Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [136]
* Similarly, the Filipino town of Sexmoan was a popular destination for American GIs after World War II, but they all made the same disappointing discovery: the name was just a Spanish-era corruption of the local name, “Sasmuan.” In 1987, Sexmoan officially became Sasmuan again for good.
* Or possibly his collaborator, an Alsatian schoolmaster named Matthias Ringmann. There’s good evidence that Waldseemüller drew the maps but left the writing of the preface to his friend.
* There are plenty of American collectors who will buy only maps in which California is an island. Maybe they’re hoping to make a killing when Lex Luthor carves off the Golden State, the way he tried to do in the first Superman movie.
* In the future, however, when islands disappear from maps, it will probably be because they’ve disappeared from the ocean as well. In March 2010, New Moore Island, a tiny dot in the Bay of Bengal, vanished under the waves due to rising sea levels. India and Bangladesh had hotly disputed claims to the island for years; that problem is now solved, but the region faces more serious problems. Almost a fifth of Bangladesh will be underwater if sea levels rise just one meter over the next forty years, as some climate models predict.
* The existence of this island was taken as an article of faith by sailors of the time, though none of them had ever seen it. Columbus even planned on stopping there on his 1492 voyage and was confused when it was nowhere to be found.
* Raise a toast this Thanksgiving to Francis “Bad Boy” Billington! I love the idea of a rebel pilgrim, presumably with his big black hat worn at a jaunty angle and the silver buckle on it shamefully unpolished. “What art thou rebelling against, Francis?” the town elders would ask him, and “What hast thou got?” would come the surly reply.
* The first survey of this kind was begun in France in the 1670s by Giovanni Cassini, and it proved so daunting that his grandson wound up finishing it more than a century later. This was the first topographic map of an entire nation ever made, but it revealed France to be much smaller in area than it had always been drawn. “Your work has cost me a large part of my state!” King Louis XIV reportedly huffed. Large-scale triangulation surveys like Cassini’s proved too laborious for other nations to emulate, and so the science died out before roaring back in the 1840s, driven by, well, shit. The new sanitation systems being installed in Europe’s large cities were the first construction projects big enough to require the precision of trigonometry.
* Before the Great Trigonometrical Survey, in fact, no one had any clue what the world’s highest mountain even was. When Surveyor General Andrew Waugh first published Everest’s height in 1856, he announced it as 29,002 feet above sea level. In fact, the surveyors had calculated the figure at 29,000 feet exactly, but Waugh was afraid no one would believe that suspiciously round number.
† The British borrowed a Hindi word meaning “learned one” to describe these native scouts, and from this we derived a modern word for any self-proclaimed expert. They were called “pundits.”
* Seoul boasts a remarkable 17,219 people per square kilometer. That’s twice as dense as Mexico City and eight times as dense as New York City.
* This was a copy of the same John Smith map discussed in the previous chapter, the first one to feature the name “New England.”
* Rumsey has spent the last decade making many of the 150,000 maps in his collection freely available online via high-quality scans. Dozens of them are now available to peruse as a layer on Google Earth.
† In time, these little cabinets grew into the first natural history museums. Hans Sloane, the London physician called the “last of the universal collectors