Enter David Thompson once again, in 1824. By this time, it had been mutually accepted that wherever the lake’s farthest point was, a line could be drawn due south—not to the Mississippi River, which was now irrelevant, all of it now being in U.S. territory—but to where it intersected with 49th parallel. After which the border would then turn away west and head off in a straight line to the Rockies. Thompson after some trekking through the mosquito-infested forests duly found this northwesternmost point, whence it was properly agreed that this should now serve as the far end of the ragged borderline that went in a more or less easterly direction down and across to Lake Superior and eventually to New England. A short connecting line was then accordingly surveyed to go southward to the 49th parallel—and the United States had its border, finally.

  Though its geometric smoothness was now interrupted for all time—the agreement was signed in 1842, after a British astronomer named Johann Ludwig Tiarks formally and very precisely determined the coordinates of Thompson’s point, at a place on the lake he called Angle Inlet—the eccentricity of what has come to be known as the Northwest Angle has a certain charm to it. It was fully surveyed during a three-year period starting in 1872—work made necessary by the studied carelessness of the framers of the Treaty of Paris, ninety years before.

  As of the last census, 123 American citizens live in the settlement of Angle Inlet, marooned inside Canada, yet residents of the U.S. state of Minnesota.

  To get to the settlement by land from elsewhere in Minnesota, the process is irritatingly and amusingly strange. You leave Minnesota through a village named Warroad, cross the border into Manitoba, head due west, and then turn north and back east again for some fifty miles of the most tedious and uninspiring muskeg-like prairie landscape imaginable, then cross into the United States once again and after ten miles within American jurisdiction, there is a small hut by the road, with a videophone. A push of a button connects you with an official somewhere far away, you show your passport over the video link, you are asked a few perfunctory questions, and you are electronically waved into the country.

  But woe betide any traveler who does not comply. For hidden cameras will find you and your car within moments, and you will get into trouble, mightily, once you try to return. For here, as all along the 5,525 miles of the longest undefended border in the world is an array of unseen and unseeable electronic gadgetry that will do its level best to defend the borderline of the United States from all comers, friend or foe. You may come to Angle Inlet, Minnesota, by land, or by water, or in winter, across the Lake of the Woods by ice. But you will be seen. You will be watched. And your presence will be known. This may look undefended. But defended it most certainly is.

  5

  Drawing a Distinction

  So geographers, in Afric-maps

  With savage-pictures fill their gaps;

  And o’er uninhabitable downs

  Place elephants for want of towns.

  —JONATHAN SWIFT, “ON POETRY” (1733)

  In the early winter of 1965 I drew a little map—or as good a little map as could be drawn with the limited skills of a twenty-year-old undergraduate—of six square miles of the southern end of the island of Raasay, in the Scottish Hebrides. This was a geological map—my degree depended on it—with Raasay chosen because it is a landscape uniquely blessed with a remarkable array of rocks, both in their type and their age. So for instance, while there is on the island a charming miniature and flat-topped mountain named Dun Caan, made of volcanic basalts thirty million years old, and which commands splendid views of the nearby Isle of Skye, there are also rocks laid down from the sea during Cretaceous times, five times as long ago. The sandstones are rich with seams of iron ore that German prisoners of war were ordered to dig out of mines there in the 1940s.

  I lived for a month in an all but roofless cottage close to a settlement called Oskaig, on the island’s west coast. The midwinter hours of daylight were few enough, and most of them saw me tramping across the machair and along the coastline and up the hills. Each evening I would cook on a Primus stove, I would read or write up my field notes by candlelight. My equipment was rudimentary: an Estwing geological hammer with one end for thumping and the other for prying, a Brunton prismatic compass and combined clinometer, a small bottle of hydrochloric acid, a tiny pocket magnifying glass—and a map, the most essential, and as it happened, my pride and joy. The physical map on which I would plot such geological information as I might discover, and which I would eventually submit along with some fifteen other examination papers, in the hope of eventually being awarded a degree. (As indeed I did.)

  My invaluable possession during that time on Raasay was Sheet 25 of the United Kingdom Ordnance Survey Maps, Seventh Series. It was titled “Portree.” this being the largest town on the sheet, although it is in fact on Skye—the largest community on Raasay then having no more than a hundred inhabitants. The map was printed in ten colors, was specially strengthened by being pasted onto folded cotton cloth. Cloth backed, it was priced at five shillings, a shilling less for paper alone. The scale of the map was famously 1:63,360, a ratio familiar to all Britons of my generation. One inch on the map was equivalent to one statute mile on the ground.

  There were back then 190 such sheets covering the entirety of the United Kingdom—from the northernmost Sheet 1, “Shetland Islands—Yell and Unst,” which included the two most northerly islets of the entire United Kingdom, Muckle Flugga and Out Stack; down south to Sheet 190, “Truro and Falmouth,” in southern Cornwall. Today the scales are a little different—with metric measurements replacing the old imperial units of miles and feet—and the much loved 1:63,360 has been replaced by the more bloodless 1:50,000 scale, which now covers the country in 204 sheets—or, if you want to walk or cycle and need the even larger scale of 1: 25,000, 403 sheets.

  But these technical details tend to obscure the fact that Britons, who have had access to such maps since the Ordnance Survey was founded at the end of the eighteenth century, are wholly in love with their OS maps, and cherish them with a fervor that is incomprehensible to most others. No American, so far as I am aware, ever professed a deep and unsullied affection for the USGS topographical sheets that it is possible to order from the government agencies. They are fine enough maps, and they cover the entirety of the nation. But seldom are they bought for the sheer pleasure of ownership, of the ability to pore over them and imagine, or remember, to draw contented admiration at their elegant appearance and scrupulous accuracy.

  The Hebridean island of Raasay as depicted on a classic Ordnance Survey map of a kind widely revered for two centuries as a nonpareil of the cartographic craft.

  It is still a rite of every British schoolchild’s passage to learn what are known as Conventional Signs—the marks that are common to all the OS maps and which indicate the presence of types of landscape, of highways and byways, of notable buildings of one kind or another. There are particular lines that show roads more than twelve feet wide, subtly different lines indicating roads less sizable. Highway gradients more than 1 in 5 get a pair of chevrons. Military firing ranges are noted, as are post offices, police stations, greenhouses. Windmills are symbolically differentiated from wind pumps, lighthouses get a sign slightly different from those denoting light beacons, sands are drawn differently from mudflats, forests with coniferous trees with different symbols from those wooded with their deciduous kin. Vertical rock faces are marked differently from vertical cliffs. There are conventional signs for boulder fields. Orchards. Roman sites. Non-Roman castles. There are contour lines and, of course, at the summit of hills indicated by a rounding of the contours, there is the tiny triangle with a dot in the middle, representing the triangulation points, the “trig points” as Britons call them, that have made the making of these maps possible in the first place.

  And all these things are just, exactly, precisely, where the map says they should be: I puffed my way to the top of Dun Caan, hammer at the ready, magnifying glass primed to inspect the granularity of the Raasay basalt, and there before me, a pillar of concrete rose from the bog and on the top of it three brass rails where once a theodolite had stood, and in the center a brass circle with four words inscribed: Ordnance. Survey. Triangulation. Station. On the map, at this very place: a triangle, a red dot in the center.

  No one would think—especially after all the effort of climbing to find a trig pillar—of ever spoiling or interfering with such a memorial, with most regarding them as precious way stations in the country’s history. The only joke ever played on the heroic memory of the old surveyors is that visitors sometimes pile a cairn next to the trig point, by doing so making certain that over the years, with all visitors adding a customary stone or two to the cairn, it rises eventually higher than the original point, which then becomes technically demoted, if ever the mountaintop were to be surveyed again.

  And inevitably enthusiasts seek to visit all the points in the nation. There are said to be about 6,200 of them, and recent images in the British press show a middle-aged and bearded man, wearing an anorak to keep out the wind and rain, standing proudly by a pillar at the top of a low hill in eastern Scotland. He claimed to have visited every single one of them, which had taken him fifteen years. He said he could only have found them because he owned and consulted every single one of the OS maps in print.

  All British bookstores carry the maps, and in areas where there is much countryside, even small general stores will stock them too, familiar in their racks with their pink or orange covers (depending on the scale) and with waterproof versions available for those determined to use them outside, in all weathers.

  The maps are cherished both for what they are and, more important, for what they stand for. Their existence says something notable about the notion of freedom, it is generally agreed—the freedom for the ordinary Briton to enjoy a relationship with the land that is unique, and which is defined in particular by a public determination that, even if land is owned privately, everyone should have a right of access to it. The Ordnance Survey maps, so wildly popular, demonstrate exactly how this access might best be gained.

  The complicated philosophical and legal questions of ownership and its bastard child, trespass, belong to a later chapter; but insofar as this section has concerned itself with the defining and delimiting of the world’s land surface—from the surveying of the world and the marking of the great ethnic frontiers to the matter of being able to stroll the boundaries of the tiniest of parishes—then it is well worth noting how, in some societies, with Britain perhaps in the forefront, the sheer existence of maps of great beauty and simple utility like these have a profound effect on the relationship of the users of such maps with the land that they illustrate and describe.

  It is by no means a coincidence that the Ordnance Survey was born in 1791, during the heady days of the Enlightenment, and that it reached its cartographic zenith during the first half of the nineteenth century, which by general agreement is regarded as the Romantic period of British history, the time of Rossetti and Keats, Byron and Shelley and Coleridge. It was the time also of the Industrial Revolution, when science and literature and art held hands and helped together to shape the fabric of a country that, at exactly the same time, was being fully mapped with beauty, accuracy, and scientific care.

  People took holidays from work for the first time, and, inspired in part by the paintings and poetry that so lyrically captured the essence of the landscape, they explored, hiked, tramped, climbed, and rambled through and across and up the countryside, exploring the land from the Scottish Highlands to the wilds of Dartmoor, from the Lincolnshire Wolds to the clifftop meadows of Dover. And to help them find their way during this transformative period in their lives, there now were for the first time sumptuously detailed maps, offered in affordable abundance, of enviable exactitude, in a manageable, understandable, and useful scale of one inch to the mile, and in their own way made quite as beautiful as the landscape that they illustrated.

  Some philosophers, wrote a later historian of the survey, “feel that maps stimulate free wondering as well as wandering, that they encourage the mind to eschew linear logic and play with randomness and free association, like the rambler who leaves the confines of major roads to skit over wide expanses of purple heath.

  “It was during the Enlightenment that maps acquired their associations with political liberty and egalitarianism, and it was during the Romantic period that this was supplemented by a deeply felt love for nature and solitary wandering. Proponents of both movements projected these ideas onto the great ‘national undertaking’, the Ordnance Survey.”

  It is these days, and surely rightly so, deeply unfashionable to speak sympathetically or with anything other than contempt and scorn about the British empire. The reasons are obvious, and legion, and millions around the world have good reason for remembering the British with disfavor. “When the missionaries came to Africa,” Desmond Tutu famously (though not originally: that honor belongs to Jomo Kenyatta) remarked, “they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.”

  But during the heyday of Britain’s colonial adventurism, the British did also come to possess some places where there were no resident peoples to oppress or imprison or enslave, where there was no concept of “our land” that might be exchanged for the Bible and a quick prayer. One such, blessed with no native population and possessed by no one, is the island of South Georgia, in the cold South Atlantic waters some few hundred miles off the coast of Antarctica. It is a long, boomerang-shaped island with a spine of sharp snow-covered mountains, scores of glaciers and deeply incised fjords, and with settlements built by late-nineteenth-century Europeans from which they would hunt for whales out in the deep ocean.

  It is also an island with an intriguing story on many levels—as the island where Ernest Shackleton and his fellow survivors from the ice wreck of the Endurance finally found rescue; as a breeding ground for one of the world’s largest seabirds, Diomedea exulans, the wandering albatross; as the home of some of the largest king penguin colonies on the planet. And also, most relevant here, as the island where cartographers from England, familiar with the excellence and profound meaning of their homegrown Ordnance Survey sheets, decided during the 1950s to turn their skills to making a comprehensive and wholly accurate map of this very island, eight thousand miles from home.

  These surveyor-dreamers were all young men, ex-army in most cases, and, most intriguing, they were led on their expeditions—staged during three austral summer seasons between 1951 and 1957—by a man named Duncan Carse, a figure already known the length of the British Isles, by children especially, for being the voice of the main character in Dick Barton, Special Agent, a beloved BBC radio thriller. That a fictional radio detective could be also a skilled mapmaker and a somewhat heroic explorer of the sub-Antarctic—for the ice-bound interior of South Georgia presents a formidably challenging landscape, and there were injuries aplenty on the expeditions—says something both about the temper of the times, and about the nature of the actual workings of empire, the nature that is seen when one looks beyond the cruelties of imperial oppression and intolerance. The science of map-making has a certain intellectual honesty to it, its practitioners enjoying a certain independent nobility of spirit. And all of it essential to the demarcation of the world’s land, wherever it may be.

  Part II

  Annals of Acquisition

  . . . everyman has a property in his own Person. This no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men.

  —JOHN LOCKE, Second Treatise on Civil Government (1689)

  1

  Up and Out and on the Level

  The great majority of those in the world today who lay claim to owning a piece of land have acquired it secondhand. Generally speaking, land that belongs to someone now has belonged to someone else before, and whether it be meadow or moorland, a tract on a mountainside or a parking lot on Main Street, it can invariably and rightly be described in just the way that an old car might be described, or a washing machine: the land acquired is previously owned, has been lightly or gently used, is a hand-me-down.

  But not quite always. There are of course enormous acreages around the world that are uninhabitable, or inaccessible, or seem to be mineralogically worthless, and so are not presently owned by any individual or institution and are superintended only by the country in which they happen to be situated. There are also, however, and thanks mostly to the forces of geology—and in places to the ingenuity and pressing needs of man—small pockets of brand-new land that in most cases never have been owned nor ever will be, and so will never enter the chain of possession that defines almost everywhere else.

  Surtsey, off the south coast of Iceland, is one such; it is an island, 600 acres or so of new land, born out of the sea in November 1963 and, as it happens because its rock is loose and friable and easily swept away by waves and wind, slowly diminishing in size. But during its existence so far it has accumulated a fair amount of nonhuman life. There are some fourteen types of birds, with gulls and puffins dominating. There are scores of plants—mosses, lichens, and a hardy bush called a tea-leaved willow. There are seals and limpets, earthworms, slugs, spiders and beetles. But humans are not allowed, neither to visit or to settle. Scientists are the exception, and may go, and there is a temporary bunkhouse from where they may study the development of island biota—though they must live under extremely strict rules, established as a precaution against pollution or contamination.*