A painting of Elizabeth I, commonly known as the Ditchley Portrait (c. 1592), shows the Queen in her royal regalia standing on a map of England, with the tips of her feet planted on Oxfordshire. In the more famous Armada Portrait (c. 1588), celebrating England’s defeat of the Spanish Armada, the Queen’s hand rests on a globe, over the Americas. Taken together, the two portraits convey a sense of Elizabeth as the undisputed queen of the whole of England who is on her way to becoming the empress of the whole known world. The Americas constituted the “new world”, which caused so much excitement among the people of Elizabethan England as exploratory sea voyages suddenly expanded the limits of the recognized world.
The poet could give a different twist to the euphoria over the discovery of new continents by finding a similar exhilaration in exploring the uncharted territory of his mistress’s body or by thinking of his infirm body laid out on the bed in his old age as a map being examined by the cosmographers, the doctors. But cartographers — especially the early ones, who did not have international land boundary agreements to impede their imagination — are also a poet of sorts as they go about their task of reducing immense space to a few lines drawn on a piece of paper. MAPS: THEIR UNTOLD STORIES, MAP TREASURES FROM THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES (Bloomsbury, $60) by Rose Mitchell and Andrew Janes documents the stories of 100 maps and their makers. These maps from the National Archives of the United Kingdom cover hundreds of years, from the early 15th century to the 1950s.
Many of the maps, predictably, are from the 16th century, when Magellan circumnavigated the world for the first time, and when Sir Walter Raleigh — a favourite of Elizabeth before he broke her heart by marrying one of her maids of honour — sponsored the first English colony in America. Thus the colonial project of England was launched. The enterprise would divide the world atlas into two broad segments, consisting of nations that are subjects of the Empire and nations that are not. The longevity of the enterprise is seen in the map-poster on top from the 1920s. This is a map drawn for the propaganda of the Empire Marketing Board, which sought to make people in Britain buy Empire produce. The countries in red seem to radiate from the tiny island nation in the middle. The moon and the sun on either side of the map lend support to the legend that the sun never set on the Empire.
Among the many decorative elements in this map are the polar bears, which have been erroneously placed at both the poles, when they belong exclusively to the North Pole. Mythical beasts, like gryphons and dragons, and exotic ones, like alligators and armadillos, as well as horned sea monsters feature in the decorative corners of some other maps. However, the embellishment on a map of Aldbourne Chase from the 17th century (the strip on the right) is made up of a riot of wild native flowers that would have done Shakespeare proud.
A map of Thames from 1662 (bottom, right) rejoices in the urban prospect rather than in rural sights. Much of the London as seen here would undergo several changes, most immediately in 1666, when many of the buildings would be razed to the ground in the Great Fire. The bombing of London during the Second World War again altered its face beyond recognition. A map prepared by the ministry of home security tracks the places where the bombs fell, and that was almost everywhere.
Not all air attacks are as terrifying. The picture on bottom, left is from a map (c. 1800) showing a hypothetical attack on the harbour of Brest in France. Although British balloons drop explosives on the vessels below in the map, aerial bombing was still a distant reality at this point in time. The balloon plan was the brainchild of a dancing master from Chelsea who had also thought of defending Gibraltar with boiling water, in an outpouring of patriotic fervour.
