Topographical gnosis anyone?

[Dr. Concrescence]

The man who mapped the world 

Unfold an Ordnance Survey map and you see the legacy
of a remarkable 
16th-century cartographer. Travel writer Nicholas
Crane has written a 
biography of Gerard Mercator, 'prince of geographers'



Maps codify the miracle of existence. And the man who
wrote the codes 
for the maps we use today was Gerard Mercator, a
cobbler's son, born 
500 years ago on a muddy floodplain in northern
Europe. In his own 
time, Mercator was "the prince of modern geographers",
his depictions 
of the planet and its regions unsurpassed in accuracy,
clarity and 
consistency. More recently, he was crowned by the
American scholar 
Robert W Karrow as "the first modern, scientific
cartographer". 

Mercator was a humble man with a universal vision.
Where his 
contemporaries had adopted a piecemeal approach to
cartography, 
Mercator sought to wrap the world in systematic,
overlapping maps. 
Along the way, he erected a number of historic
milestones. He 
participated in the naming and the mapping of America,
he constructed 
the two most important globes of the 16th century, and
the title of 
his pioneering "modern geography", the Atlas, became
the standard 
term for a volume of maps. 

Mercator also devised a new method - a "projection" -
of converting 
the spherical world into a two-dimensional map. Unfold
any Ordnance 
Survey map of Britain and you will see a landscape
plotted on 
Mercator's Projection. Click through the pages of
Nasa's website and 
you will find it illustrated with maps of the solar
system, on 
Mercator's Projection. 

Mercator was born in 1512 and died in 1594. His world
was one of 
military conflict, social upheaval, religious
revolution - and 
geographical discovery. He was five years old when
Martin Luther 
precipitated the Reformation, and 10 when the
survivors of the 
world's first circumnavigation returned to Seville in
their leaking 
caravel. 

No better example is required of genius arising from
turmoil. He knew 
poverty, plague, war, and persecution. He was
imprisoned by the 
Inquisition, yet patronised by an Emperor. His life
was one of 
brilliant breakthroughs and abrupt reversals. In its
telling, his is 
the story of the poor boy made good; the pauper who
embraced the 
world, found fame, faced death, yet triumphed through
fortitude. 
Variously described by his peers as honest, calm,
candid, sincere and 
peaceable, Mercator wore - and wears - an aura of
beatitude in 
troubled times. 

His attitude to his geographical calling was described
by his friend 
and neighbour, Walter Ghim, as "indefatigable". Some
40 or so of 
Mercator's letters have survived, together with
examples of virtually 
all of his printed maps and globes. Astrolabes bearing
his initials 
have turned up in Vienna and Brno, and the British
Library recently 
bought a unique one-off atlas compiled in the 1570s by
Mercator for a 
fellow humanist. The most important single source of
biographical raw 
material is the short appreciation written in 1595 by
Walter Ghim. 

Ghim's "remarkable and distinguished" friend spent the
first six 
years of his life on the brink of poverty in a small
walled town on 
the high road between Cologne and Antwerp. After a run
of bad 
harvests, the family migrated west to the Low
Countries, and a 
Flemish river port called Rupelmonde. The region's
mercantile 
capital, Antwerp, lay just a couple of hours, walk
down the Schelde's 
banks. 

The Low Countries of the early 1500s was the most
densely populated 
region in northern Europe. Passing Rupelmonde's
wharves were barges 
bringing firewood from the Ardennes, silk and satin
from Mons and 
Quesnay, wheat from Picardy. 

The river was also a conduit of overseas news. On its
banks, a boy 
could meet men who had sailed through the Pillars of
Hercules and 
bumped against the ice floes of the East Sea. The
printed accounts of 
Columbus and Vespucci were in wide circulation and
rumours must have 
reached the Schelde concerning the Cabots, the father
and sons who 
had twice sailed west for the English king, Henry VII.
Portuguese ships on the Schelde spread the stories of
Vasco da Gama, 
whose astonishing voyage of 1497 had taken him around
the tip of 
Africa and all the way to Calicut - and India. 

The terrain of the Low Countries bred well-muscled
imaginations. 
Hieronymus Bosch had died recently and Mercator's
contemporaries 
included Brueghel and Albrecht Dürer (who visited
Antwerp in the 
1520s), and the landscape painter, Joachim Patinir.
Mercator's 
perception took form on these deltas and windy
interfluves. The views 
he knew were invariably level, verticality was rare,
scales were 
horizontal. There were no cliffs or peaks that could
offer another 
dimension. The Low Countries existed in only two
dimensions. The 
world Mercator knew was a plane as flat as a map. 

Orphaned in his teens, Mercator was sent by his uncle
to school in 
northern Brabant, and then to Louvain university. It
was here that he 
met - and was tutored by - a frail, brilliant
mathematician called 
Gemma Frisius, who had recently published a booklet -
"Of the 
Principles of Astronomy and Cosmography, with
Instruction for the Use 
of Globes, and Information on the World and on Islands
and Other 
Places Recently Discovered" - which solved the
longitude problem. In 
it, Gemma described how a mariner sailing with a
portable clock which 
had been set to the time of the port of departure,
could always 
calculate his longitude as long as the clock never
stopped. 

Two years later, Gemma published the first printed
description 
of "triangulation", the basis for cartographic
surveying. Using a 
device called a "planimetrum", Gemma's surveyors could
map an entire 
area by taking sightings on prominent points. And on
the plane 
surface of the Low Countries, the Church had already
provided the 
trinity of every triangle, in the form of towers. The
two-dimensional 
geography of these floodplains permitted unimpeded
sight-lines, while 
the long straight roads were ideal for measuring
base-lines. Decades 
later, when the technique of triangulation reached
England, the first 
surveys were conducted in the flatlands of Norfolk. 

In covering the land with imaginary triangles, Gemma
had given 
geographers a means of simplifying the surface they
were trying to 
reduce. At its surveying stage, triangulation created
a mimetic map, 
a pictograph laid over the landscape at a scale of
1:1. Seeing maps 
as a selective tracing of reality was one of the
perceptive leaps 
that helped Gemma's generation of Earth-modellers to
break free from 
the imaginary worlds of the Middle Ages. 

So conditions in the Low Countries were ripe for
cartographic 
advance. To the jurist, Viglius van Aytta,
"Geographicus chartis" 
enabled him "to know places, regions and people". At
court in 
Brussels, Emperor Charles V pored over maps with
councillors. Maps 
had a subversive role too, and in Germany,
cartographers under the 
spell of Luther and Melanchthon, saw geography as the
route to 
comprehending Creation; the pathway to God. 

Out in no-man's-land between orthodox Catholicism and
breakaway 
Lutheranism, Mercator regarded geography as an
exercise in 
harmonisation, which required multiple aptitudes.
After university, 
he embarked upon a frantic apprenticeship, engaging
himself in 
philosophy and theology, learning mathematics,
copper-engraving, 
instrument-making and mastering a new cursive script
called "italic", 
whose clarity and compression were proving ideal for
lettering maps 
and globes. (Later, Mercator published the first
manual of italic to 
appear north of the Alps.) 

Around 1536, he collaborated with Gemma on a printed
globe, and for 
the following six years, his output was prodigious. In
1537, he 
published his first map (of the Holy Land) and
followed this a year 
later with a world map in the shape of an open heart.
A wall map of 
Flanders followed, and then in in 1541, he produced
the largest 
printed globe ever seen. 

Disaster struck in 1542, when an army of wild
Gelderlanders burst 
across the Maas and swept through Brabant burning and
looting. 
Louvain was laid to siege, but spared after students
took to the 
ramparts. In the aftermath, the Inquisition pounced,
and Mercator was 
one of 42 suspected "Lutheran" heretics caught in a
round-up. He was 
locked up in Rupelmonde castle, whose 17 towers
shadowed the river 
port of his boyhood. Surviving letters convey
Mercator's desperate 
plight as allies in the university pleaded for his
release. Of his co-
accused, two women were buried alive, another was
burned at the 
stake, another beheaded, another banished. Unable to
find evi dence 
against him, the Inquisition released Mercator after
seven months. 

In the six years following what he referred to as his
"most unjust 
persecution", Mercator produced just one celestial
globe, albeit 
magnificent. In 1552, he left Louvain and the Low
Countries for 
Duisburg, a small town in the Duchy of Cleves, whose
tolerant ruler 
Wilhelm permitted Catholics and evangelists to worship
together in 
relative harmony. 

Away from Antwerp and its hectic hinterland, Mercator
became 
something of a recluse. And in his seclusion on the
right bank of the 
Rhine, he turned to the sequence of works which would
eventually 
place him in the centre of the cartographic pantheon.
First, he 
produced a huge and influential wall map of Europe,
and then a map of 
the British Isles. Again, he suffered a setback. In
1564, aged 52, he 
undertook a commission to map the strategically
positioned Duchy of 
Lorraine. "This journey through Lorraine," recalled
Ghim, "gravely 
imperilled his life and so weakened him that he came
very near to a 
serious breakdown and mental derangement as a result
of his 
terrifying experiences." Irritatingly, Ghim did not
elaborate on 
these experiences. At the time, Lorraine was prey to
bands of German 
mercenaries, and there had been an outbreak of plague
on the Duchy's 
borders. 

Spared again, Mercator revealed that he would embark
upon a project 
of cosmic proportion. A multi-part cosmography, the
work would 
include his own treatment of the Creation account, a
section on 
astronomy, a chronology of world events and a "modern
geography", 
which would eventually contain over 100 new maps. As a
prelude to the 
great work, Mercator produced in 1569 an enormous
world map on a new 
projection. In doing so, he solved the greatest
cartographic riddle 
of the day: how could the course of a ship following a
constant 
compass bearing be represented as a straight line on a
map which had 
been constructed on a grid of latitude and longitude? 

Mercator's solution was to progressively increase the
space between 
his lines of latitude, away from the equator. The
effect was to 
straighten the lines of constant compass bearing (also
known as rhumb 
lines or loxodromes). Unfortunately, straightening the
rhumbs caused 
progressive areal distortion towards the poles. At the
map's northern 
and southern extremities, the polar regions occupied
the full width 
of the map, while North America appeared to fill half
the 
circumference of the world. To further confuse his
viewers, Mercator 
had cobwebbed every ocean with intersecting
rectilinear rhumbs. 

Few of Mercator's contemporaries understood what he
was up to, 
despite the map's title explaining that it was
intended "for use in 
navigation". Mercator knew that his projection was
unsuitable as an 
areal description of the world, but it would be
several decades 
before the map's true, navigational purpose would be
recognised. "He 
does smile his face," wrote a young English playwright
called William 
Shakespeare, "into more lynes than are in the new
Mappe with the 
augmentation of the Indies." 

Meanwhile, Mercator was marshalling and editing all
the geographical 
data he needed for his modern regional maps of the
world. His sources 
were wide-ranging and multitudinous: an imperial
physician in Vienna, 
John Dee in London, his Antwerp friend and competitor
Abraham 
Ortelius, the viceroy of Holstein. In his own,
comprehensive library, 
he could turn to manuscript versions of Ptolemy, Marco
Polo and John 
Mandeville. 

Mercator was still working on these maps when - in
1590 - he suffered 
a heart attack: 78 and partially paralysed, he
struggled on. "The 
thing he resented most about his illness," recorded
Ghim, "was that 
its prolongation cost him so much precious time." But
the great 
cosmography that Mercator had already titled "Atlas"
would never be 
finished. Four years after his stroke, he died, with
just over 100 of 
the maps complete. 

In the Atlas, Mercator had embodied the principles of
future 
mapmaking: his italic lettering, his identical map
overlaps, his 
complete coverage of regions at more than one scale,
his consistent 
use of grids of latitude and longitude; his singular
editorial 
control, were all adopted as cartographic standards.
Atlas, the 
cosmography, became atlas, the (Oxford English
Dictionary) term 
for "A collection of maps in a volume". 

The projection assumed a life of its own. So powerful
a cartographic 
tool did it become that Mercator the man became
subsumed by his own 
device. By the 20th century, "Mercator's Projection"
had been adopted 
by state cartographers to map the land that he'd named
"North 
America". In 1938, Mercator's Projection was selected
by the Ordnance 
Survey to map Britain anew. And in 1974, the American
cartographer 
Alden P Colvocoresses used the Space Oblique Mercator
Projection for 
the first satellite map of the USA. 

When the Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent Mariner 8 and
Mariner 9 to 
map Mars, they undertook their Martian cartography on
a standard 
Mercator Projection and - naturally enough - the first
book of maps 
describing the Red Planet was titled Atlas of Mars. 

One by one, the mappable orbs of our solar system are
appearing on 
the worldwide web, flattened for our screens according
to Mercator's 
cartographic principles. "Synthetic aperture radar
mosaics" sent back 
to Earth by the Magellan spacecraft have been used to
map Venus on 
Mercator's Projection. Jupiter can be viewed on
Mercator's 
Projection, and its volcanic moon Io, and Saturn's
largest moon, 
Titan. 

Mercator's Projection reconciled the sphere and the
plane, while his 
Atlas enveloped the world with an integrated system of
maps. In the 
midst of an era of tumult, he lived, and he engraved,
for global 
harmony. And in his spatial masterworks, the cobbler's
boy from the 
Low Countries inscribed his own, universal epitaph. 

· Nicholas Crane's book Mercator: the Man who Mapped
the Planet is 
published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson this month.

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