Review: Vivien Horler
This Way Up – When maps go wrong (and why it matters) by Mark Cooper-Jones & Jay Foreman (Mudlark)
Back when I was at school we learnt in History, or it may have been Geography, that Bartholomeu Dias and his flotilla were the first Europeans to round the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, opening up the sea route to India and the east.
But there’s an extraordinary tale of skulduggery involving Christopher Columbus, and how a map by his cartographer brother Bartholomew Colmbus probably persuaded the Spanish royal court to fund Christopher’s voyage west across the Atlantic to find India, China and the Spice Islands. (He didn’t of course – but he did find the West Indies.)
It appears, according to this fascinating book by a pair of chaps who call themselves the Map Men (after their YouTube video series), that Italian-born Columbus, with his brother in tow, first approached the Portuguese court with his plan.
But Portugal turned them down, partly on the grounds that the trip was counter to Portugal’s determination to find a route to India by rounding Africa and sailing east.
Columbus went on to see if he could persuade the Spanish to sponsor him, but he left his brother behind in Portugal compiling a new world map for the king, based on the latest Portuguese discoveries.
Dias’s triumphant return to Portugual in 1488 appeared to scupper Columbus’s Spanish plans, and Portugal was keeping the details of Dias’s voyage secret. Columbus was desperate – and broke.
His secret weapon was the useful Portuguese information provided by his brother, via another Italian cartographer called Martellus. The Map Men tell us Martellus’s map had Columbus’s brother’s fingerprints “all over it”.
The extraordinary thing about this map is that the southern tip of Africa is ridiculously long, so much so that it breaks the map’s frame.
The Map Men write: “Discoverer Dias had marked the Cape of Good Hope at 34 degrees south of the equator, which just happened to be bang on; A+ for his use of the astrolabe. On Martellus’s map, however, it’s an inexplicable 45 degrees south.”
Notes that Bartholomew Columbus left behind after his death said he was present when Dias presented his findings to King John II of Portugal, claiming the Cape was 45 degrees south.
“Columbus’s Brother was present in all of this, and therefore would have known Dias located the Cape at 34 degrees, not 45. What he writes here, therefore, is a blatant lie. At 45 degrees the journey east to Asia was made a whole 40 degrees less appealing… One degree of latitude equates to 69 miles, so by adding a total of 40 degrees of sailing, Columbus’s Brother had made the eastern route to Asia less appealing by about 2 760 miles.”
And the Map Men conclude: “Not only do the inexplicable [map] distortions appear perfectly designed to facilitate Columbus’s ambitions, they contain a body of evidence quite literally pointing to the hand of his brother.”
As a result, the Spanish court of Ferdinand and Isabella gave Columbus the okay to head west in 1492. He returned, wrongly claiming to have been in Japan, when he was in fact in Cuba. The French Caribbean island of St Barts bears Columbus’s brother’s name to this day.
This is just one of the stories told in an extraordinary and fascinating account of the importance of maps.
I’ll mention two other intriguing snippets in This Way Up. Copyright is tricky when you’re a mapmaker, because if your map is correct, what’s to stop other cartographers from publishing their own versions, with slightly different colours or fonts, and without all the hard slog of actually measuring streets and rivers and mountains?
The solution is to introduce deliberate errors, a dead giveaway if you’re copying some else’s map. There’s a tiny alley in London called Book Mews, which appears in the London A-Z as “Brook Mews”. The Map Men say there is a rumour the A-Z has at least one mistake on every page.
And here’s another factoid: in February 2019, the same month the Swedish furniture company Ikea was about to open a branch in New Zealand, they produced a map of the world that left New Zealand off it altogether.
It turns out New Zealand is quite often left off world maps, including the massive United Nations logo on the wall of the UN headquarters in New York.
In Kazakhstan Airport there’s a large wall map of the world in the customs hall with no New Zealand… “which by the way resulted in a New Zealand visitor being detained for 24 hours when unable to point to the country of her passport in 2016”.
I enjoyed This Way Up very much, although occasionally the Map Men’s jokey tone jars, and the maps, reprinted in black and white to fit a trade paperback’s A5 pages, are often too small to be helpful. But I learnt a lot, in a most agreeable way.
All the Way to the River is the third memoir of Elizabeth Gilbert’s I’ve read. The first was Eat Pray Love, a bestseller which made her fortune. It famously starred Julia Roberts in the film version.
Many books have been published within weeks of the end of a sensational court case, mostly it would seem to cash in on the public’s ghoulish interest in the subject matter.