Adventures in maps

Many of the maps in our collections were made for, or about, travel. And even now in an age when we increasingly use satnavs or GPS to find our way, a map that you can hold in your hands has its own charm.  A recent Bodleian book, Adventures in maps, uses some of these to tell the stories of 20 different journeys, on foot, horseback, train, car, sailing ship and spacecraft. They include early sea charts and explorers’ maps, as well as maps marketed when travel became more widespread and commercial. The chart below shows mariners’ routes across the Southern Ocean, many of them following the traditional ‘Clipper route’ devised in the seventeenth century to take advantage of the most favourable winds. 

The dangers of sea travel are illustrated with a story by Basil Hall, a Lieutenant aboard the British frigate Endymion, who took part in the first recorded landing on Rockall in  October 1811. Rockall, an isolated rocky islet in the North Atlantic, is over 300 km from the nearest inhabited land, the Scottish island of St Kilda. The Endymion dropped off an exploring party in two small boats, and as the sailors recorded and sketched the island, they failed to notice for some time that a slight haze was gathering on the sea. Once they realised that their ship was becoming invisible in the mist, they hastily, and with some difficulty, got everyone down from the steep rock and into the small boats. But by then it was too late; their ship was out of sight in the fog. Despite some alarming experiences everyone was eventually rescued. On the same voyage they also rescued a party of survivors from a shipwreck, including several women and children, who were trying to reach land with only oars and an improvised sail; their prospects would have been poor if the Endymion had not come to their help. The chart illustrated here was made over 100 years later but makes clear both the inaccessibility of Rockall and the fact that the sea around it was still barely surveyed. It includes a drawing of Rockall as seen from the sea which emphasises its inaccessibility.Over the next few decades increasing numbers of people had the opportunity to travel. Thomas Cook organised the first package tour in July 1841, buying train tickets in bulk at a discount for 500 people travelling from Leicester to Loughborough for a temperance meeting and celebrations. A contemporary railway map in an unusual style, printed white on black, accompanies a guide to the line.

Cook went on to organise similar train trips locally, and within 10 years was taking tourists to the Scottish Highlands, and within twenty to France and Switzerland. By the 1870s Cook’s Tours had reached the Nile, and trips to North America soon followed. By this time there was plenty of competition as the idea of mass tourism took off. But Cook was the pioneer, and his company continued until the early twenty-first century.

The book also includes maps made by explorers showing their routes, such as the one made by a companion of the archaeologist David George Hogarth, travelling through Anatolia in 1894. It shows the places where they crossed the Euphrates in a terrifyingly leaky ferry and, later, forded one of its tributaries guided by a local man who took an apparently random route to avoid quicksand. Hogarth published an account of the expedition, his experiences and the archaeological finds.

You can read more in Adventures in maps, available from the Bodleian book shop.

Eastern hemisphere. From Philips’ centenary mercantile marine atlas London: George Philip, 1935. 2021 a.34.

Inset showing Rockall. From [Chart of the N.W. Coast of Scotland, including Faeroe Island & Orkney & Shetland Islands.] London: Imray, Laurie, Norie & Wilson, 1917. C18:3 (1)

Plan of the Midland counties railway. From A guide or companion to the Midland counties railway Leicester: Tebbutt, 1840. G.A. Gen. top. 8° 458

Detail from Mr Hogarth’s route from Khalfat to Malatia  / F.W. Green, 1895. MS D30:8 (2)