But few tourists ever come to see the markers. The British alpaca farmers who live by the little town of Ergli in central Latvia knew well of the arc’s existence, but thought that the last time anyone had clambered up the rain-slick grass to see the tiny stone with its letter X carved into it back in 1821 had been six months before. It seems that despite the best efforts of a few, Herr Struve is a hero still somewhat overlooked, a prophet without honor, even close by his Baltic home.

  3

  Just Where is Everything

  The world is a great wilderness where mankind have wandered and jostled each other about from the creation. Some have removed by necessity and others by choice. One nation has been fond of seizing what another was tired of possessing; and it will be difficult to point out the country which is to this day in the hands of its first inhabitants.

  —HENRY ST. JOHN, VISCOUNT BOLINGBROKE,

  Reflections upon Exile (1716)

  Now, with the size of the world fully determined, it remained only to make a map of it. A map of all the world, as precise and as a perfect as may be.

  This too was as almighty a project as it sounds, conceived at a gathering of geographers in Switzerland in 1891, just as the African arc geodesists had assembled up the road in Paris eight years before and as their Russian predecessors had gathered in Dorpat earlier in the century. This new conference was held at a time when geography and cartographic technique had evolved into a very much more advanced science, and for which the girdling of the earth was a quite vital matter. It was also a time when European empires—particularly the British, the French, and the German—were at their apogees, and yet when most physical geographers, even when from one of the imperial powers, maintained a studiedly disinterested view of their craft. Physical geographers back then, as mostly still today, took pride in remaining as politically neutral as the land was itself, caring little for which nation ruled what, only for the nature of the world’s fantastically varied surfaces and their physical appearance and settings, the location of the planet’s river and peaks, its deserts and swamps.

  Albrecht Penck was a scholar preeminent in the field, an expert on glaciers and the Alps and the geology of the Pleistocene. He was a German, though at the time of the intellectual epiphany that gave birth to the world map project, he was settled in Austria, a professor at the University of Vienna. It was an appropriate city from which to witness the birth of so noble and yet ultimately so ill starred an idea: in the 1890s the Hapsburgs and their kin, rulers of their immense Austro-Hungarian empire, were blessed with a peculiarly cosmopolitan view, endlessly curious, intrigued by everything in the world around them. The Hapsburg archduke Franz Ferdinand, still twenty years away from meeting his world-shattering assassinated end in Sarajevo, was about to set off on a celebrated world tour, which saw him hunting kangaroos in Australia and taking himself, locally unannounced, to such unfamiliar places as Sarawak and Hong Kong, Bangkok and Nagasaki. The Viennese, sedate in their coffeehouses and comfortably taking their morning chocolate at Demel, read avidly about every encounter between the incognito archduke and his hardly incognito retinue of chamberlains and hussars, on the one hand, and on the other the bemused locals of his dozen or so Pacific stopovers.

  When Franz Ferdinand had initially set off for Trieste and the twin-funneled cruiser that would transport him and his suite to the Pacific and then around the world, the Hofburg announced that his adventure was specifically designed for his “information and study.” The Austrians, following his travels reverentially via the lengthy dispatches in their morning newspapers, found themselves more than happy being educated along with him, gleefully coming to know more about the outside world than did most in other landlocked nations, especially considering that this one had only a rudimentary navy and a merchant marine that was wanting in sailors who might bring home stories of the exotic outside.*

  Albrecht Penck, the cartographic visionary who very nearly succeeded in mapping the entire planet at the scale of one to one million.

  It was armed with this kind of peculiarly Austrian geographical enthusiasm that Professor Penck traveled through the northern Alps to Berne in 1891 and presented the conferees at the Fifth International Geographical Congress with what seemed at first a wildly romantic and impractical dream.

  He declared that he wanted the delegates formally to agree that the entire world should promptly be mapped, with everywhere on the globe—every continent and every nation and every island owned or unincorporated—drawn on permanent paper at the scale of one to one million (a little under sixteen inches to the mile), and that all the resulting maps should be of the same style—using the same systems of colors, the same units of measurement (meters), the same spacing of contours and hypsometric tints (darker shades at the bases of hills and mountain ranges, paler as the hills became higher, white where there was snow), the same system of typefaces (employing the Roman alphabet—no Cyrillic, no Arabic, no Chinese), and the same language (English).

  Moreover, the maps’ sheets should all be limited to a rectangle of four degrees of latitude and six of longitude, and their projection should be a kind that if all the sheets were to be fastened together (clear tape not at the time invented) they would form themselves into a gigantic sphere exactly one millionth the size of Planet Earth. An oblate spheroid of globe, in other words, as Herr Struve had lately proven, and which at Penck’s proposed universal scale would be about the size of a moderately large house. He would call the project the International Map of the World, the IMW—a common map, as he put it, for a common humanity.

  It was something of an iconoclastic idea for the fractured and fractious world of the nineteenth century, and the geographers present that day applauded with enthusiastic surprise. Hitherto all too many maps of all too many countries had been jealously created with a mind-set of defensive territoriality, the mapmakers shielding their work like adolescents in an examination room, cupped hands covering their work from prying eyes. The British were among the worst offenders, promoting the size and importance of their own imperial holdings and displaying a haughty cartographic indifference to lands not under their control. Earlier empires, from the Greeks to the Venetians and the early Ottomans, those that flourished before the technologies of theodolite-based mapmaking had arrived at the end of the eighteenth century, were perhaps not so blameworthy, resorting to making maps that showed blank spaces, or mysterious areas marked Terra Incognita, or Terra Nullius or Here Be Dragons and which displayed more ignorance than indifference. But at the height of British imperial power, with which the Berne conference coincided, a peculiarly English combination of insouciance and arrogance helped to produce a distorted view of the mapped world—a view that Penck was determined to change.

  Nevertheless he did install a Briton on the IMW committee—a Scots-born journalist, teacher, and impassioned geographer named Sir John Scott-Keltie, whose eagerness for all to know geography as a science—he helped expand geography teaching in schools, helped establish readerships at both Oxford and Cambridge, urged the Royal Geographic Society to give as much weight to promoting geography as it did in sending expeditions into the most exotic faraway—was matchless, and earned him a chest groaning with gold medals and a knighthood from the King. He was also the longest-serving editor—for forty-four years, until his death in 1927—of The Statesman’s Yearbook, a massive and legendary compendium of global information still published each year in London, as it has been without interruption since 1864.*

  This modest Scotsman was joined on the committee by an American of even greater public reputation: John Wesley Powell, revered father of the exploration of the American West and the first white man to take a boat down the entire length of the Grand Canyon. As with so many reputations, his has lately suffered somewhat: his divisions of the world’s peoples into the savage, the barbarous, and the civilized (with the Native Americans he encountered seen as exemplars of barbarity, yet with ambitions to become civilized) has won him few twenty-first-century friends. And though he only had one arm—his right was half shot off at the Civil War Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee—and though his rock-climbing abilities were prodigious and his leadership skills in the rapids-dashed Colorado River boats were without parallel, some have claimed his expedition stories were embroidered and bowdlerized. For instance, Powell failed to mention that because of his disability he allowed himself a life belt, while his men, if they went in the water, would have to fend for themselves.

  There is no doubt, though, that Powell’s view on land use was prescient: he thought that America’s intermountain west was quite unsuitable for large-scale agriculture, believing that a chronic want of water was a crucial problem that would affect all of the western states. He also thought state borders—numbers of which were being drawn during his lifetime—should follow natural watershed boundaries, so as to lessen the likelihood of argument over water ownership. He was an impassioned proponent of conservation as well, believing land should in many places remain wild and untouched by humankind, left for the local flora and fauna and the native peoples—even if in his condescending ignorance he saw these as “barbarous”—to enjoy the acreages without disturbance. His standing in the pantheon has yet to fall wholly victim to modern revisionism: there are numberless entities now named for this soldier, explorer, and geologist—there is a Lake Powell, a reservoir, a plateau, a mountain peak, a mineral (a salt of molybdenum, much valued in steel making), several schools, a federal building (the headquarters of the U.S. Geological Survey, of which he was the second director), a song, a movie, and a small town named Powell which sports six thousand souls in the front range of northern Wyoming.

  One would have thought that with such eminent boosters as these the IMW would have gotten off to a flying start. It did no such thing. Division, rancor, petulance (the French displaying much, especially over the use of the Greenwich meridian rather than having Paris as the longitudinal divide between east and west), blind hostility (the British objecting to the use of the French metric system for the maps’ scale), and sheer mulishness—all these contributed to a delay of some seventeen years before there was even a signed agreement to begin. And even that was promptly derided as being merely a pious aspiration.

  But then serious planning did get under way, if hesitantly. The Greenwich meridian was eventually chosen; the meter was selected; Latin script would be used; a clever numbering system was adopted; and a cunning projection—polyconic, meaning that all of the maps have a trapezoid shape, their upper and lower edges as parallel as the latitudes they represent, their sides (in the Northern Hemisphere) tending to make the map wider toward its lower edge or (in the Southern Hemisphere sheets) toward the upper.

  A last wrinkle was occasioned by some spectacular dog-in-the-mangerism—when, for instance, both the Russians and the Japanese declared that each had a prescriptive right to make the IMW maps of China, which was then mired in a postrevolutionary shambles. Not so fast, said China from beneath its wreckage: “we hereby announce that our Geodetic and Topographical Service are now operating regularly in all the provinces of China,” and that St. Petersburg and Tokyo might as well mind their own business.

  Thus chided, the forty-eight delegates gathered for a photograph on the steps of the Quai d’Orsay in Paris—all long coats and astrakhan collars, impressive facial hair and expressions of high purpose and with the hugely tall Albrecht Penck towering above them, front and center—and told the world they were ready to begin the greatest cartographic endeavor undertaken in all history.

  Six months later, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, Europe spiraled rapidly out of control, and by the end of that summer of 1914, the Great War had begun. Yet as it happened, and somewhat counterintuitively, the conflict, at least toward its end, provided a sudden spur to the IMW mapmakers—not least because the reorganization of so much of the world dictated by the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 required maps and atlases to help the world understand where exactly its citizens were now living their postwar lives. Fully one hundred sheets had been produced by the end of the war, most of them by the Royal Geographical Society in London, many of these of British colonial possessions and some scores of the landscape of Imperial India.

  During the ensuing two decades the project—which had its headquarters in Southampton, in southern England—swung into impressive action, though with some notable exceptions. France mapped much of francophone Africa. Germany made maps of all German-speaking countries in Europe. The entirety of the former Roman empire was mapped. An agency called the Brazilian Club of Engenharia published a 50-sheet series of Brazil. The Americans began a project of drawing 107 sheets of all of Hispanic America, which is still regarded today as “an unsurpassed scientific and artistic achievement.” But to general dismay the map-making energy that they displayed toward Cartagena and Maracaibo was not reflected in their coverage of Colorado and Mississippi—and Washington’s isolationist tendencies halted production of more than a scattering of American millionth-scale sheets. The Russians withdrew from the project after the Bolshevik revolution; and for a variety of other reasons—wars civil and international, institutional incompetence, budgetary problems among them—there were virtually no sheets made between the world wars of northeast Asia, Australia, Canada, or Polynesia.

  The only known complete collection of the IMW maps is kept at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee—almost eight hundred sheets of a project that was tragically never finished.

  One signal success stemmed from a joint Chinese and Swedish expedition to map Mongolia and Chinese Turkestan. It spent eight years wandering purposefully through some of the most remote grasslands and deserts of central Asia. This expedition was led by the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, and with its forty scientists from six countries (mostly Swedes and Germans, since their governments footed the bills) and protected by a force of thirty infantrymen and with its supplies carried across the sands by a team of more than three hundred camels, it was described by some as a “traveling university”—not that this, one imagines, is how villagers en route saw the group of ghostly strangers, probably the only whites ever seen in the region.

  The expedition produced four sheets of its proposed trans-Himalayan atlas, with all the information presented in impeccable IMW style—but the huge atlas itself was not to be published until 1966, and, quite bizarrely, because the government of the United States confiscated it. Hedin had wanted it published by a renowned German company based in the city of Gotha—but as fate would have it Gotha fell behind Soviet lines in the partition of postwar Germany. In the days before the closing of that frontier, a team of three officials of the U.S. Defense Department raided the publishing office and hauled off as much material as possible before the Russians could get their hands on it, and flew it back to Washington. The Pentagon decided it could be published only when East Germany’s strategic significance was deemed to be minimal—and that turned out to be in 1966, when just about all involved (Sven Hedin included) were dead.

  Slowly, slowly, the stack of completed maps increased. The Soviets changed their mind, and as part of Stalin’s third Five Year Plan agreed to map the entirety of the USSR—it would take fully 182 sheets—starting in 1940. Stakhanovite labors ensued: the venture was completed—despite the many depredations of war—in 1946, with as a result a further 22 million square kilometers of the world’s land surface was added to the accumulating total. The planet’s entire land surface area runs to 37 billion acres: the Soviet Union’s share was some 6 billion, now all of it fully mapped.

  But then, soon after the war, came a bombshell—and it came in the shape of yet another, and equally ambitious series of maps of the surface of the world.

  All of a sudden, commercial aviation blossomed from an entertaining curiosity into a formidably important component of the economy, for the rapid transport of both goods and people. And while a map of the world’s surface made for the convenience of a surface traveler, a similar map designed specifically for the aircraft pilot became, all of a sudden, an essential. And it did so initially for one very simple reason: a pilot flying two miles high above France had an absolute need to know if there were any mountains on his route that were three miles high, and which he would otherwise plough into. A map of the world’s surface that would inform him of such peril would be just as essential for his cockpit glove box as the joystick or the compass or the landing gear.

  The International Civil Aviation Organization, initially made up of fifty-four nations with aviation ambitions, was set up in 1947. One of ICAO’s priorities was to create a series of charts of the world’s surface—stripped of many of the finer and more granular details that would be of little interest to those sitting so high in the sky—but to do so at the same convenient scale as the IMW, one to a million. And in each square of the map, to note in large and very visible figures the height of the tallest object—a mountain, invariably—that a plane might be likely to encounter. One by one, countries that had set their mapmakers to work producing elegant million-scale land surface maps now found they were compelled by international agreements to prepare brand-new aviation charts of this kind, similar to but different from the IMW, and, because of the demands of airlines, to do so at a dramatically faster pace.

  Qantas and British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC), for example, both began long-haul services between London and Sydney in 1947—with refueling stops in Rome, Tripoli, Cairo, Karachi, Calcutta, Singapore, and Darwin. The cockpits of aircraft flying the route—which took the aircraft fully four days, before jet aircraft replaced the lumbering Lockheed Constellations—thus had to have a quiverful of up-to-date physical outline maps of Europe, the Levant, North Africa, Iran, Afghanistan, India, Burma, Thailand, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, and all of Australia from the Gulf of Carpentaria to Bondi Beach. The agencies charged with either making these new maps or providing information for others to make them had little time to produce at the same scale the much more detailed IMW maps of what were, one would have to confess, of lesser immediate importance.