As a sub-genre of cartography, it has been around since at least La carte de tendre, an 18th-century French map of love’s topography (discussed in entry #245 of this blog). Other examples previously discussed include a Map on Temperance (#258) or a German map of the Empire of Love (#59).

This map was possibly commissioned by the Heimeran Verlag (publishing house) of Munich, a frequent employer of Mr Woelfle’s artisanship – although no information could be found relating to the specific circumstances of this map. One can only presume that it illustrated a book about books, or more precisely, a book about publishing. The look and feel of the map is definitely older than its mid-20th-century age; in a positive case of antiquarianism (i.e. lending something respectability by increasing its age), it has been made to resemble the maps of earlier times (17th, 18th century, I’d say).

Many thanks to Paul K. (of the brilliant BibliOdyssey) for the map, found in the digital archives of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.

PS – I had written up an extensive overview of all areas of the Land of Books, discussing in depth some of the more meaningful ‘place-names’ on the map, but lost all of that while uploading the picture. I did plan to ask anyone who has some insight into the double entendres used to contribute their views… So please feel free to comment!

372 – Flevo of the Month: Dutch Drainage Dreams Denied

Had the 19th century Dutch favoured Jerome Wenmaekers’ big idea over that of Cornelis Lely, their country would now look rather differently – and be quite a bit bigger. But in 1876 they rejected the former’s megalomaniacal land reclamation scheme, and in 1892 they adopted the latter’s less ambitious drainage plan. Lelystad now is the capital of Flevoland, the province reclaimed from the sea following Lely’s plan. In an alternate reality, Wenmaekersstad would have been the capital of a much larger administrative area, as Plan A also would have drained off all the water between Flevoland and the Wadden islands - areas Lely chose not to reclaim.

The Zuiderzee (i.e. ‘South Sea’) was the smaller, more obnoxious twin of the North Sea. Both bodies of water were created at the close of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago, by the rising waters that flooded the plain between Britain and the Continent. An inland system of lakes (called Flevo by the Romans) eventally coalesced into the Zuiderzee, which would have been more manageable were it not for its direct connection to the wily North Sea. As a result of this connection, the unstable Zuiderzee was prone to flooding the surrounding low-lying, densely populated areas. A system of dikes and drainage by windmills kept the growth of the Zuiderzee in check, but massive flooding was a recurrent fact of life. As far back as the 17th century, the damming of the entire Zuiderzee was proposed as the only durable solution.

Damming – with the possible bonus of land reclamation – only became technically feasible in the 19th century, when at least half a dozen plans were proposed. The scale of the proposed project was so daunting that even with the approval of the Lely Plan in 1892, it took the Watersnood (‘Great Flood’) of 1916 to propel the reluctant Dutch government into concrete action. It took them over 50 years (1921-1975) to finish the massive project.

Lely’s plan was followed almost to the letter. The Afsluitdijk (Closing Dike) was built to his specifications; dikes further out to sea, even between the Wadden islands, were considered but rejected by Lely as impractical and too expensive. The areas Lely designated for land reclamation contained clay deposits, which were more interesting for agriculture than the sandy soils in the areas that were to remain submerged.   The land reclaimed in the Waddenzee also would not be suitable for agriculture.

In 1932, the Afsluitdijk was completed, and the name of the rump of the Zuiderzee officially changed into IJsselmeer (after the river IJssel). In 1934, the Noordwestpolder (‘North West Polder’) was the first of four projected new dry land areas to be released for cultivation. The Noordwestpolder was later incorporated into the pre-existing province of Noord-Holland. The main new land areas (East and South Flevoland) were reclaimed in 1942 and 1957 respectively.

All of which resulted in the now-familiar Dutch coastline, instantly recognisable on any satellite map. How different the Netherlands would have looked like if Wenmaekers had had his way. But he hasn’t, and consequently has slipped into obscurity. Very little is known about him, except that he was a Belgian engineer, residing in Brussels. I have managed to retrieve two intriguing biographical snippets:

• In 1875, he proposed a project to build a railway tunnel under the English Channel to connect England and France, “according to [his] system of underwater construction, patented in France and England”. The proposal, in French, makes an appeal for venture capitalists to step in. We must assume that Wenmaekers’ Avis aux capitalistes didn’t generate enough funds for his visionary plan to go ahead, as the Channel Tunnel would remain un-dug for over a century.
• In 1893, Wenmaekers patented another invention in Belgium, which he submitted to the US Patent Office in 1896 for “certain new and useful Improvements in Erecting Buildings (…) for various purposes, (…) strong and durable, entirely fireproof, and very cheap when compared with buildings erected in the usual manner.” This invention, essentially a primitive, cumbersome version of prefab, wasn’t the breakthrough he was waiting for either.

Somewhere in between, he found the time to propose this scheme for the expansion of the Netherlands – and have it rejected.Wenmaekers’ plan was a maximalist one, eschewing an Afsluitdijk to reclaim land all the way to the Wadden islands of Texel, Vlieland, Terschelling and Ameland. These would be incorporated, two by two, into two larger islands, separated from each other and the mainland by straight and narrow canals, all still connected directly to the North Sea.

In the Zuiderzee, four more islands (with similarly narrow canals between them and the mainland) would be constructed. All of these would be divided in two main parts by a broader canal, entering the new lands south of Texel and abutting northeast of the former island of Urk. A slightly narrower canal would branch of halfway to connect it to Amsterdam.

At first sight, Mr Wenmaekers seems to have been one of those unfortunate, lone visionaries, too far ahead of their time. But his abortive proposals were probably not isolated cases. The late 19th century was a time of grand engineering projects, and thus a fertile breeding ground for multitudes of ideas, patents and proposals, some for grand projects that eventually came to be, many for projects that never left the drawing board. In spite of the world’s most famous palindrome – A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!  – even the Panama Canal was the work of many men, and the result of many plans, most of which are now obscure footnotes to history…

Many thanks to Jeroen Van den Berg and  Stefan Patelski for sending in this map, found here on the flickr stream of the Dutch Nationaal Archief (National Archives).