398 – Bridge to Nowhere: a Map of Golden Gate Jumpers

It’s 75 metres (245 ft) down from the deck of the Golden Gate Bridge to the water below. That drop will kill most people (*). And that’s exactly what it did to over 1,200 people who jumped off the bridge since its opening in 1937.

San Francisco’s most famous landmark, the world’s longest suspension bridge at its opening, has earned the sad distinction of being the world’s most popular suicide spot (others include Aokigahara, the “Sea of Trees” at the foot of Mount Fuji [Japan], Niagara Falls [US/Can], Beachy Head and Clifton Bridge [both in England]).

The number of jumpers from the bridge, spanning the over 2 km (6,700 ft) wide strait at the entrance of San Francisco Bay, has varied greatly throughout the years, never more than around 10 until 1960 (with the exception of the 20 of 1948), then rising dramatically to peak at 40 in 1977 and dropping again to a low of less than 10 in 1990.

In 2004, 24 people jumped off the Bridge, spiking to 38 in 2007 – an increase many blamed on The Bridge, a documentary about the place’s fatal attraction. In 2008, authorities voted to install a ’safety net’ six metres below the Bridge (although how this should prevent people from jumping from the net  is a question that should definitely be covered by the study to be conducted on the net’s impact).

This cartogram details the exact locations of the suicides, corresponding them with the 128 light poles that line the Bridge (east to west, even ones on the oceanside, uneven ones on the bayside). For obvious reasons, the areas closest to the edges of the Bridge are less popular (most suicides aim for maximum effect, i.e. longest way down). Remarkably, the bayside is a lot more popular than the oceanside. The hotspot is light pole 69 with – if I counted correctly – 56 recorded suicides.

Many thanks to Szymon Piotr Nogalski, who most recently submitted this map, and others who did so earlier. The map was sourced here on SFGate, the online presence of the San Francisco Chronicle, the newspaper that first published this suicide map. 

(*) After a fall of about 4 seconds, a jumper would hit the water at approximately 140 km/h (87 mph) – lethal in most cases. Those surviving the actual fall usually succumb to hypothermia, induced by the cold (8°C/47°F) water of the Bay. Over the decades, 26 people are known to have survived the fall and the cold water.

397 – Eliminating the Bottom 5%

How would you eliminate almost half the planet by subtracting just 5% from it? This map shows you how: delete the countries that constitute the bottom 5% of global GDP contributors, and you scrap almost 3 billion people from the equation. Those people mainly live in Africa and South East Asia, as demonstrated by the disappearance of those areas beneath the waves.

This map was first shown on the political website FiveThirtyEight (”Politics done right”), in reaction to an argument that climate change would affect global GDP by “only” 5% over the next 100 years. Quite rightly, the point was raised that a reduction in potential GDP might not be an adequate measure of the human impact of such society-shattering change.

As per-capita GDP varies across the world’s countries by a factor of 800 (or 2,000 if you count Zimbabwe), this is a rather cynical (or at least cold-hearted) way of measuring the worth of human lives, making the average Rwandan life hundreds of times less important than that of the average Luxembourger.

To demonstrate the impact of a reduction of global GDP by a mere 5%, FiveThirtyEight erased the countries constituting the bottom 5% of global GDP (IMF estimates for 2008), in reverse order of magnitude:

Zimbabwe (1), Burundi, DR Congo, Liberia, Guinea-Bissau, Eritrea, Malawi, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Niger, Afghanistan, Togo, Guinea, Uganda, Madagascar, the Central African Republic, Nepal, Myanmar (Burma), Rwanda, Mozambique, East Timor, the Gambia (2), Bangladesh, Tanzania, Burkina Faso, Mali, Lesotho, Ghana, Haiti, Tajikistan, the Comoros, Cambodia, Laos, Benin, Kenya, Chad, the Solomon Islands, Kyrgyzstan, India (3), Nicaragua, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Mauritania, Pakistan, Senegal, Sao Tome and Principe, Ivory Coast, Zambia, the Yemen, Cameroon, Djibouti, Papua New Guinea, Kiribati, Nigeria (4), Guyana, the Sudan, Bolivia, Moldova, Honduras, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Mongolia, Bhutan, Egypt (5), Vanuatu, Tonga, Paraguay, Morocco, Syria, Swaziland, Samoa, Guatemala, Georgia, the Congo, Iraq, Armenia, Jordan, Cape Verde, the Maldives, Fiji and Namibia (6).

All in all 81 countries (almost half of the 192 UN member states), representing nearly 2.9 billion people (about 43%) of the world population. But still, a mere 5% of world GDP…

Thanks to Jackson Wagner for providing me with this link to the FiveThirtyEight page.

——-

(1) 0.02% of global GDP, or $55 p.p.

(2) the list of countries up til now represents only 0.27% of global GDP.

(3) apparently constitutes only 2% of global GDP, surprisingly

(4) the list of countries up til now represents 3.6% of global GDP.

(5) the list of countries up til now represents 4.4% of global GDP.

(6) these countries together constitute 4.99997% of global GDP.

 

396 – “You take it – No, you take it”: the Bir Tawil Trapezoid

 

The Bir Tawil Triangle is a desert of sand and rocks on the border between Egypt and the Sudan. It is also officially the most undesired territory in the world. Bir Tawil is the only piece of land on Earth (*) that is not claimed by any country – least of all by its neighbours. For either of them to claim the Bir Tawil Triangle would be to relinquish their claim to the Hala’ib Triangle. And while Hala’ib is also mainly rock and sand, it is not only ten times larger than Bir Tawil, but also adjacent to the Red Sea - so rather more interesting.

This bizarre situation started out with what is supposed to be the simplest of borders: a straight line. By the Condominium Treaty of 1899, the British drew the line between Egypt and what was then still known as the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan at the 22nd parallel north, resulting in a straight-line border of about 1,240 km (770 miles) from Libya to the Red Sea.

Straight-line borders are not uncommon in the sparsely populated Sahara desert, from Egypt all the way to Mauritania. But the border between Egypt and the Sudan apparently proved a bit too straight. In 1902, the Brits amended it in three places. A small area north of where the Nile crosses the border was handed over to Sudanese control on account of the local villages being more accessible from the south. The Wadi Halfa Salient is still Sudanese, but claimed by the Egyptians, who solved most of the problem by submerging all of the villages in the salient in Lake Nasser after the construction of the Aswan Dam.

The Bir Tawil Triangle, east of the Wadi Halfa Salient and south of the 22nd parallel, was handed over to Egypt because a tribe on the Egyptian side of the border used the area as grazing lands (Bir Tawil apparently means ‘water well’). Conversely, the Halaib Triangle, north of the 22nd parallel but touching Bir Tawil, went to Sudan because the locally dominant tribes were based in the Sudan.

Actually, Bir Tawil is less of a Triangle than a Trapezoid, its northern edge (the 22nd parallel) 95 km long and its southern edge, around 30 km to the south, 46 km long. Its total area is just over 2,000 km². The Hala’ib Triangle is about 20,500 km² in size.

De iure, the conflict between Egypt and the Sudan over Hala’ib and Bir Tawil is still unresolved, although Egypt has asserted itself as the de facto administrator of the larger of both areas in the 1990s. I have been unable to ascertain whether either country exerts any practical control over Bir Tawil, leaving open the exciting possibility that it is indeed the only officially ungoverned territory on Earth.

Many thanks to Bill (a.k.a. ‘The Eidolon’) for alerting me to Bir Tawil, discussed here on his blog. The best map I found was this tiny one on Wikimedia Commons. Many thanks to Eugene van der Pijll for providing me with the link to the present image (see comment #4).

(*) No country officially occupies any part of Antarctica, but this is only because the 1959 Antarctic Treaty froze any existing territorial claims to the continent.

395 – Strange Mats: Afghan War Rugs

A rug, to quote The Big Lebowski, can really tie a room together. The Dude (or El Duderino, if you’re not into the whole brevity thing) opted for a pretty run-of-the-mill carpet – a classic Persian or Oriental design, if I recall correctly.

Here is an example of an exciting subgenre that is sure to be a conversation piece at your next cocktail party. Or after-bowling get-together. The Afghan War Rug is a modern reinterpretation of an age-old art. Where the regular oriental carpet has an abstract design, these rugs are figurative, including tanks, guns and other weapons, and usually show a map of Afghanistan. They also deal with a very specific subject matter – the troubled recent history of Afghanistan.

Examples include rugs celebrating the defeat of the Soviets, who withdrew from Afghanistan in 1988, to this one. It is similar to the Soviet Exodus mats (note the column of tanks heading north). However, it is dated to the year 2002.

Some of the lettering is in Latin script, the top text is in Farsi, apparently reading “The army of al-Qaeda is leaving Afghanistan”. According to the website www.warrug.com, which specialises in selling modern carpetry of this type, this rug “is a transitional piece between the Soviet story rugs and the War on Terrorism rugs (…) Until the US eliminated the Taliban regime, this style of rug was woven by refugees in Pakistan. After we drove al-Qaeda and the Taliban back to the age of the Cave Man, these weavers were able to return to their native homes and produce these rugs around Mazar I’Sharif and Sherberghan.”

An interesting afterthought: in weaving recent history into mats, these Afghan artisans are unwittingly imitating the tapestry-as-news school of carpetry that had its most famous early example in the Bayeux Tapestry, which detailed William the Conqueror’s usurpation of the English throne.

Many thanks to Pál Szabó for alerting me to these strange mats.

 

394 – Athanasius Kircher’s Atlantis

Irrespective of whether it’s entirely mythical or merely missing, the ‘lost’ island of Atlantis is one of the most sought after pieces of real estate in history. The oldest source for the stories of a once mighty land now vanished beneath the waves are two of Plato’s Dialogues (4th century BC). But while Timaeus and Critias place Atlantis beyond “the Pillars of Hercules” (i.e. the Strait of Gibraltar) in the Ocean that still bears its name, evidence of Atlantis has been proposed and presumed in places as far apart as Sardinia, Antarctica, Cuba and Indonesia.

These days, most serious scientists prefer one theory over all others; that the drowning of Atlantis is a folk memory of a catastrophic volcanic eruption on the island of Thera (present-day Santorini) some time around 1600 BC that caused a tsunami, wiping out the Minoan civilisation. Many pre-modern scientists held to Plato’s original thesis, that Atlantis was once lapped by the waves of the Atlantic Ocean. One of them was Athanasius Kircher, who produced this map in his book Mundus Subterraneus (’The Underground World’, ca. 1665).

A biography published in 2004 dubbed Kircher (1601-1680) was titled The Last Man to Know Everything, and the German Jesuit’s interests and expertise were certainly wide and deep enough to rival Leonardo Da Vinci’s. Both would be close contenders for the title of Ultimate Renaissance Man. Kircher wrote 40 books, on subjects as diverse as geology, music theory, Coptic grammar and magnetism (typically for his syncretic style, both of the gravitational and amorous kind).

Like Da Vinci, Kircher was fascinated by the invention and perfection of mechanical contraptions. He designed what has been described as the world’s first megaphone, perfected a magnetic clock and invented a cat piano, whereby a pin would pierce the tails of the animals which would then yowl at specific pitches (it’s not clear whether Kircher ever realised this scheme, although Monty Python in one of their sketches adapted the idea to a ‘mouse organ’). He is also credited with inventing the magic lantern.

That Kircher’s international fame was eclipsed by Rationalism later in his life may be understood from some of his more outlandish theories. Although still considered one of the founding fathers of Egyptology, he believed that Egyptian was so ancient that it must have been the language of Adam and Eve. Centuries before the hieroglyphs were deciphered, Kircher convinced himself that he had cracked the code, producing volumes of nonsense translations. An equally early pioneer of Sinology, Kircher thought the Chinese descended from Ham, and Confucius identical to Moses. In Arca Noë, he discussed the logistics – including the feeding schedules – of Noah’s Ark voyage.

Mundus Subterraneus is a blend of vision and error typical of Kircher. He correctly postulates “fires” raging inside the earth, but links the tides to the interaction with an underground ocean. Included in the work is this map of Atlantis, placing the lost island (or rather mini-continent) between Spain and America. For some reason, the map is oriented upside down, with the south on top. The main island of Atlantis is accompanied by two smaller, unnamed ones to its right (west).

Is anyone familiar enough with Latin to hazard a translation of the text on this page?

Many thanks to Barry Ruderman for sending in this map. A larger-scale picture can be seen here on Rare Maps, the website of Mr Ruderman’s antique map dealership. The website has a special section detailing many other antique print curiosities, both cartographic and otherwise.

393 – The Unevenness of Space-Time Convergence

How long does it take to travel from London to elsewhere? The answer is provided by this map, showing a set of expanding circles centered on the British capital, each bigger one delineating two extra hours of travel time.

The familiar shape of the world is morphed into grotesque, contorted shapes as these isotemporal lines replace the usual lines of longitude and latitude for frame of reference. Not surprisingly, as different modes of transport must have been taken into account: fast transatlantic jet to New York, slower ground-based transport (car or train) to Penzance. This makes the difference in travel time to both cities from London less than 2.5 hours, while the actual distance between both is a formidable 3,264 miles (5,253 km).

This map predates the opening of the Eurotunnel, which has allowed faster connections between London and Paris (about 2 hours) than shown on this map. Travel time distances from London are:

Under 2 hours

• Birmingham
• Bristol
• Southampton

Under 4 hours

• Norwich
• Manchester
• Amsterdam
• Glasgow
• Edinburgh
• Paris
• Dublin
• Dusseldorf
• Swansea
• Hull
• Milan
• Aberdeen

Under 6 hours

• Newcastle
• Madrid
• Inverness
• Burnley
• Holyhead
• Fishguard

Under 8 hours

• Penzance
• Workington
• Pwllheli

Under 10 hours

• New York
• Stranraer
• Montreal

Many thanks to blogfok for sending in this map, found here on Erik Laakso’s website.

392 – The Portland Arm (and Maine Leg)

Fixing her regional loyalty in indelible ink on skin, Julia had a map of Portland, ME tattooed on her shoulder. A comparison with the more conventional map on the right indicates that her tat clearly shows the Portland peninsula, the Fore River, Back Cove and surrounding coastline, plus a large part of the road network connecting Maine’s biggest city to its hinterland.

None of the places on her map are named, though. The tat might be not just an overt symbol of regional fealty, but also a covert signal to help identify similarly loyalist Portlanders – as they would be most inclined to recognise a blind map of the area. Others might mistake the map for a representation of the Arabian Peninsula.

In a national context, the city of Portland is usually mentioned in the same breath with its state, making it sound as if the city’s called Portlandmaine. This is done to distinguish it from Portland, Oregon. A distinction not without its practical consequences, I once found out, as the hotel room I had booked online turned out to be in Portland, OR while I was headed for Portland, ME. Some fun facts about the town once dubbed Forest City:

• Maine and Oregon don’t have exclusive rights to the name; there are at least 16 other places in the US called Portland; as a toponym, the name refers back to the Isle of Portland in the UK.
• The Isle of Portland is the southernmost part of the county of Dorset, connected to the mainland via Chesil Beach. Its excellent natural harbour has been in use since before the Romans (who might or might not have called it Vindelis), its limestone was quarried for Buckingham Palace and St Paul’s Cathedral in London. The novelist Thomas Hardy called it The Gibraltar of the North, for its similarity in physical geography.
• The southernmost point of Jamaica is also called Portland Point.
• In the original Portland, a taboo rests on mentioning rabbits. Polite conversation generally steers clear of the subject, but if unavoidable, they are called underground mutton. The bunnies (another euphemism) were feared by quarrymen, as they would (literally) undermine the stability of their workplaces.
• With a population of only 65,000, Portland is the biggest city in Maine. Its namesake in Oregon, on the other side of the country, was actually named after it. The Oregoners obviously were desparate for East Coast respectability; an alternative suggestion would have made the city’s name Boston, Oregon.
• The first settlement of the Portland, ME area was in 1623 by Christopher Levett, who called it York, after his hometown. This first “New York” of the New World was lost without a trace; the name survives in York County, adjacent to Cumberland County, which contains Portland. The first permanent settlement was called Casco (1633), later renamed Falmouth (1658), an expansion of which was to be called Portland (1786).
• The city’s motto Resurgam (Latin for “I will rise again”) refers to the rebuilding of the city after no less than four fires that devastated the city, one of which was the Great Fire of 1866, started on Independence Day (July 4), most likely by a firecracker. Killing only two but destroying 1,800 buildings, the fire rendered almost 10,000 people homeless. It was the greatest fire ever in America until the Great Chicago Fire (1871).
• Portland was ranked #1 in Forbes’s Most Livable Cities index for the year 2009.

This is not the first example on this blog of someone exhibiting the affection for their hometown by a map tattooed on their body. Here is an arresting map of Hanover: #126.

Many thanks to Christian McNeil for sending in this map, found here at the Strange Maine blog. As the entry shows, Julia not only has a map of Portland on her right shoulder, but also a map of Maine on her right leg.

391 – Ireland As 100 People

If there were only 100 people in Ireland, 55 of them would be speaking only English, 39 of them would be speaking mainly English, and occasionally Irish, 2 of them would be speaking mainly Irish and one would be speaking Polish. Three would be speaking other languages.

Michal Boleslav Mechura collected these and other data from the Irish Census 2006, and crafted them into a few interesting cartograms.

Many thanks to him for sending in this map. Visit his website here for more, reflecting immigration, religion and residence intrapolated (if that’s the right word) from Republic of Ireland’s 4.24 million actual residents (Census 2006) to only 100 representative ones.

390 – “Portugal Is Not a Small Country”

 

Portugal, on the southwestern periphery of the European continent, is a medium-sized EU member state. Its population clocks in at 11th place out of 27 (10.59 million, in between Belgium’s 10.66 million [10] and the Czech Republic with 10.40 million [12]). Size-wise, it’s a bit further down the list: 13th (at 92.391 km2, between Hungary [12] at 93.030 km2 and Austria [14] at 83.871 km2).

Yet Portugal is loath to think of itself as a small country. Or at least it was, before its overseas empire collapsed. Built up over centuries of exploration, trade and colonisation, the Portuguese Empire once spanned four continents. The jewel in its crown was Brazil, but Portugal lost control over its South American colony in 1822.

By mid-20th century, Portugal still held on to Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Sao Tome & Principe, Angola, Mozambique, Macao, East Timor and its Indian possessions (Goa, Daman and Diu – three smallish footholds somewhat grandiosely labeled “Estado da India”).

As the legend to this map indicates, all these territories together added up to an area larger than (Continental) Spain, France, the UK (mislabeled “Inglaterra”), Italy and Germany put together, explaining why, as the title claims, Portugal não é um país pequeno. If that sounds a bit defensive and self-justifying, that’s no coincidence.

In the early 1970s, Portugal languished under a dictatorship determined to hold on to the vestiges of its former colonial glory. The increasingly costly and impopular wars against freedom fighters in Portuguese Africa eventually led to the overthrow of the regime, in a virtually bloodless military coup in April 1974, the so-called Revolução dos Cravos. This Carnation Revolution would lead to a swift liquidation of Portugal’s overseas assets and ultimately to democracy within Portugal. 

Portugal’s African possessions were all granted independence. Indonesia took advantage of the turmoil “back home” to take over East Timor (India had forcibly annexed Goa etcetera in 1961). Only Macao remained in Portuguese hands, until 1999, when mirrorring Hong Kong’s reversion in 1997, it was reintegrated into China. The Azores and Madeira, ethnically and geographically closest to the mother country, are still part of Portugal.

This map was sent in by Nuno D. Alves, who studied it in history class, when studying the pre-revolutionary dictatorship. “It is a propaganda map, suggesting that our country was important. Portugal’s orientation towards its colonies, away from Europe, “was used to justify the isolationism of the regime, and its neutrality in World War II (…) [The map] shows the Portuguese colonies that remained by that time superimposed on a map of Europe, going on to compare surface size with the main European countries. All in all very silly.”

Original context of the map here, at the Portuguese National Library.

PS – this map is reminiscent of another size comparison map posted earlier on this blog (#35).

389 – America’s Mean Streak

The mean centre of US population is “the point at which an imaginary, flat, weightless and rigid map of the US would balance perfectly if weights of identical value were placed on it so that each weight represented the location of one person on the date of the census”, in the definition of the US Census Bureau itself. 

That bureau has been holding censuses every decade since 1790; these censuses form the backdrop for this string of mean centres of population in the US. The map shows an ever westward shift of that centre, obviously in parallel with the westward expansion of the US and its citizenry. The mean centre of population of the US has shifted thusly:

• 1790: 23 miles east of Baltimore (MD)
• 1800: 18 miles west of Baltimore (MD)
• 1810: 40 miles northwest by west of Washington, DC
• 1820: 16 miles east of Moorefield (VA, now WV)
• 1830: 19 miles west-southwest of Moorefield (VA, now WV)
• 1840: 16 miles south of Clarksburg (VA, now WV)
• 1850: 23 miles southeast of Parkersburg (VA, now WV)
• 1860: 20 miles south by east of Chillcothe (OH)
• 1870: 48 miles east by north of Cincinnati (OH)
• 1880: 8 miles west by south of Cincinnati (OH)
• 1890: 20 miles east of Columbus (IN)*
• 1900: 6 miles southeast of Columbus (IN)*
• 1910: in the city of Bloomington (IN)
• 1920: 8 miles south-southeast of Spencer (IN)
• 1930: 3 miles northeast of Linton (IN)
• 1940: 2 miles southeast by east of Carlisle (IN)
• 1950: 8 miles north-northwest of Olney (IN)
• 1950: 3 miles northeast of Louisville (IL)**
• 1960: 6-1/2 miles northwest of Centralia (IL)
• 1970: 5 miles east-southeast of Mascoutah (IL)
• 1980: 1/4 mile west of DeSoto (MO)
• 1990: 10 miles southeast of Steelville (MO)
• 2000: 3 miles east of Edgar Springs (MO)

This list refers to the nearest city, which might be in a different state than the mean centre itself. For a more complete listing, including precise sets of decimal coordinates, please see this Wikipedia article. 

Some mean centre trivia:

• The very first census’ mean centre was near Chestertown in Maryland – very close to the nation’s capital (the location of which was chosen exactly for its centrality). Westward expansion has made Washington DC increasingly eccentric, not just in a literal, geographic sense, but also by the steady eastward “mean streak” of its statistical population centre, depicted here.
• The most appropriate mean centre surely was the one near the very aptly named town of Centralia, Illinois (1960).
• The addition of Hawaii and Alaska to the Union (in 1959) didn’t cause as much of a shift as one might expect : it moved the mean centre only two miles south and ten miles west (1960).
• Interestingly, the mean centre of the European Union has moved in the opposite direction, as the EU has continued to expand into Eastern Europe (if anyone knows of nice maps representing that eastward drift – they are welcome.)

Many thanks to Kees Huyser for alerting me to this map, illustrating the aforementioned Wikipedia article.

* Corrected Columbus, OH to Columbus, IN (thanks to all who pointed out the error).

** Please note that the double mention of the 1950 census (with a different result) reflects one and the same set of data, calculated according to an earlier method and the current one, respectively.

388 – US States As Countries of Equal Population

At last, the worlds of cartography, vexillology and population statistics meet! This map was inspired by earlier maps of the US, with its states renamed for countries with a similar GDP (see posts #131 and #135).

It shows each US state covered by the flag of a country with a population of comparable size. This map was made by James Richards, who also sent in a list of the pairs of US states and flags of corresponding countries. But I agree with him that “unlabeled, it’s a fun test of your knowledge of nations, can you guess them all?”

Update: the full list is posted as provided to me by Mr Richards in comment #36.

387 – The Graveyard of the Atlantic

I had never heard of Fagunda. A 17th-century map places it in the North Atlantic, not far from Estotiland, Bus and Frislant. These and other so-called phantom islands were a by-product of the Age of Discovery. They started out as errors of nautical observation, and lived on as cartographic misconceptions – sometimes for centuries (see also #62, #64,  #295).

A comprehensive list of phantom islands is quite long, but Fagunda is not on it. That’s because Fagunda is real. Even if its history is equally obscure and hardly less fantastic than that of actual phantom islands. Even if that name is as absent from today’s maps as those of its fictional companions.

The island, basically a single, giant dune marooned off Nova Scotia, nowadays is known as Sable Island. And yet even under that name it’s an obscure piece of North Atlantic real estate. Contributing to its obscurity are its isolated, eccentric location (160 km out to sea), tiny surface (34 km2) and economic irrelevance.

Like the island itself, its history is frequently shrouded in mist. The first European visitor may have been the Portuguese discoverer João Álvares Fagundes, in the 1520s (hence its early name). At the end of the 16th century, a French attempt to establish a convict colony succeeded only in endowing the island with its subsequent name: île de Sable, literally Sand Island.

Only sealers, shipwrecked sailors and salvagers made their homes on Sable Island, impermanent ones at best. The salvagers must have had some pretty good times – over the last few centuries, more than 350 vessels were shipwrecked on what became known as the “Graveyard of the Atlantic”.

Located in shallow, often stormy and foggy waters, the elongated Sable Island (44 km long but never more than 2 km wide) might have been predestined as a catchment area for ships treading these Atlantic latitudes – a self-fulfilling curse for captains igorant or oblivious of this huge, constantly shifting sandbar.

This map shows many of the ships wrecked on the shores of Sable Island, detailing the type of vessel (ship, bark, schooner, brig, brigantine, steamer), the year of the wrecking (1802 to 1946, even though the earliest wreck is attested as dating from 1583) and the ships’ names. These include many that are just too fantastic not to repeat here: the Black Duck, the Margarita, the Farto, the Vampire, the Esperanto, the Stranger, the Sadie Knickle (sounds like a lost Beatles track, that one) and (my favourite) the Bob Logic.

Safety was greatly improved in 1872, when the Canadian government installed two lighthouses, one on each side of the crescent-shaped island (the last recorded shipwreck occurred in 1999.) The lighthouses have been automated, but Sable island is still home to a year-round crew, of five meteorologists.

The only really permanent island-dwellers are over 300 feral horses (possibly left there by Thomas Hancock, uncle of John Hancock, the proverbial signatory). They roam the grasslands and drink at Lake Wallace and other freshwater ponds, undisturbed by man. For the whole island is a nature reserve. No one can get on it without permission of the Canadian Coast Guard. Other wildlife includes several thousand seals, arctic birds (of which the Ipswich sparrow breeds only on Sable Island).

Resulting from its uniquely extremitous position in the Atlantic, Sable Island was chosen in 1901 by Guglielmo Marconi as the location of a wireless station for transatlantic communication. Talking about communication – the island is a bit of a holy grail for radio amateurs, what with its inaccessibility and the fact that it has its own callsign (CYO; reminiscent of another special island described here some time ago — Market, #6).

This map taken here from the Sable Island section of the Museum of National History site, which is part of the Nova Scotia Museum.

386 – My Kingdom for a Beer? Heineken’s “Eurotopia”

 

Freddy Heineken (1923-2002), the Dutch tycoon who made his beer into a global brand, also was a dedicated Europhile. Towards the end of his life, he proposed reshuffling Europe’s national borders to strengthen the supranational project whose stated goal is an “ever closer union”.

Heineken collaborated with two historians to produce a booklet entitled “The United States of Europe, A Eurotopia?” The idea was timely, for two reasons. Eastern Europe was experiencing a period of turmoil, following the collapse of communism. The resulting wave of nationalism led to the re-emergence of several nation-states (i.e. the Baltics) and the break-up of several others (Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia). And in 1992, the Maastricht Treaty would transform an initially mainly economic “European Community” into a more political “European Union”.

Heineken’s proposal would lead to the creation of dozens of new European states, which would have a comparably small population size (mostly between 5 and 10 million), some basis in history, and for the most part would be ethnically homogenous.

The theory behind Heineken’s idea is that a larger number of smaller member-states would be easier to govern within a single European framework than a combination of larger states competing for dominance. Heineken might have been inspired by the work of Leopold Kohr, whose similar proposal was discussed earlier on this blog (#18).

Here is a list of countries proposed in the “Eurotopia” detailed by Heineken e.a., with their capital cities and population figures. Numbers correspond to the ones on the map:

Scandinavia

1 Iceland      Reykjavik     252.000

2 Norway Oslo 4.200.000

3 Sweden Stockholm 8.500.000

4 Finland Helsinki 4.900.000

5 Denmark Copenhagen 5.100.000

British Isles

6 Scotland Edinburgh 5.100.000

7 Ireland Dublin 5.100.000

8 Northumbria York 8.000.000

9 Lancaster Manchester 5.400.000

10 Wales Cardiff 2.900.000

11 Mercia Birmingham 7.400.000

12 East-Anglia Cambridge 5.300.000

13 Essex London 8.300.000

14 Wessex Plymouth 5.900.000

15 Kent Southampton 5.400.000

Low countries/Central Europe

16 Holland-Zeeland The Hague 6.500.000

17 Ysselland Arnhem 6.000.000

18 Flanders/Vlaanderen Brussels 7.800.000

19 Hainaut/Henegouwen Lille/Rijssel 7.100.000

20 Schleswig-Holstein Hamburg 6.100.000

21 Hannover Bremen 7.900.000

22 Brandenburg Berlin 6.000.000

23 Sachsen Dresden 7.900.000

24 Westfalen Münster 7.900.000

25 Nordrheinland Düsseldorf 9.200.000

26 Thüringen Erfurt 8.300.000

27 Rhein-Moselland Mainz 5.100.000

28 Frankenland Nürnberg 5.100.000

29 Bavaria/Bayern Munich 6.000.000

30 Baden-Württemberg Stuttgart 9.600.000

31 Poznan/Posen Poznan 6.200.000

32 Silesia Wroclaw 8.200.000

33 Gdansk Gdansk 5.500.000

34 Warzawa Warsaw 7.600.000

35 Galicia Krakow 7.400.000

36 Bohemia Prague 6.300.000

37 Moravia Brno 4.000.000

38 Slowakia Bratislava 5.300.000

39 Austria Vienna 4.500.000

40 Noricum Graz 5.000.000

France

41 Picardy-Normandy Rouen 4.900.000

42 Ile-de-France Paris 10.300.000

43 Burgundy Nancy 8.000.000

44 Neustria Nantes 8.200.000

45 Aquitania Bordeaux 7.400.000

46 Auvergne Lyon 6.500.000

47 Provence Marseille 6.500.000

Iberia

48 Galicia-Asturias Santiago de Compostela 4.400.000

49 Castilia Madrid 9.100.000

50 Navarre-Aragon Bilbao 4.100.000

51 Catalonia Barcelona 6.000.000

52 Valencia Valencia 5.500.000

53 Andalusia Sevillia 8.000.000

54 Portugal Lisbon 10.300.000

Switzerland/Italy

55 Switzerland Bern 6.600.000

56 Piedmont Torino 6.200.000

57 Lombardy Milan 8.900.000

58 Venice Venice 6.500.000

59 Tuscany Bologna 7.500.000

60 Umbria Rome 7.400.000

61 Apulia Bari 5.700.000

62 Naples Naples 8.600.000

63 Sicily Palermo 7.100.000

Balkans/Greece

64 Hungary Budapest 10.600.000

65 Croatia Zagreb 4.600.000

66 Bosnia-Herzegovina Sarajevo 4.100.000

67 Serbia Belgrade 8.500.000

68 Albania Tirana 5.000.000

69 Transyvlvania Cluj-Napoca 7.500.000

70 Moldavia Bacau 5.000.000

71 Wallachia Bucharest 9.000.000

72 Bulgaria Sofia 8.900.000

73 Skopje Skopje 1.900.000

74 Greece Athens 10.300.000

75 Cyprus Nicosia 688.000

While an interesting conversation piece, Mr Heineken’s proposal is wildly improbable, as no EU member-state is eager to be dismembered or dissolved for the greater good. The Dutchman died in the year his “Eurotopia” plan was published. The European Union has since continued to expand eastwards, becoming ever more unwieldy as the number of member states increased. Whether chopping up larger states into smaller ones with less historical baggage would make the decision-making process within the EU easier or more difficult, will probably remain a purely academic question.

Many thanks to Theo Hoebink for sending in this map and Marc Vlek, Jan Noordam and others for also suggesting it.

385 – Pogue States: A Celtocentric World Map

As seemed to be the rule in those days, Shane MacGowan’s stage appearance was over in minutes. After incomprehensibly muttering the lyrics to a new song, a couple of roadies carried off the singer, who was much too drunk to make it to the end of the set – or the back of the stage. Lyrical intelligibility increased greatly when one of the other Pogues took over the singing. But it wasn’t until after the festival that I discovered that what had sounded like “Mnnng hhmn hfwmg hmmm ghm hnng hmsn” actually was “If I Should Fall From Grace With God”, the title of the new Pogues album. Which places the event in 1988.

In 2000, Tim Bradford wrote a book about Irish culture, entitled “Is Shane MacGowan still alive?” A pertinent question. The singer had been fired by the rest of the band in 1991, and had slipped into obscurity. But he hadn’t fallen from grace with God. MacGowan, the drunkards’ drunkard, his rotten row of teeth resembling an ancient graveyard, became legendary as much for his self-destructive antics as for his singing and songwriting. But he survived, re-joined the Pogues (in 2001) and to date is still touring with them.

These pictures are the front and back of a t-shirt for the 2008 Pogues US tour, and together they form a world map according to the Pogues. The quotes are all taken from Pogues lyrics, and reflect the world as seen through Irish eyes, with an emphasis on lands important to the Irish diaspora. These include

• the United States (where, according to some estimates, over 36 million Americans claim Irish ancestry – 12% of the total population and 6 times the current total population of Ireland)
• the United Kingdom (over 6 million Brits, or 10% of the total population, is of Irish descent. Shane MacGowan, for example, was born in Kent).
• Australia (almost two million Australians, or 9% of the population, has Irish antecedents).

Lyrics on the front cover:

• Greenland Whale Fisheries
• The Western Ocean
• A Land of Opportunity
• Boston and PA
• Fairytale of New York
• He Fought the champ in Pittsburgh
• Those Old Cotton Fields Back Home
• She Left Me Drunk in New Orleans
• Havana to Seville
• ‘Round Cape Horn
• The Wake of the Medusa
• Girl from the Wadi Hammamat
• Sketches of Spain
• Frank Ryan bought you whiskey in a brothel in Madrid
• Night train to Lorca
• Until we see Almeria once again
• A trip to Lourdes
• Paris St. Germaine
• Pont Mirabeau
• You pissed yourself in Frankfurt
• Got syph down in Cologne
• Flanders Oh
• The rosy parks of England
• White City
• Dark streets of London
• In Guildford there’s four
• Birmingham Six
• The booze ran out at Crewe
• Dirty old town
• The leaving of Liverpool
• Dear old Ireland
• Star of the county Down
• Boat train
• There’s fighting in Dublin to be done
• Wildcats of Kilkenny
• Their hearts in Tipperary
• People from Cork City
• In Newcastle West I spent many a night
• The Limerick Rake
• Galway Bay
• Galway races
• THe broad majestic Shannon
• The road leading up Glenaveigh
• Passengers from Nenagh
• Seen the carnival at Rome

Lyrics on the back cover:

• South Australia
• To the Dusty Outback
• The Battle of Brisbane
• From the Murray’s Green Basin
• As our Trip pulled into Circular Quay
• Macao to Acapulco
• I am bound for California
• Summer in Siam
• My brother earned his medals at My Lai in Vietnam
• She gave me Mekong whiskey
• She gave me Hong Kong Flu
• Hanging out on Pattaya Beach
• Ended up in Nepal
• Put me on a breeze to Kathmandu
• Stepped over bodies in Bombay
• The Lebanon Line
• Billy’s Bones
• Turkish Song of the Damned
• We sailed off for Gallipoli
• The hell that they called Suvla Bay

Two final points:

This celtocentric worldview not only emphasises certain countries important to the Irish Diaspora, it also enlarges them. Ireland and Great Britain dominate the front of the t-shirt (in a way reminiscent of the Tory Atlas of the World – #105). And I’m pretty sure Australia has also been inflated.

The lyrics that don’t refer to Irish emigration destinations tend to reflect theatres of war (the Middle East, Gallipoli in Asia Minor, the Spanish Civil War, etc.)

The t-shirt mentions the original name of the band, Pogue Mahone, which is a rude expression in Irish. The band shortened the name after complaints the BBC received complaints from Scotch-Gaelic viewers.

Many thanks to Liam Flanagan for sending in these images, who asks to confirm whether this map consists entirely of lyrics. As far as I can tell (and as far as I can rely on Mr MacGowan’s elocution), I think it does.

384 – Does My Metro Area Look Big in this Ring Road?

In London Orbital, writer, walker and Londoner Iain Sinclair approaches his favourite subject – his home town – by circumambulating it. The book details his trek along the M25, London’s ring road.

Sinclair completes the 117 mile (188 km) journey in 592 pages, which works out to 5 pages per mile (or 3 per kilometer). As ring roads go, London’s is one of the longer ones – which can with some difficulty be gleaned from this map.

The map layers the peripheral highways of 27 of the world’s larger cities onto a poster, designed by the Rice School of Architecture in Houston, TX. That location is no coincidence, because the poster highlights a record for Houston: it has the largest ring road in the world (or at least the largest of all the world cities surveyed).

However, it is unclear how long a book Mr Sinclair would have to write, were he to transplant his peripatetic procedure (and the same distance-to-volume ratio) from London to Houston.

The city at the centre of the US’s sixth-largest metropolitan area (with 5.7 million inhabitants) has three ring roads: Interstate 610 [circling downtown in a 38-mile (61-km) loop], Beltway 8 [about 83 miles, or 137 km] and the as yet unfinished Grand Parkway [State Highway 99].

Clearly, for Houston to have the world’s longest loop, the big black blob on this map could only be the latter. But a few problems arise. Four, to be exact.

One: the Grand Parkway is far from finished. Only two of 11 segments are completed. However tempting it may be, it is hardly fair to tout something as “the world’s largest” before it’s been completed. Especially since, as any large-scale project, the Grand Parkway has its share of detractors. So it might never get done.

Two: even if it is to be completed, plans may change and length might vary. The website for the Grand Parkway Association doesn’t specify beyond the “circumferential scenic highway” going to be “180+ miles” (app. 290 km) long.

Three: the Houston orbital outsizes all others on this map to such an extent that it’s difficult to imagine its circumference to be no larger than London’s by a factor of 180 to 117.

And finally, four: now that I’m mentioning London’s orbital road again — the website for the UK’s Highway Agency states that the M25 is… the longest ring road in the world.

While the identity of the actual highway(s) surrounding Houston and depicted here remains elusive, it is beyond doubt that the Texan city has a large surface, a fact attested by a map posted earlier on this blog (#327), the discussion of which also touches upon the phenomenon of sprawl (large conurbations with relatively low population density) as a result of increased mobility.

 Many thanks to Owen Evans, Scott Bodenheimer, Iain Kennedy (and anyone I might have overlooked) for alerting me to this map, found here on Thumb.

383 – The Obfuscated Giants of Brobdingnag

 

 

“Having been condemned by Nature and Fortune to an active and restless Life, in two Months after my Return I again left my native Country, and took Shipping in the Downs on the 20th Day of June 1702, in the Adventure, Capt. John Nicholas, a Cornish Man, Commander, bound for Surat.”

Thus begins the second part of Gulliver’s Travels, which will have Jonathan Swift’s fictional hero Lemuel Gulliver shipwrecked once again, though not this time on Lilliput, the strange land inhabited by tiny humans that he visited in the first part, but on Brobdingnag, where the people by contrast are huge; Gulliver is no longer a giant among men, but a dwarf among giants.

As indicated by this map printed in early editions of Gulliver’s Travels, the land of Brobdingnag seems to be located on the Californian coast, just north of New Albion. The inclusion on the map of that English colony, named by Francis Drake, might be to underline the nowhere-ness (or u-topia) of Brobdingnag, as the exact location of Drake’s land-claim was deliberately obfuscated by the English crown, and has been debated fiercely ever since.

New Albion has been positioned just north of San Francisco, and anywhere north from there along the US’s Pacific coast – which does not, however, contain a peninsula in the rather peculiar shape of Brobdingnag. The only shape vaguely similar is that of Canada’s Vancouver Island – but that is not a peninsula.

To make matters even more confusing, indications in the text itself would place Brobdingnag in Micronesia. Furthermore, Brobdingnag is described as being continent-sized – 6,000 miles long and 3,000 miles wide. Which doesn’t fit with any land mass, in Micronesia or on the Pacific coast of North America. And even more fantastically, Brobdingnag is separated from the continent by a volcano range of up to 30 miles high – a gravitational impossibility. All of this is not an accident; Swift’s own obfuscating reflects his skepticism of the reliability of contemporary travel writing.

Although 60 feet (18 m) of height, the giants of Brobdingnag nevertheless stand less tall in the popular imagination than the dwarves of Lilliput. While ‘lilliputian’ has become a more or less general adjectival synonym for ‘tiny’, ‘brobdingnagian’ has become rather less used (for ‘colossal’), although Italy has been described as ‘the brobdingnagian boot’.

Rather appropriately, the lack of appreciation appears to be mutual. After Gulliver explained the ins and outs and what have yous of 18th century European politics, the King of the Brobdingnagians declares: “I cannot but conclude the Bulk of your Natives to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.”

This map taken from the relevant Wikipedia page. Entry #83 on this blog deals with another of Gulliver’s fictional countries – the Land of the Houyhnhnms.

382 – Two Eggs and a Kidney: Regional World Cities

This world map slices up the globe into two egg-shaped pieces and, for some reason, a kidney-shaped one. It purports to show the world’s three panregions (*), and the world cities with which they interact. In all, there are nine of these “regional world cities”: two “panregional centres”, three “major regional centres” and four “minor regional centres”.

The American panregion is divided into northern and southern halves, but both are dominated by northern cities: New York and Miami respectively.

The Euro-Afro-Middle-Eastern one (note: find snappier name for this panregion) is more complex, with a Francophone African subregion within Africa, and the Middle East seemingly straddling Africa and Europe. London has the biggest reach of all the regional world cities in this zone, interacting with Europe, the Middle East and Africa. But not with Francophone Africa, which is the sole domain of Paris. Johannesburg and Brussels are minor players, tentatively tentaculating into their respective continents.

The Asia-Oceania panregion is divided into four subregions: North East and South East Asia, Japan and Oceania. Singapore and Hong Kong are mirror images of each other, extending their influence into both subregions on their side of the north-south axis. Tokio is the main hub of the small Japanese zone.

The acronym GaWC refers to the Globalisation and World Cities Research Network (based at the Geography Department of Loughborough University in the UK), a network focused on studying the interaction between world cities (which obviously encompasses the study of globalisation).

A world city is a city with a global impact – and thus not necessarily synonymous with a megacity. Which is why Brussels (app. 1 million inhabitants, but lots of Eurocrats and lobbyists among them) is one, but much more populous cities like Lagos, Mexico City or Pyongyang aren’t.

“Global impact” naturally is a highly subjective term. Since 1998, the GaWC at Loughborough has tried to define and refine a set of criteria that world cities have to correspond to. I am guessing this map dates from the GaWC’s early days. More recent updates, in 2004 and 2008, have produced sophisticated rankings and subsets of world cities that go beyond just the nine of them on this map.

Nevertheless, in the 2008 update, London and New York are still listed as the only two world cities in the top, “Alpha++” category. The Alpha+ category is made up of Hong Kong, Paris, Singapore and Tokyo (also on this map), but also Sydney, Shanghai and Beijing. All the way down the list are “Gamma-” cities such as Edinburgh, Tallinn, San Diego, Calgary and Doha.

Many thanks to blgfk for sending in this map, taken here. More info on the GaWC on this page at Loughborough University.

* Since there’s three of them instead of two, it would be silly to call them hemispheres.

381 – Shoe World

 

Italy’s famously boot-like appearance might be what gave Emad Hajjaj the idea for this footwear-oriented world map. Hajjaj, a cartoonist for the Jordanian newspaper Al-Ghad, manages to craft all major countries and continents into shoe-shapes – most of them endemic to the country or continent thus represented.

Russia, home of the galosh (see also entry #289) is made up of two brobdingnagian furry boots (one European and one Siberian, one imagines). Canada and Greenland are similarly furry and boot-like. Canada’s northern archipelago is represented by a craquelure of icy patches that together form the shape of a low boot.

South America, passionate about futbol, is decked out as a sports shoe decorated, for good measure, with a football. Mexico and India also seem shaped like locally worn footwear. Nice touch: the Baja California peninsula doubles as an elongated heel, while India’s shoetip is decorated with a pompon – i.e. Sri Lanka. The US is, of course, a cowboy boot. Alaska is cleverly represented as the nose of Canada’s left shoe, but in the America’s cowboy motif.

The fair amount of single shoes floating around the world seas remind one of one of life’s less transcendental, yet reoccurring conundrums: why does one always see shoes by the wayside in singles and never in pairs? Islands thus represented are Iceland, Nova Zembla, a particularly well-turned out New Zealand (perhaps a Wellington boot?), a Japanese folklorically correct wooden shoe (the exact term eludes me), an unmatching pair representing the island of New Guinea, divided between the independent state of Papua New Guinea (eastern half) and Irian Jaya (Indonesia’s western half).

I doubt, however, whether any Saudi wears the laced boots representing the Arabian peninsula, and I don’t know whether slippers are really that popular on Madagascar. Quite appropriately, Italy is represented by the exact same shape it has in reality…

I am not familiar with the context of this particular cartoon, so I am unaware of any political double entendre. I can only speculate that, if such were the case, it might have something to do with the particular place of footwear in Arab social discourse. To be struck with the sole of a shoe is the ultimate insult – hence the images, at the end of the Baathist regime, of angry Iraqis hammering Saddam’s torn-down statue with their shoes.  Hence also the practice of throwing footwear at despised dignitaries, as happened to the former president Bush on his last visit to Iraq.

Many thanks for Dave Martucci for alerting me to this map, found here on Daryl Cagle’s fantastic Political Cartoonists Index. Mr Hajjaj’s work is also featured on the website www.mahjoob.com.

380 – White Fright: Asia Looming Over Anglo-Australia

A youngster in breeches and an elderly man with a scythe, both white and together looking rather vulnerable, are playing dice against a team of unreliable-looking Asians. The object of their Great Game is on the board — Australia.

“Can the English-speaking peoples protect Australia as a white man’s country? They can to-day. But at a time when the energetic and capable Americans are very dubious whether they could even to-day protect the Philippines against a Japanese attack, it is not without pertinence to point out that any defense of Australia must be accomplished very far from the home bases of both Great Britain and the United States – and that an armed China would have enormous man-power at its disposal.”

(…)

“Equally obviously Premier Hughes fears, and fears rightly, that Japanese eyes are turned towards Australia. His speech breathes that fear throughout. But he pins his faith to the British Navy, to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, and to an understanding with America. He appeals to America. ‘If she can not agree with Japan, how is she to help Australia?’ But does America really want to help Australia in the event of Japan’s insistence on freedom of entry? It has long been obvious to the thinkers of the great Republic that Japan must soon ‘find room somewhere for her rapidly expanding population’. And she is taking the necessary steps to preserve the purity of her own white race. But it does not follow that she is equally anxious about the purity of the Australian section of the European race. It is actually in the mind of many Americans that Australia, being the only empty area of any magnitude in the world, and more closely connected with Asia than any other land, is the natural sphere of Japan’s extension (…)”

This map was sent in by K. McIver who found it in a 1929 issue of the Literary Digest, an American weekly magazine best remembered for the rather ignominious circumstances of its demise. In 1936, based on its own polling of 10 million Americans, the magazine predicted a landslide victory in the presidential elections for Alf Landon against F.D. Roosevelt. FDR went on to win 46 out of 48 states, the polling became a textbook example of how not to poll, and the loss of credibility cause the magazine to first merge with another and even then still fail shortly afterwards. Literary Digest’s polling was skewed because it relied on databases of telephone subscribers and car owners – in those days, a demographic much better-off (and much less Democratic) than the American average.

Whether or not the magazine poll’s right of centre orientation has something to do with the tone of this particular article is questionable. Shocking as the overt xenophobia in the above quotes might seem, it was mainstream in much of the western world – even among the nations that would go on to defeat the virulently racist Axis powers in the Second World War. It could even be argued, in fact, that anti-racism only became an intrinsic part of the ‘western’ outlook because of that victory – and even then only rather gradually (vide the decolonisation of Africa and the Civil Rights movement in the US in the Fifties and Sixties, and the rather tardy establishment of – non-white – majority rule in South Africa in the Nineties).

Australian official racism was mainstream enough to be explicited in a White Australia policy, in operation from 1901 to 1973, restricting non-white immigration to Australia. The policy was aimed mainly against migration from Japan and China, countries which were seen as the biggest threat to white Australian homogenity due to their proximity and booming population. But anti-Asian migration restrictions were in force even before Australian federation in 1901; in that period, they were often the direct result of Australian trade union protest against Chinese, other Asian and Oceanic labourers ‘undercutting’ white working men’s labour conditions – an example either of how racism extends to even the supposedly “internationalist” left wing of the political spectrum, or of how the laudable defense of (native) white workers’ rights risks turning into something less than noble when those rights are defended against other workers who are forced to be less choosy about theirs.

Australia was not alone in restricting non-European immigration; the same applied, in varying degrees and timeframes, to other countries founded by Europeans in other parts of the world. Australia was one of the few countries, though, to make its white-only immigration policy such a centrepiece of its national political scene. As Prime Minister Stanley Bruce said during the 1925 election campaign: “We intend to keep this country white and not allow its peoples to be faced with the problems that at present are practically insoluble in many parts of the world.”

I am wondering which problems he was referring to at that time, at the height of Europe’s economic, if not colonial grip on the rest of the world.

“White Australia” was gradually relaxed after World War II, when the slogan Populate or Perish expressed the national mood more acutely. Racialism in immigration legislation was only explicitly forbidden in 1973, however. Immigration from Asian countries to Australia has increased markedly in recent decades, and Australia no longer is a lilywhite British Isle in the Pacific… but the UK remains one of the single largest sources of immigrants.

Many thanks to Mr McIver for sending in this map.

379 – Russia to US: You’re Breaking Up (Too)

 

Endtime prophecy is not the province of the religiously excitable alone. Even the die-hard materialists of the Russian intelligence service FSB (formerly the KGB) dabble in apocalyptic musings – although the scope of this particular prediction is not global, but limited to the imminent demise of that old-and-new archenemy, the United States.

Igor Panarin has been predicting the “moral and economic collapse” of the US for about a decade now; he set the Endtime for the American Empire at the year 2010, and the recent arrival of the credit crunch lends some credence to his outlandish forecast - at least as far as the Russian (state) media is concerned. Panarin, formerly a KGB analyst and now an academic, gets about two interview requests a day. 

The break-up predicted by Panarin would be the result of mass immigration, economic decline and moral degradation, all of which would trigger a second American civil war, and the collapse of the dollar. This would then lead to the break-up of the United States, by mid-2010, into half a dozen regional sub-entities. These would be dominated or absorbed outright by foreign powers.

• Alaska would revert to Russia, and Hawaii would become Chinese or Japanese.
• The West Coast (the three Pacific states, joined with Idaho, Nevada, Utah and Arizona in a Californian Republic), would fall to China or at least be under Chinese influence.
• A Texas Republic, which would also include New Mexico, Oklahoma and all the other traditionally southern states (except the Carolinas, the Virginias, Kentucky and Tennessee), would similarly be either directly or indirectly under the sway of Mexico.
• The aforementioned southern exceptions would join the northeastern states in forming a bloc that might join the European Union.
• The rest – all midwestern and western states – would be at Canada’s mercy. 

Imagine Chinese overlordship of Utah – another Tibet waiting to happen -, the Maple Leaf flag flying at the Gateway Arch and the European Union and Mexico meeting just south of there, on the Mississippi. As far-fetched as that may sound, Mr Panarin is no fringe looney. He heads the Russian Foreign Ministry’s academy for future diplomats (and Russia will need quite a few more of those, if his prediction comes true). Mr Panarin also is one of  the talking heads on (Russian state) tv whenever US-Russian relations are at issue.

The popularity of his end-of-America views mirrors the Kremlin’s semi-official anti-Americanism, and it is all the more popular for the pithy sympathy he wraps up his predicitions in: Panarin claims his disintegration scenario has about 50% chance of happening, and if it did, it would not be the best outcome – for Russia, that is. Even though the Russians would again cross the Bering Strait to retake possession of Alyaska, the disintegration of Russia’s main trading partner would spell economic trouble for the resurgent world power.

One can’t help but feel that Mr Panarin’s view is less a realistic scenario based on cold, hard facts (as he claims), and more a kind of payback for America’s and the West’s gleeful spectatorship of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Mr Panarin explicitly refers to political scientist Emmanuel Todd, who in 1976 predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union. “People laughed at him”, Mr Panarin is quoted as saying by this article in the Wall Street Journal, implying that he can relate to the scorn felt by Mr Todd at the time, and is anticipating a similar vindication.

As with religious eschatologists (at least those careless enough to posit a near and definite date for the world’s end), the only way definitely to disprove Mr Panarin’s reverse Schadenfreude is to wait for his prediction to outlive itself. So let’s see exactly what Mr Obama remains president of, if anything, come August 2010…

Many thanks to the dozens of readers who sent in this map.

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).

371 – Charting the Cherry Blossom Front

“The man of breeding never appears to abandon himself completely to his pleasures; even his manner of enjoyment is detached. It is the rustic boors who take all their pleasures grossly. They squirm their way through the crowd to get under the trees; they stare at the blossoms with eyes for nothing else; they drink sake and compose linked verse; and finally they heartlessly break off great branches and cart them away. When they see a spring they dip their hands and feet to cool them; if it is snow, they jump down to leave their footprints. No matter what the sight, they are never content merely with looking at it.”

This lament by the Japanese author Yoshida Kenkō (ca. 1285 – ca. 1350) in his classic, Tsurezuregusa (’Essays in Idleness’), mentions the typically Japanese tradition of hanami (cherry blossom viewing). The blooming of cherry trees (which in Japanese are called sakura) is anticipated by the Japanese with such an eagerness that it prompts the national weather bureau to forecast and chart the progress of the sakurazensen (’cherry blossom front’) across the Japanese archipelago, south to north.

This is such a map, showing this year’s sakurazensen over the last and coming few weeks, colour-coded to reflect the transition of greens to pinks that accompanies the blossoming of the hanami.

On 20 March, the cherries blossomed over most of the southern island of Kyushu (except its southern part), the western half of Shikoku and the teensiest bit of southern Honshu, the Japanese main island. By the 25th of March, the sakurazensen reached the southern third of Honshu, taking in many of the larger cities of Japan. By the end of March – which is just around now – the cherry blossom front has moved up north to include Tokyo. All during April, the sakurazensen will creep north on Honshu, jumping across to the northern island of Hokkaido by the end of April. By the 10th of May, the cherry trees will finally blossom across most of Japan’s northern island – by which time the hanami season in the south will be long gone, the blooms lasting only two weeks at most…

Many thanks to Sara Velas for pointing me to this map, found on the Some Landscapes blog (questioning landscapes in the arts), to which I am also indebted for the Kenkō quote.

370 – Palestine’s Island Paradise, Now With a Word from its Creator

The Bible contains at least two stories equating the aquatic with the amoral. As Red Sea pedestrians, Moses and the Israelites didn’t even get their sandals moist, while the Lord did some expert smiting on the pursuing Egyptians, by way of the gurgling waters closing in on them. And a few thousand years earlier, Noah kept his binary boatload afloat while all the rest of humanity (and the now extinct species of the animal kingdom) met their watery grave.

Even though this map of L’archipel de Palestine orientale (‘The Archipelago of Eastern Palestine’) is set in the same area and uses a similar theme, the cartographer behind it refutes any allegation that it is meant to reflect the same Biblical dry = good, wet = bad analogy. “The map is not about ‘drowning’ or ‘flooding’ the Israeli population, nor dividing territories along ethnic lines, even less a suggestion of how to resolve the conflict,” gasps Julien Bousac, the Frenchman who created this map.

A small excerpt of the map (focusing on the Greater Jerusalem area) was published a bit earlier on this blog, but the map in its entirety (sent in by Mr Bousac but also earlier by Baptiste Hautdidier) merits a separate entry, not only because “without a legend, it […] gives ground to various misinterpretations, due to the high sensitivity of the subject,” as Mr Boussac relates – but also because it just looks so nice. And strange, of course.

“Maybe posting the full map would help to take it for what it is, i.e. an illustration of the West Bank’s ongoing fragmentation based on the (originally temporary) A/B/C zoning which came out of the Oslo process, still valid until now. To make things clear, areas ‘under water’ strictly reflect C zones, plus the East Jerusalem area, i.e. areas that have officially remained under full Israeli control and occupation following the Agreements. These include all Israeli settlements and outposts as well as Palestinian populated areas.”

Mr Boussac took advantage of the resulting archipelago effect “to use typical tourist maps codes (mainly icons) to sharpen the contrast between the fantasies raised by seemingly paradise-like islands and the Palestinian Territories grim reality.” The map does have a strong vacationy vibe to it – but whether that is because of the archipelago-shaped subject matter, or due to the cheerful colour scheme is a matter for debate.

Those colours, incidentally, denote urban areas (orange), nature reserves (shaded), zones of partial autonomy (dark green) and of total autonomy (light green). Totally fanciful are of course the dotted lines symbolising shipping links, the palm trees signifying protected beachland, and the purple symbols representing various aspects of seaside pleasure. The blue icon, labelled Zone sous surveillance (‘Zone under surveillance’) has some bearing on reality, as the locations of the warships match those of permanent Israeli checkpoints.

Some of the paradisiacally named islands include Ile au Miel (Honey Island), Ile aux Oliviers (Isle of the Olive Trees), Ile Sainte (Holy Island) and Ile aux Moutons (Sheep Island), although the naming of Ile sous le Mur (Island beneath the Wall) constitutes a relapse into the grimness of the area’s reality.

369 – Best Beer Map of America

Despite the quip about American beer being like making love in a canoe, the US produces a multitude and a variety of brews that belie the homogenised tastes of the most popular brands. At its annual Great American Beer Festival, the Brewers Association awards gold, silver and bronze medals to the best beers produced by the hundreds of breweriers in the US, from the largest to the micro-est.

Compiled by veteran drinks journalist (1) Rick Lyke and his son-in-law Mike Wirth (2), this map charts all the gold, silver and bronze presented by the Brewers Association since 1987. “Looking at the pages of medal winners from the past does not give quite as clear a picture as the state map showing where the winners come from,” says Mr Lyke (on this page of his blog, lyke2drink). “Clearly, beer fans in California, Colorado, Wisconsin, Oregon and Pennsylvania enjoy some of the best beers in the land.”

Top 10 medal-winning states are:

1. California – 474
2. Colorado – 322
3. Wisconsin – 232
4. Oregon – 170
5. Pennsylvania – 162
6. Texas – 133
7. Washington – 114
8. New York – 98
9. Missouri -90
10. Massachusetts – 76

Of course, this does not take into account the population size of the states listed here. The top 10, reshuffled to reflect the number of medals per million of inhabitants, looks quite different, reflecting a dominance by states with a strong micro-brewing tradition:

1. Colorado – 64.4
2. Oregon – 42.5
3. Wisconsin – 38.6
4. Washington – 16.2
5. Missouri – 15
6. Pennsylvania – 13.5
7. Massachusetts – 12.6
8. California – 12.8
9. Texas – 5.6
10. New York – 5.1

Reversing the map slogan, the “worst beer in America” is brewed in the states with the least medals, i.e. West Virginia (0), North Dakota, Oklahoma (both just 1), Alabama, Rhode Island, DC (2 each), South Dakota, Nebraska, Louisiana (4 each) and Connecticut (5).

Most highly decorated beer in America is the Alaskan Smoked Porter (15 medals; 6 gold, 4 silver, 5 bronze), followed by the New Belgium Abbey Belgian Style Ale (10 medals; 6 gold, 4 bronze) and the Genesee Cream Ale (10 medals; 2 gold, 5 silver, 3 bronze).

Even though these and most other decorated beers are produced by small “craft” breweries, it’s still the large brewing conglomerates that rake in the highest number of medals among them: Anheuser-Busch (65), Miller (55) and Pabst (50).

Many thanks to Mike Wirth for sending in this map (first version sent in late March ‘09, updated version sent in early June ‘09). Mike is a designer, educator and artist. Visit his website here.

(1) presumably a veteran of drinks journalism, and not a journalist of veteran drinks
(2) In its orginial German, Wirt (these days without -h) rather fortuitously means “innkeeper”.