Above: A map from Henry Francis Abell's, History of Kent, as overlaid by the Georeferencer.

With 2016 well underway it is a great pleasure to see work on the 50,000 maps held in the Georeferencer continuing apace. It looks like our volunteers were very busy over Christmas and the numbers processed have jumped, heading well beyond the 20% mark with a total of 11,644 now georeferenced. I must confess I had intended to provide a festive post to showcase some of our more wintry maps but in the excitement of the run up to Christmas completely forgot to post it. And so the Georeferencer’s yuletide treats have to pass unmarked – until next year.

For today’s post I’ve been paying more attention to the UK maps being worked with in the Georeferencer. These make up a significant proportion of the content being processed and the UK is the densest area of pinned maps both for this element of the project and the Georeferencer work as a whole. Having recently moved to Kent I decided to have a dig around the maps pinned here, hoping to find some interesting items. This turned out to be a success but not in the way you would necessarily expect.

The above map comes from Henry Francis Abell’s, History of Kent, with original sketches and maps which, as you can see, makes a significant amount of of the ‘new maps and illustrations’ contained in the work. The only issue is that Abell had previously published a children’s history of Kent which contained exactly the same map and now the Georeferencer hosts them both side by side, highlighting Abell’s recycling of old map plates. Aside from being an insight into a slightly disingenuous writer or publisher’s practice of selling books these two maps open a door on a much wider practice of nineteenth century illustration production.

The BL 1 Million stream of images, from which this map is pulled, have allowed digital humanities researchers to analyse the content in various ways, comparing and contrasting images with each other. One of these researchers, Mario Klingemann, (recently awarded a BL Labs prize for his work) noted the prevalence of reproducing and slightly amending previously published illustrations in order to drive down the cost of production for publishers. In short, what Abell is up to with his maps was a relatively well established nineteenth century practice, especially where cheaper books were concerned.

Above: Map of the Railroads of England designed for Edward Churton's, The Rail-Road Book.

One other item worth drawing attention to is this railroad map of Great Britain, which I stumbled across while looking for interesting maps of Lancashire. It reminded me that one of our volunteers, Susan Major, has recently published a work on railroad history - and you won’t be surprised to hear that Susan georeferenced this particular map for the Library. That’s all for this particular georeferencer update, there is more to come about the project and work of our volunteers in March. In the meantime, if you are new to the Georeferencer and would like to get involved, you can find out more here.

[PJH]

The map researcher and dealer Ashley Baynton-Williams has written a book about some of the weirder and more wonderful historical maps in the British Library's collection.  From the hundred maps included in 'Curious Maps', now published, we asked him to select his top three. Ashley.

I have always had an interest in maps created by the 'mapmaker at play', maps which have been historically - though not altogether accurately - termed  'cartographic curiosities'. Given the British Library is home to the best printed map library in the world, choosing a hundred of them for inclusion in 'Curious Maps' was a difficult task. Selecting the following three highlights from among them was even more difficult. Many of them were topical productions, produced to illustrate or satirise current events. The following selection shows how little has changed with the passage of time.

Lilian Lancaster, 'United States a correct outline', 1880. British Library Maps cc.5a.230

A recurring figure in the book is Lilian Lancaster, a well-known English actress, singer and stage performer, with a notable talent for drawing cartoons and caricatures, often cartographic in nature. Lilian was on a tour of the United States in 1880, during the final stages of the Presidential election, and the campaigning inspired her to draw two cartoons. Superimposed on the outline of the United States, this manuscript depicts the 'rough-and-tumble' of the campaign, with comic portraits of the two candidates as squabbling children in dresses: James A. Garfield (the Republican challenger) and his opponent Winfield Scott Hancock (the Democratic candidate). Uncle Sam has turned his back on the mayhem, clearly thinking that the future occupant of the White House should be chosen from serious men campaigning in a serious manner, not these two, throwing simplistic sound bite punches.

Thomas Onwhyn, Comic Map of the Seat of War with entirely new features [The Crimean War], 1854. British Library Maps X.6168.

Of all the different genres of curious map in the book my personal favourites are the serio-comic satirical maps of the second half of the nineteenth century. Of these, the best is Thomas Onwhyn's 'Comic Map of the Seat of War with entirely new features', signed 'Done by T.O.'. The initials are rather concealed along the southern coastline of Turkey and only recently spotted, allowing us to properly identify the mapmaker. Onwyn was the son of Joseph Onwhyn, an artist and engraver who had produced a 'Map of Green Bag Land', in 1820 which satirised the increasingly messy attempts by King George IV to divorce Queen Caroline.

The seat of war map was published in 1854 at the onset of the Crimean War between Great Britain, France and Turkey, on one side, and Russia on the other. A skilled production, it has a strong claim to be the very first serio-comic map. There are all manner of satirico-political references, with notably barbed comments about Russia.

However many times I look at it, there is always something new to see. I love the awful British puns (as does my friend, writer and blogger, Tim Bryars) - particularly the alcohol-related ones: Malta is depicted as a tankard of ale (malt beer); the Caucasus Mountains are a row of bottles with corks a-popping, labelled 'Cork as Us Mountains & Bottle him', while Constantinople is represented as a bottle of port, labelled 'The Sublime Port'!

The Crimean war was fought to peg back Russian aggression in south-eastern Europe. The references to the war in the Baltic and Black Seas give a humorous take on war, characterizing it as clipping the Russian bear's claws. This light-hearted approach was not always well received, with one reviewer complaining about this viewpoint while the reality was that men were daily being killed, wounded or dying from other causes.

Johnson Riddle & Co. Hark Hark The Dogs Do Bark, 1914. British Library Maps 1078.(42.).

When the First World War commenced in 1914, a new generation of artists produced comic maps to satirise the protagonists. Many thought that the war would be of short duration. But by 1915, when the human cost of the conflict became apparent, propaganda mapsadopted an altogether darker tone.My third choice is 'Hark! Hark! The dogs do bark!', published by Johnson, Riddle & Co. in 1914. The artist has chosen to depict the different nations as dogs. Many are obvious choices, notably the British bulldog and the French poodle, while Germany (the enemy) is depicted as the funny-shaped and rather harmless dachshund, rather than the German Shepherd (Alsatian) or Rottweiler that a German publisher might have chosen. I like to think that the puppet-master who is controlling the strings of the Royal Navy ships is Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, while others argue that it is simply a generic 'John Bull' figure, and any likeness to Churchill coincidental.

The rather naive jingoism of these two satirical maps makes for fascinating and compelling, images alas, that war could be as harmless and as 'fun' as the cartoons satirising them. 

The Curious Map book is published by the British Library and available here.

Ashley Baynton-Williams

The British Library is running a major project to digitise the King’s Topographical Collection, the personal map collection of King George III containing more than 50,000 maps and views.  It is considered to be one of most significant and beautiful collections of maps in the world, and it provides a rich insight into one of Britain’s most intriguing monarchs.

A donation from Daniel Crouch Rare Books will enable the digitisation of one of the jewels of the collection, the extraordinary Klencke Atlas – a huge volume measuring 1.75 x 1.9 metres wide and presented by Johannes Klencke, a Dutch sugar merchant, to King Charles II of England in 1660 on the occasion of his restoration to the throne. The atlas, one of the largest in the world, contains 41 wall maps of the continents and regions including Britain and other European states, as well as Brazil, South Asia and the Holy Land.   Kept in the king’s cabinet of curiosities, where the diarist John Evelyn observed it in November 1660, the atlas would have symbolised the king’s knowledge and possession of the geography of the world.

Daniel Crouch said:

“This is an immensely important collection, which is rich and vast, and has never been fully catalogued. Conserving, cataloguing and transforming public access to these royal maps will give enthusiasts and scholars all over the world a unique opportunity to learn from them, and I am proud to be able to help get this project off the ground.”

 Daniel Crouch and Nick Trimming with the Klencke Atlas.

The Klencke atlas has been wonderfully documented in photography over the years. It seems to have been a rite of passage to be photographed standing next to it, and we have images of British Museum porters and conservators posing with it as far back as the late 19th century. Imaging inside the atlas is another story, however, and until fairly recently it simply was not possible to photograph the large maps to a sufficiently good  standard to make out each one of the tiny names, titles and other features. But now, high resolution images will be captured, and made available to everyone for research, enjoyment and inspiration for years to come. We are very grateful for the generosity of Daniel Crouch and all our donors for their support as we endeavour to transform access to our collections in this way.

Digitisation of the Klencke Atlas is expected to be completed by the end of 2016. The atlas itself is on permanent display in the lobby of the Maps Reading Room in St. Pancras.

The British Library has made available online over 550 military intelligence maps and associated documents from the War Office Archive relating to the former British East Africa - modern-day Kenya, Uganda and adjacent parts of Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, DR Congo, South Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia.

The sheets were created between 1890 and 1940, and range from small sketch maps made by intelligence officers in situ, through surveyors’ field sheets to cartographers’ fair drawings. Most of the items are unique manuscripts, and show the region immediately before and during the colonial era.

Detail of WOMAT/AFR/BEA/54

The archive is a rich resource not only for researchers of African and colonial history, but also for environmentalists and climate scientists – many of the sheets record the earliest systematic surveys of East Africa and provide a wealth of information relating to historical populations, settlements and tribal regions, along with details of historical land use, types and limits of vegetation, hydrology and much else.

A ‘Collection Guide’ provides easy access to the archive, with links to catalogue records and high-res images, which can be viewed on the British Library website or downloaded from Wikimedia Commons and re-used for any purpose free of charge. A Google Map page provides a geographical index to the sheets, also with links to images and catalogue records.

The British Library has catalogued, conserved and digitised the archive with generous funding from the Indigo Trust.

Nicholas Dykes

 In 1550 the Norman cartographer Pierre Desceliers made a large world map (135 × 215 cm, 4.4 × 7 feet) which had been commissioned as a gift for King Henry II. This gift was intended to help rehabilitate the career of one of Henry’s ministers who had fallen out of favour, and no expense was spared in its decoration. In fact, as Henry already owned a large world map by Desceliers, it is likely that a team of artists was recruited specifically to decorate the map at a higher artistic level than the earlier map. As a result, the 1550 map is one of the most beautiful to have survived from the Renaissance, and as part of its elaborate hand-painted decoration, there is a rich program of illustrations of human monsters.

Pierre Desceliers, [world map or planisphere]. Arques, Normandy, 1550. British Library Add.MS 24065. 

 Cynocephalus in northern Asia—the one from Section 5 of the map

Near the northern coast of Asia – a coast depicted in a style that Desceliers reserves for shores that are poorly known – there is a cynocephalus or dog-headed man, and beside him the words hommes monstruces, “monstrous men.” To his left there is text that indicates that this is the Region of Darkness, where the people live like beasts, without morals or manners, without light for half the year, and conduct a brisk trade in furs. The image of the monstrous cynocephalus seems intended to symbolize the wild and dangerous nature of this whole region at the northern edge of the world.

 The siren and ship from Section 32

In the ocean off the southern coast of Africa swims a siren holding an elaborate mirror in one hand in which she admires herself, and a comb in the other. Both objects symbolize beauty but also vanity. To her right there is a ship, and the water beneath the ship is painted in a different color, and also in a different style, than that beneath the siren. This difference shows that different artists were hired to paint the monsters and the ships on Desceliers’ map, an interesting insight into his workshop.

 The Patagonian giants from Section 30

At the southern tip of South America there is an image of two Patagonian giants. It was Antonio Pigafetta, in his account of Magellan’s voyage around the world, who had first reported giants in this area, and they are depicted on several earlier maps. However, the artist whom Desceliers hired went a step further than others in emphasizing the giants’ monstrosity by giving them – strangely – the feet of birds.

  The two monstrous races in the center of Africa from Section 25

In the centre of Africa, which in European accounts was often held to be the home of monsters and other exotica, two monstrous races of men are depicted. One is a blemmyae, a man with his face on his chest, but this is a cyclopoid blemmyae, with only one eye instead of two. To his right is a man with six arms. Earlier cartographers had located cyclopoid blemmyae in Africa, but the six-armed man seems to be an addition to the monsters of this area by Desceliers or the artist he had hired.

 The cynocephali cannibals from Section 34

And finally, in the map’s huge hypothetical southern continent there is another image of cynocephali or dog-headed people. These are cannibal cynocephali, for they are butchering one of their own, evidently to eat him. The image is all the more shocking for its combination of brutal behavior and dog-like faces with European clothing. This grisly scene is based on Marco Polo’s description of the Andaman Islanders, which is cited just to the right.

The decorative program on Desceliers’ map includes cities and sovereigns, non-monstrous animals and peoples, ships, mountains, vegetation, coats of arms, and elaborate compass roses. I hope that this brief look at some of the monsters will inspire further examination of the map in my book The World for a King: Pierre Desceliers’ Map of 1550.

Chet Van Duzer.

 

Most of you know the British Library and a dedicated group of volunteers have, for the last few years, been plugging away at georeferencing maps from across the Library’s collections. The most recent, and rather large, set of maps has been carved out of the cache of Library images held on Flickr and now our volunteers are working their way through over 50,000 maps in need of georeferencing. Thanks to the work of our dedicated georeferencers things are progressing well, with over 9,000 maps referenced so far but for those of you interested in getting involved there are still plenty of opportunities for you to do so.

Above: the geographical spread of the maps georeferenced so far.

As you can see above, the georeferencing done so far has already dealt with maps from an impressively wide geographical area. In fact, there are now so many maps available I'm going through them and picking out some that strike me as particularly interesting. The below map of the expedition of Baron Adolf Eric Nordenskiӧld into the interior of Greenland is from a publication about his 1883 trek to understand more about the continent, it's also one of my favorites from the current georeferenced batch. The map almost made it into the Library’s recent Lines in the Ice exhibition as Nordenskiӧld encountered what he thought was a new mineral, Kryokonite, but which turned out to be coal dust deposited by snow. In short, Nordenskiӧld found some of the earliest evidence of the global circulation of pollutants – he just didn’t know it yet.

Above: map of Baron Adolf Eric Nordenskiӧld’s 1883 Greenland expedition. See in Georeferencer.

For completely different reasons I’m also very keen on the two following maps, depicting late nineteenth century Niagara Falls (both sides) and Melbourne at a similar time. It’s not so much the content of the original maps as their situation on the contemporary Google Map which interests me here as both now form small parts of sprawling urbanised areas. Niagara Falls has not developed in the same manner as Melbourne, which grew explosively in the late twentieth century, but both maps and their background say a lot about twentieth century urban development.

Above: Niagara Falls, Canada and U. S. A., published 1886. See in Georeferencer.

Above: Melbourne, Australia, published 1888. See in Georeferencer.

It is these sorts of historical nuggets and contemporary juxtapositions which make the BL Georeferencer so interesting and if this whets your appetite to get involved I have good news, there are still plenty of maps left to work with. You can find out more about the process of signing up and working with the material here. Another gem to come out of the work of our volunteers’ work is the availability of these maps through the wonderful Old Maps Online. This has been available through a web browser for some time but it now comes to you in a mobile phone app too.                                    

There is more information about the app and its uses via this press release from the Old Maps Online team and it is well worth a read. For the purpose of this blog the most pertinent thing to point out is that the maps you reference from the current cache of material will also be available, in the palm of your hand, through this app. The bonus feature of the Old Maps Online app is that you can now find maps about where you are, wherever you are, so long as you have your phone, a signal and (especially if you are outside of your home country) a suitable mobile data package.

This means that if you go for a walk, say, on the Downs of Kent you can open the app and see georeferenced material about your location originating from the British Library, and other institutions who have taken part in the project. All this while stood in a field, a bog, a forest or a town. Have a go, it really is great fun.

[Phil Hatfield]

The British Library’s ongoing project to catalogue and digitise the King’s Topographical Collection, some 40,000 maps, prints and drawings collected by George III, has highlighted some extraordinary treasures.  The improved and up-dated catalogue records are now accessible to all, anywhere in the world, via the Library’s catalogue, Explore, and offer a springboard for enhanced study. 

Your donations to this and other projects enable us to digitise more of our collections, the results of which are invaluable.  One such example of further research using material digitised with help from donors is the recently published book by Richard H. Brown and Paul E. Cohen, Revolution. Mapping the Road to American Independence, 1755-1783, which features a number of maps from the K.Top.

Bernard Ratzer, PLAN of the CITY of NEW YORK, in North America Surveyed in the Years 1766 & 1767. [London: about 1770]. Copperplate engraving with hand colour. Maps K.Top.121.36.b.

This magnificent engraved map of New York was, prior to the current project, listed on one catalogue record with another map.  The original 1829 catalogue description called this map simply “Another Copy of ditto. A Roll” where ditto (actually Maps K.Top.121.36.a., a second edition of the map) was described, not incorrectly, as "A Plan of the City of New York and its Environs, surveyed and laid down by Lieut. B. Ratzer, 1766, 7, with a View of ditto; published by Jefferys and Faden, 1776. Two sheets".  However, the two maps are not the same and are deserving of separate listings.

Firstly, Maps K.Top.121.36.b. displays fine hand colour, while the other remains black and white, and this colour supports the theory that this particular example of map may have been made for presentation to George III; such careful and expensive embellishment may not have been offered to all.

In addition, Maps K.Top.121.36.b. is an example of the first state of the map, one of seemingly only four known examples of this first state, published in about 1770.  The first state can be identified by the lack of publishers’ imprint; thus the names Jefferys and Faden do not appear here as they do on the second state.  Although the map’s existence as a first state had been known to scholars for some time (it was listed by W. P. Cumming in his article ‘The Montresor‐Ratzer‐Sauthier sequence of maps of New York City, 1766–76’ in Imago Mundi in 1979 and then featured in subsequent works), this information was not reflected in the catalogue record.  The current project has remedied this fact; a correct date of publication is given for the map and the catalogue record now also cites important references to the map.

Tracking down other examples of the first state of the map has been a complicated part of the cataloguing process.

Cumming in Imago Mundi lists examples of the first state of the map held by the British Library, Alnwick Castle being the seat of the Duke of Northumberland, and the New York State Library at Albany.

Cohen and Robert Augustyn in their book, Manhattan in Maps 1527-1995, and Margaret Pritchard and Henry Taliaferro in their book, Degrees of Latitude. Mapping Colonial America (both of which reference an earlier work by Gloria-Gilda Deak, Picturing America 1497-1899 : prints, maps, and drawings bearing on the New World discoveries and on the development of the territory that is now the United States,) list only two known copies of the first state; at the British Library and the New York Historical Society.

A New York Times article by Michael Wilson entitled “Cunning, Care and Sheer Luck Save Rare Map” and published on January 11^th 2011 refers to two copies of the first state of the map at the New York Historical Society (and the Society’s catalogue seems to confirm this by listing M36.1.3A and M36.1.3B as separate items) and one further example of the first state newly discovered, at the time of the article, at the Brooklyn Historical Society, in addition to the British Library example.

This seems to make six examples in total.

However, on closer inspection the New York State Library at Albany example is an 1873 copy by Robert Cochrane Bacot, published by Murphy and Bechtel, taking the known copies back down to five.  Then, the Alnwick example cited by Cumming may not actually be a first state of the map but rather a second; an example (incomplete) of the second state of the map with Percy family provenance was sold in recent years.  Hence, the conclusion of four known copies of the first state.

Why are these editions and dates of publication significant?  Well, in the case of this map, the 1770 date of the first edition places publication before the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War thus, as explained by Brown and Cohen, the smoke in the view beneath the map cannot relate to the Great Fire of New York of 1776 because it quite simply hadn’t happened yet.  With the commencement of war in 1776, demand for such a map was greater and more examples of the second state, published to meet that demand, have survived.

The attribution of the 1770 date of the first edition is based on a New-York Gazette advertisement for the map in October that year, which is referenced by Pritchard and Taliaferro. 

Another K.Top map to feature in Brown and Cohen’s book is a manuscript map of Albany by Thomas Sowers.  With Thomas Sowers’s name and the date, 1756, given in the elaborate key at upper left this map’s military context is that of the French and Indian War.  The map shows the position of the troops of "Major General Braddock", "Sir Peter Halkett" and "Colonel Dunbars" and is cited by Brown and Cohen as “the first to show Albany during this war”.

Thomas Sowers, PLAN, of the CITY, of ALBANY, in the PROVINCE, of, NEW, YORK. 1756. Manuscript pen and ink with wash colour. Maps K.Top.121.41.

The K.Top cataloguing and digitisation is ongoing thanks to the support of valued donors.  For further information about contributing to this exciting project please visit our website.

Kate Marshall

British Town Maps: A History by Roger J.P. Kain and Richard J. Oliver is published by the British Library and available to purchase online, and we are pleased to host this guest blog by one of its esteemed authors.

Towns present map-makers with the most complex and challenging of all landscapes to depict. Buildings within a town tend to be of different ages, styles (vernacular or designed) and functions. They are arranged on their plots along streets in different ways; streets may be broad and ruler-straight, or narrow and irregular, or may be formally created terraces, crescents, circles or squares. Towns also contain a range of land uses – residential, commercial, industrial, ecclesiastical, recreational – which contribute to land differentiation. They might be situated on hilly or on relatively level terrain. And underlying everything, invisible in the landscape but a key to the urban texture, is the pattern of property ownership.

John Hooker’s Map of Exeter, engraved by Remigius Hogenberg c. 1587, British Library Maps C.5.a.3. 

Just as varied as townscapes are the cartographic types or genres subsumed within the term ‘town map’. Two maps drawn from this variety illustrate this fact. The first is a late sixteenth-century manuscript bird’s-eye-view map of the city of Exeter – not drawn to a strict scale, highly decorated, topographically generalised yet rich in transient detail (fishing and ships are shown sailing on the River Exe, woollen cloths are hung out to dry on tenterhooks). As well as being a representation of topography, this map is also in many ways a celebration of the wealth and power of this town in early modern times. John Hooker’s portrayal of the city has been studied from many angles and analysed for what it can tell us about Exeter’s architecture and townscape, but important questions remain. Why was this map made at all? What was its purpose, and why was a considerable sum of money expended on it?

There are no straightforward answers to these questions, but we can be certain that Hooker’s map is more than a factual, topographical description of the walls, streets and buildings of a cathedral city. It tells us something of the economic importance of the place, and its iconography conveys much deeper messages. The coats of arms of the City of Exeter and the Bishop of Exeter pictured in the upper corners of the map doubtless acknowledge Queen Elizabeth I’s patronage. In this sense the map is a celebration of the wealth and power of this important town under her government.

Ordnance Survey 1:500 Lancashire sheet 104.6.19, surveyed in 1888 (Maps OST 15 – Manchester sheet CIV.6.19).

The second example is a small part of Manchester as depicted by the Ordnance Survey on its very large-scale, highly detailed, printed late nineteenth-century map series, maps which mark the high point of detailed urban topographic mapping in Britain. Almost every town of more than 4,000 population was surveyed and mapped at this scale. These maps meant the effective eclipse of privately sponsored original mapping of owns, other than for very specific engineering purposes and the like. They can trace their inception to the growth of interest in public health reform following the issue of Edwin Chadwick’s report on the sanitary condition of the labouring population of Great Britain in 1842. After 1894 the ‘town scales’ were largely superseded by the smaller 1:2500; the ‘occasion’ of sanitary reform and the backlog of infrastructure improvement was passing.

These maps are among more than 150 illustrations – some well known, others that have languished in obscurity – discussed in our new book, a history of urban mapping in Britain based on twenty years of research deep in archives by a British Academy Research Project. The book accompanies an online Catalogue of British Town Maps.

Roger J. P. Kain