Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [28]
Just about every luminary in history, it seems, makes a Mylar-covered cameo appearance in the Map Division’s shelves. As he shows me around, Hébert is dropping so many famous names that he starts prefacing them with the faux-humble-sounding disclaimer “a man called”—“a man called Stonewall Jackson,” “a man called Ferdinand Magellan.” At one shelf, he points offhandedly to a high drawer. “I have Lewis and Clark in there,” he says, alarmingly. Seemingly at random, he opens another drawer and shows me a colonial map of Alexandria, Virginia, before the town was even built. It’s an unremarkable survey listing the names of local landowners, and I’m not quite sure why I’m looking at it. People sure did have nicer handwriting back then, I guess. Then I see on an indexing sticker the mapmaker’s name: a young Virginia surveyor who later went on to other things. George Washington. I feel a little twinge of vertigo—not just that I’m holding in my hands a map personally drawn by The Father of His Country, Mr. First President, Ol’ Ivory Teeth himself, but also that this priceless artifact is sitting seemingly unnoticed in a nondescript drawer (“Virginia 3884.A”), lost among dozens of similar maps.
The number of mind-blowing items like this one in the library’s collection is powerful testimony to the omnipresent Zelig-like role that maps have played, always just behind the scenes, in the history of the world. I already described how Columbus’s fateful voyage was inspired by his study of a map by Paolo Toscanelli. But there was also the 1854 cholera outbreak in London, which killed hundreds of people until a physician, John Snow, drew a map demonstrating that a single contaminated water pump was the source of the illness, thereby founding the science of epidemiology. There was the 1944 invasion at Normandy, which succeeded only because of the unheralded contribution of mapmakers who had stolen across the English Channel by night for months before D-Day and mapped the French beaches.* Even the moon landing was a product of mapping. In 1961, the United States Geological Survey founded a Branch of Astrogeology, which spent a decade painstakingly assembling moon maps to plan the Apollo missions. The Apollo 11 crew pored over pouches of those maps as their capsule approached the lunar surface, much as Columbus did during his voyage. It seems that the greatest achievements in human history have all been made possible by the science of cartography.
The Library of Congress has had maps in its collection since its founding under President John Adams; in fact, the library’s very first shipment of books, purchased in London in 1801, included three maps and an atlas. There were one hundred maps in the library, then located in the U.S. Capitol, when the original collection was burned during the War of 1812. Today the collection holds more than five and a half million maps and more than eighty thousand atlases, and Hébert, though choosy about acquisitions—“we don’t buy crap,” he assures me—is still adding between sixty and eighty thousand new maps every year.
They come from everywhere. The library has offices in Cairo, Islamabad, Jakarta, Nairobi, New Delhi, and Rio scouring the world for maps. “We don’t know what’s going to come through our door,” says Hébert. “We have languages you’ve never seen before.” Every map submitted for copyright in the United States automatically joins the collection. And by law, every time a U.S. government agency prints a map, it must deposit a copy with the Library of Congress—and these maps are generally free of copyright, since your taxes financed them, making them a remarkable publicly held resource. The best-known government maps are probably the United States Geological Survey’s “quadrangle” topographic maps, whose pale green forests and bubbly brown contour lines are permanently etched