Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [30]
Translation: no, there’s not a single documented case of a pirate drawing a map to buried treasure. This was a trope invented by the likes of Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Louis Stevenson, not Captain Kidd and Blackbeard. I make a mental note not to mention this at my son’s upcoming birthday party, for which a buccaneer theme is planned. I’m still reeling from my geographic faux pas of a few months back—when I told my kids that there’s no land at the North Pole the way there is in the Antarctic, just water and sea ice, it led to some uncomfortable Santa-related follow-up questions. Sometimes careful cartography is good for the imagination, but other times you’d rather have the mystery.
The Map Division’s visitors come from all over the world. Recently, scholars flew in from Beijing to look at nineteenth-century plans of the Chinese capital, because Washington had better maps than anything they could find in China. In 2001, a Japanese research group stopped by the library to see what they could find on Ino Tadataka, the legendary shogun-era surveyor whose team produced the first modern map of Japan in 1821. That map was later lost in a fire, and modern scholars had been able to locate only 46 of his map’s 214 tatami-mat-sized pages in Tokyo’s Diet Museum. They were shocked to find that 207 pages—nearly a complete set—had been gathering dust in the Geography and Map Division for decades and soon secured a quarter of a million dollars from the Japanese government to scan and restore them. The final map was finally exhibited in a Nagoya baseball stadium, laid out neatly along the right-field line. Thirty-five thousand people filed by to look. “This collection is full of gems like that, just waiting to be discovered,” says Hébert. In fact, there’s no catalog at all for the vast majority of the pre-1970 material here; there’s just too much of it. Millions of maps will sit unseen until someone looks for them.
Sometimes the foreign visitors are officials looking to settle—or start—a border dispute. It might be a South Korean delegation hoping to discredit Japanese claims to some tiny islets in the Sea of Japan or a group of Congolese and Ugandan bureaucrats wondering where exactly in Lake Victoria their nations meet. “They had gone to Brussels, they’d been to London, couldn’t find the official maps. We had ’em,” says Hébert proudly. In the late 1970s, Chile and Argentina were locked in a dispute over who controlled the eastern end of the Beagle Channel, a narrow strait running between the islands of Tierra del Fuego. This wasn’t just an obscure issue of national pride for Chile, which would lose its only access to the Atlantic Ocean if Argentina’s version of the border was drawn. The ruling junta in Argentina at the time seemed ready to go to war over the boundary, refusing to accept an International Court of Justice ruling for Chile and even preparing a military invasion of the contested islands for December 1978. At the eleventh hour came a diplomatic development straight out of the sixteenth century: the Vatican intervened, and both nations agreed to let the pope draw the boundary line. During the height of the conflict, Argentine and Chilean delegations spent months sitting at tables at opposite sides of the Geography and Map Division reading room like warring cliques in a high school cafeteria. They would request the same maps of Tierra del Fuego in turn and study them carefully, never acknowledging the enemy across the room. “We’re neutral ground,” claims John Hébert, but it might be more accurate to say that, for a few months, the border between Chile and Argentina ran north, right through the basement of 101 Independence Avenue in Washington, D.C.
Boundary lines can arouse stronger feelings than perhaps any other feature on a map. Marking property was the purpose of many of the earliest surviving maps, and boundary markers—piles of rocks, for example,