A change of address

In 1792 the noted engraver and cartographer John Cooke (1765-1845) moved from Drury Lane, London to Mill Hill. In a novel approach to a change of address card for existing and new clients Cooke made this map: ‘He has taken this method to inform them that he has removed from London to Mill Hill’.

A new map of the roads from London to Mill Hill & Barnet. By John Cooke, Engraver, at Mill Hill, Middx. 1792 Gough Maps Middlesex 46.

Cooke at this time must have been in his late twenties; he had left his apprenticeship some five years before. He had been apprenticed initially to bookbinder Mary Cooke (most likely a family connection) before transferring to the engraver William Wells and then John Russell, the latter an important cartographer and engraver of maps. Cooke had now embarked on what was to be a successful and productive career, with apprentices of his own and many works to his name. Although Mill Hill is today very much a suburb of London, at that time the area’s distance of eight or nine miles from Cooke’s previous base in the City would have seemed considerable. The map is very beautifully engraved, and serves to advertise the quality of Cooke’s work. Hills are indicated by delicate hachuring, and the hand colouring is sufficient to enhance the map without obscuring the fine engraving. The text panel explains that he has removed from London to Mill Hill, but that he is still at his customers’ service, since ‘the Mill Hill Errand Cart sets out every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday from the Bull Inn, Holborn at one, and at two o’clock from the Cock in Tottenham Court Road…’ Distances are noted with tiny numbers along the roads. The map demonstrates how easily communications may be carried between London and Mill Hill. Cooke’s trade card at the time also included a detailed map of the area around his house.

Cooke was to switch between the country around the city and London a number of times. By the end of the century he was back in central London and employed to engrave charts for the Admiralty and for numerous private publishers. But we can only conclude that London living did not suit Cooke, for by 1817 he had made what was to be a permanent move to Plymouth, Devon, where he spent the rest of his reasonably long life. This seems like a surprising choice considering how central to the publishing industry London was but a large amount of Cooke’s work was to do with navigation and shipping and after his move he made numerous maps on Plymouth as the area grew in importance with the building and developing of new or existing docks by the Navy.

Here’s Cooke’s map of the new Breakwater being built in Plymouth Sound, which in 1806 had an estimated cost of £1,170,000 (£88,000,000 at current rate)

Cooke’s guide to Plymouth Sound and Breakwater, 1806. G.A. Devon 8° 341 (9)

Cooke’s most famous work, The Universal Atlas, was published in 1802 when Cooke was in Howland Street, London. Cooke made the maps, ‘accurately delineated by an eminent geographer‘ while the Rev. Thomas Smith wrote the introduction and the descriptions. Along with maps of the continents and countries there are maps of the Solar System and a ‘geographical clock’ designed by Cooke which works by moving the marker on the inner dial to a location, which then makes this location noon, from there all the other times can be read (so here it’s noon in London, so 1am in the Great South Sea).

The universal atlas, and introduction to modern geography, 1802, Gough Gen. top. 202

Many of Cooke’s customers from his later career appear to have been based locally in the West Country, although he had previously worked for some of the major London mapmakers. He also appears to have branched out into copperplate printing.

With the Mill Hill map Cooke shows his skills as both a cartographer and an engraver and this is as much an advertisement of his abilities as a notice of the change in address. He also cleverly makes the best use of the area he wants to show by including the change in angle north of Finchley and Hendon to come up with this beautifully designed work, allowing for text and compass rose to be shown in opposite corners. This strip approach to mapping brings to mind John Ogilby’s ground-breaking road maps of almost a hundred years before (see Measuring distances, a wheel or a chain? | Bodleian Map Room Blog).

Our Cooke, John, was one of a number of Cooke’s active in London at this time. His brother Stephen (1768-1854) was an apprentice to John in the 1780s. He remained in London and also had a long map engraving career, employed by such well known map publishers as William Faden and Laurie & Whittle. The brothers William Cooke (1778-1855) and George (1781-1834), no relation to john and Stephen, both worked with map-makers such as Arrowsmith as well as non-map engraving work.

Four seasons

Dating from circa 1670 this is a map from the Dutch Golden Age, when ships set out from the Netherlands to trade and set up colonies. The Dutch East India Company had trading posts throughout the Indies, controlled the spice trade and, for a time, was the only nation to have a trade link with Japan, while the Dutch West India Company were doing similar in South America. Trade and cartography went hand-in-hand, with high quality maps by the leading cartographers of the day helping in the exploration and navigation of these far-off places.

Nova orbis tabula, in lucem edita…F. de Wit, c1670. Map Res 110

Frederick de Wit’s Nova Orbis Tabula… is a lovely though fairly typical example of a World double-hemisphere map, but what is of interest are the wonderful representations of the seasons in each corner. These insets also feature, in three of the four, representations of the continents* as well.

Spring is represented by a maiden, often Persephone, the symbol of spring growth. To her left is a bull, the animal symbol along with a horse for Europe.

Summer is Ceres, Goddess of the harvest who represents Earth’s natural abundance. She’s also the mother of Persephone. Ceres often appears on maps and her control of the growth, harvest and dying back of plants during the year reflected human existence on earth. The lion is a symbol for Africa, and the scorpion in this case is one of the animals associated with Ceres.

With the harvest done Autumn is a time to celebrate, Bacchus represents this season, drinking wine and supported by a pair of satyrs, themselves representations of lust and mischief. Another scorpion, this time for Africa.

Finally Winter, whose symbol is an old King wrapped up against the cold. No animal representation for America, which is usually a crocodile or armadillo but the male goat can also be used as a symbol for winter, when they are generally more active as this is when female goats come on heat. Which leads to fertility, which leads us back to spring, and growth and abundance, and the cycle goes round again.

Symbolism is an important and fascinating part of cartography. At the very least these allegorical pictures fill what would be empty spaces but at the time the audience for the maps would have understood both the meaning and the message. The seasons seem an obvious topic for a map, as they signify not just the changes in the weather and the time of the year but mark the earth’s progress in space and around the Sun. But people would have also understood how this connection with time through the year was also linked with our journey through life, it’s no coincidence that Spring is shown as a young maid, Summer an Earth Goddess, Autumn an older man and finally an old man in Winter.

This is also a blog about people, with a strong connection to Oxford and the Bodleian. De Wit’s map seems to be a smaller version of larger World map with the same title from 1660. The map is the first in a collection of maps which have been bound together at some point, in an unknown hand the title is given as ‘The first volume in a collection of more than one hundred maps of all the Kingdoms and Provinces in Europe by severall authours…1691′. The connection with Oxford, and the probable reason for the volume ending up here at the Bodleian is that the atlas once belonged to William Charles Cotton, brother of Sarah Cotton. Sarah married Sir Henry Acland, one-time physician to the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII, see this blog ) and Librarian of the Radcliffe Science Library. Acland wrote a report in 1854 about cholera epidemics in the city, which included one of the earliest disease maps published in Britain (more on this map here) .

In 1839 Cotton was ordained a priest and in 1841 he sailed to New Zealand to be Chaplain to the newly appointed Bishop of New Zealand. He was also a noted apiarist, and wrote a number of books on bee-keeping (including the wonderfully titled ‘My Bee Book’, published in 1842 and written when he was a student at Christ Church in Oxford). Cotton spent seven years in New Zealand before returning to Britain. At the front of the atlas are a letter and a note from Cotton. The hand-writing for both is very hard to read, and parts of the letter have lines written over lines at right-angles, but both are to Henry Coxe, Bodley’s Librarian, in 1878 offering the collection of maps to the library, or ‘if not wanted to be returned to Mrs. Acland’. The Acland’s lived at numbers 39-41 Broad Street which in a remarkable coincidence was one of the houses knocked down for the building of what is now the Weston Library, part of the Bodleian Library, and where the maps are stored (and from where I’m writing this piece).

* Since this blog went live a colleague in Theology has pointed out an alternative view of some of the figures represented, which makes more sense, and that is that the signs of the Zodiac are represented. So in Spring the bull also represents Taurus and the ram Aries. In Summer the scorpion is more likely a lobster, which would represent Cancer and the lion Leo. In Autumn the scales represent Libra, the lion Leo and the archer Sagittarius. Finally Winter, with the fishes Pisces and the goat Capricorn.

If that’s not enough, how many other maps feature someone being sick from too much drink?

Digging deep: charting the rise and fall of British coal

Midnight on 1st October 2024 saw the UK’s last remaining coal-fired power station close for the final time, marking the end of a 142-year history of coal-based energy production in Britain. The development of coal, industry, and infrastructure have been closely linked throughout this period, with many maps in our collection highlighting these connections.

Small-scale, localised coal mining is likely to have taken place in Britain for several centuries, but it was not until the 18th century that more substantial shafts began to appear on the landscape. This detailed site plan of the coal works at Kinnaird, Scotland is dated 1776, and shows the development of excavations over the preceding 18 months.

A plan of Kinnaird main coal workings at Jan 4th 1775 shewing also the space wrought from that period to 1st Aug. 1776 (1776), Gough Maps Scotland 86

As well as a planimetric map of the site, a cross section is also included, clearly showing the various layers of ‘the different coal’ and the depths and locations of various shafts.

By the mid 19th century, coal production had dramatically increased, providing a crucial catalyst for the industrial revolution. Entire regions became peppered with new collieries, as shown by this ultra large-format 1850 map of the ‘Great Northern Coalfield’, spanning large parts of Northumberland and County Durham.

Map of the great northern coalfield in the counties of Northumberland & Durham, including the whole of the coal mining districts of the Tyne, Wear and Tees and those of Hartlepool, Seaham, Hartley, Blyth and Warkworth, From actual survey by J.T.W. Bell (1850), (E) C17:2 (2)

In some parts, such as this area south west of Bishop Auckland, the concentration of collieries is remarkably dense, appearing very prominently with capitalised labels.

With the increase in coal mining came the increasing need for transport infrastructure to match. The emergence of railways connecting collieries with major cities and ports is clear on the ‘Great Northern’ map, but this 1845 map published by Longman & Co. shows that this development was widespread, and in parallel with the construction of canals. Here, coalfields are indicated using a grey tint, with the Tyne, South Wales, and Firth of Forth coalfields already very substantial by this time.

Map exhibiting the navigable rivers, the completed & proposed canals & railroads of Great Britain & Ireland, with the coal fields, lighthouses etc (1845), (E) C15 (150)

It was not until the 1910s that coal production reached its peak, although coal still accounted for around 90% of UK electricity production until the 1960s, when oil and nuclear began to see significant expansions. The ‘Coal and Iron’ map produced by Ordnance Survey at the end of the Second World War shows the extent of coal mining in Lancashire, South Yorkshire and the West Midlands in particular, immediately prior to nationalisation in 1947.

Great Britain. Coal and Iron. Compiled… from… maps… and from information… referring to the year 1940, sheet 2 (1945), C16 (251) [13]

The closure of the final coal-fired power station is a significant landmark as the UK, alongside many other countries, pursues Net Zero and low-carbon policies. In no small part, this shift has been facilitated by the exponential growth of renewable energy production, including wind, wave, solar, and hydroelectric power.

The 16th edition of the ‘Wind farms’ map, produced by La Tene Maps and RenewableUK in 2020, shows that it is wind farms which now characterise many of our landscapes and seascapes, as the once dominant coal industry continues to fade from view.

Britain – wind farms (2020), C16 (937)

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)

Les cartes olympiques de Paris

Hosting the Olympic Games is a huge task for even the largest and most seasoned of cities, requiring years of careful logistical planning. However, hosting the Games also presents a cartographic challenge, with transport alterations and dozens of temporary venues rendering ordinary city maps inadequate for visitors. Special maps are often commissioned by upcoming hosts, allowing easy navigation by the influx of international travellers. Such event maps are ephemeral by definition, but many are preserved in our collections (you can read more about our collection of Olympic maps here).

As the XXXIII Olympiad draws to a close in Paris, we’ve taken a look back through our collection of maps made for the three Games held in the French capital to date; in 1900, 1924, and 2024.

The 1900 Olympics coincided with the Exposition Universelle, a world’s fair which attracted some 48 million visitors to Paris over a seven-month period. The Parisian publishing house Garnier Frères published this map of the exhibition sites, which clustered around a central portion of the River Seine. It features an overview map alongside four enlarged insets which show the details of the exhibition displays.

Plan de l’exposition universelle de 1900 (1900), C21:50 Paris (8)

Detail showing the Grand Palais and Petit Palais, which were built especially for the event. C21:50 Paris (8)

Foreign publishers also took advantage of the event, with Edinburgh-based W. & A.K. Johnston Ltd. publishing this map for an Anglophone audience. The Johnston map incorporates three different scales on one sheet; the exhibition sites, central Paris, and the whole of France.

W. & A.K. Johnston’s plan of Paris, and Exhibition, and map of France (1900), C21:50 Paris (14)

Detail of the River Seine, showing the ‘foreign section’ and the artistic exhibitions. The river itself hosted the Olympic rowing, swimming, and water polo events in 1900. C21:50 Paris (14)

The first operational part of the Paris Metro opened part way through the 1900 Olympics, but its rapid expansion in the following decades meant that it played a more significant role in subsequent Games. This 1922 map by A. Taride uses a red overprint on a street plan to highlight the lines that would have been at the disposal of visitors to the 1924 Olympics, incorporating the competing Métropolitain and Nord-Sud networks, which did not merge into a unified system until 1930. The centrepiece of the 1924 Games was the Yves du Manoir Stadium in Colombes, which hosted nine sports, in addition to the Opening Ceremony. However, neither the Metro system or Taride’s map extend as far north west as Colombes.

Nouveau plan de Paris avec toutes les lignes du métropolitain et du nord-sud (1922), C21:50 Paris (47)

Detail of the area around the Champs-Élysées and Place de la Concorde, showing the convergence of Metro lines. C21:50 Paris (47)

One hundred years later, the 2024 Games opened in a very different, digital world. This time, organisers have launched a specially designed mobile app which provides dynamic navigation instructions using real-time data to flexibly disperse crowds and ease congestion. Alongside this high-tech solution, the organisers have also provided an outage-proof paper map, which joins our collection hot off the press. While 2024 marks the third time Paris has hosted the Olympic Games, it is the first time that the city has hosted the Paralympic Games, with the map designed to cater for both events.

The Yves du Manoir Stadium reprises its Olympic role as the venue of the hockey tournaments, but once again does not appear within the main map frame, which only includes central Paris. However, the Grand Palais, built for the 1900 exposition, does feature; this time as the Olympic and Paralympic venue for fencing and taekwondo — as well as a cameo in the Opening Ceremony, during which La Marseillaise was performed from its rooftop.

Paris 2024 : plan des transports publics (2024), C21:50 Paris (219)

Produced by Lyon-based firm Latitude-Cartagène (which specialises in event mapping), the Paris 2024 map draws on OpenStreetMap data and, like Taride’s map, focuses on public transport. The map tackles the unenviable design challenge of combining a street plan and extensive transit map with station closure information, 17 Olympic venues, and the locations of the city’s permanent tourist highlights. With an audience travelling from over 200 countries, the cartographer’s brief is made harder by having to avoid any culture-specific conventions or language. All the while, the map must be sympathetic to the Paris 2024 branding style — an important commercial aspect of a modern Games — as well as that of the regional public transport authority, Île-de-France Mobilités. Using a pastel base map, minimal text, pictorial symbols, and a broad colour palette for the thematic content, it clears these hurdles with gold medal-worthy clarity.

How to make a map Soviet style. Part two.

We often tend to look on maps, and by extension all other forms of art or literature, as a finished thing. This is done without any thought but in doing so we miss out on the skill and work that goes into the making. We’ve blogged about the making of maps, the science of cartography, by both the Austrian military and the Soviet cartographic department before, and a recent donation to the library has added more material to this fascinating field.

Some map-makers maps are distinctive due to style or choice of colours, and that is certainly the case with this set of four educational maps at different scales, published by the Glavnoe Upravlenie Geodezii i Kartografii pri Sovete Ministrov SSSR, (Main Directorate of Geodesy and Cartography under the Council of Ministers of the USSR, otherwise known as the GUGK). The use of soft pastel colours is instantly recognizable as from the GUGK and seems in contrast to the impression we have of a Soviet style of brutalist architecture and politics, but does allow for a beautiful map design (more on Soviet mapping can be found here and here).

Of the four maps in the pamphlet, the one at 1:50,000 is the most informative. Around the edge are instructions on surveying, depicting relief and profile and making grids. Part of the relief instructions shows heights above sea levels in profile.

The maps date from 1987, an important time in the history of the Soviet Union. Despite the appointment of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 and a new era of openness and more freedom than previously allowed under the concept of glasnost, the explosion and release of a radiation cloud over northern Europe from the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant in 1986 showed how weak and secretive the Soviet Union was (we blogged about Chernobyl here). Four years later, the Soviet system collapsed, bringing in a new, post-communist, Russia.

Despite the convincing topography these maps show imagined locations. The maps start at 1:100,000 then gradually focus on a smaller area as you go down through scales, like a cartographic set of Russian dolls. So the town of Snov (Снов) gets gradually bigger with each increase in scale down to 1:10,000 (1:100,000 top, 1:50,000 2nd, 1:25,000 3rd, 1:10,000 bottom).

This set will go into the O section of the map storage area, drawers full of maps of imaginary lands. Produced by the Soviet State to help their cartographers make maps of both the Soviet Union and many other countries, this set will lie in a drawer with maps of Middle Earth, the Island of Sodor and Ambridge.

Uchebnye topograficheskie karty, 1987. O1 (42)

Mapping Guyana

Earlier this month, the Map Room was visited by Christina Kumar; a cartographic advisor to the President of Guyana. Over several years, Christina has created a large and highly detailed map of Guyana, and kindly donated a copy to the Bodleian Library during her visit.

Christina Kumar presents the map to Map Curator Nick Millea

The map, more than 1.5 metres in length, provides a detailed picture of the country’s land cover at 1:600,000, as well as its settlements and transport infrastructure. Christina explained how GIS software had been used to process satellite imagery in order to produce a map of this intricacy; including its detailed insets showing oil, mineral deposits, and carbon density. The map also features an attractive street plan of the nation’s capital, Georgetown.

Administrative map of Guyana (2024), H10 (143)

The Bodleian already holds a substantial collection of maps of Guyana, particularly from the British colonial era which officially lasted from 1831 until independence in 1966. The area had previously been in Dutch hands since 1627, with the exception of short-lived periods of French and British occupation. As a result, our collection also includes French and Dutch maps of the region from the late 18th and early 19th centuries; each map a window on the various attempts to understand and control these northern shores of South America. The 1803 British occupation of the Dutch Colony of Berbice (Kolonie Berbice) proved to be longer-lasting, ultimately leading to the formal establishment of British Guiana.

We were happy to show Christina a sample of these European maps, including this Dutch map from 1802, the final year before British occupation. The map shows land holdings along the Berbice River, and features an imaginative cartouche depicting the region’s flora and fauna, perhaps with some artistic license. Christina noted that the cadastral land numbering system still remains in use today and that, with the exception of a few variations in spelling, many of the place names included on the map remain unchanged.

Karte van de Colonie de Berbice gelegen in Bats. Guiana in America (1802), (E) H10:2 (3)

Christina’s new map becomes the most recent addition to this cartographic timeline of Guyanese history; distinctive in its presentation of the nation through local eyes, rather than from a European perspective. In an era when Guyana’s natural resource management and relations with its South American neighbours are high priorities, the role of maps in understanding and administering territory remains crucially important.

The Summer Solstice

A short blog to mark a long day.

A curved line is a beautiful thing. Especially when it is both convex and concave, inward and outward, especially when it shows something as magical as the journey of the Sun across the Earth. This path is called the ecliptic. Today is the Summer Solstice*, the day of the longest amount of sunlight for those in the Northern Hemisphere. We blogged, here , about the Spring equinox, using a beautiful Dutch double hemisphere map of the World from an atlas by Claes Janszoon Visscher. In that blog we highlighted the straight line of the Equator, crossed by the Sun twice in a year to give us the Spring and Autumn equinoxes, days of equal day and night.

Planisphærium Terrestre sive Terrarum Orbis…from Atlas Minor by Claes Janszoon Visscher, c1705. Map Res. 85

Here we follow the curved line, showing the Sun’s journey through the Heavens, the ecliptic. When the Sun is at its most northern point, today, it reaches the Tropic of Cancer, and marks our Summer Solstice. It’s both obvious and amazing that it’s not the Sun though making this curved journey. The Sun stays where it is within the Solar System, even though, along with all the other objects in the Solar System we’re travelling at 450,000 miles per hour around the Milky Way. It’s the Earth that moves, tilting on it’s axis throughout the year and it’s this variation of tilt towards the Sun that produces this curved path in relation to the Earth, and from this our seasons.

Here’s a diagram from a 1909 edition of ‘Bacon’s popular atlas of the World’, showing the workings of the Solar System. ‘Astronomical diagrams’ shows not only the seasons but also a diagram showing the difference in the spread of the Sun’s rays at the two solstices, a concentrated 15° on June 21st (or 20th in this year) and a wider and hence weaker 28° a the winter solstice. Surely this though depends on whereabouts on the Earth you are?

Bacon’s popular atlas of the World, 1909. G1.B1.52

Bacon’s atlas uses the Patent thumb-index, which the publisher claims has been ‘invented specially for this work’. Along the right-hand edge of the atlas the margin gradually gets cut away as you journey through the atlas. This allows you, with a sliding motion up with your thumb, to open up the atlas at any of the general maps you want, Africa for instance, and from there see a list of maps of Africa and the countries therein, followed by the country maps of that area. Bacon promises, ‘This important improvement, it will be seen, has thus been effected without disfiguring the edge of the book’. Probably helps here to have reasonable finger-nails.

*This year’s solstice is the earliest since 1796. It’s because 2024 is a leap year, which means the solstice is 18 hours earlier than in a non-leap year. That it’s as early as it is is due to some complex maths based on how the Georgian calendar tries to fit in leap years over the course of centuries.

Mountains and contested borders

This mysterious and beautiful map of Sikkim and Tibet has been in the Bodleian Library for at least 83 years, described briefly in the catalogue as dating from the 19th century and in Hindi. The first of these statements was imprecise and the second completely wrong; the map is almost certainly from the 1880s and is in Tibetan. Who made the map, when, and why? With the help of experts in Tibetan, in Oxford and Princeton, we now have answers to some of these questions.

The map is hand drawn in ink and what appears to be watercolour paint, and is a strange combination of two different styles. The lower half is enclosed within a square border and graticule, as a conventional western style map such as the Survey of India was making in the area at the time. It shows rivers and place names, with roads or tracks joining the settlements; at the very bottom is a tiny stretch of railway running south from the city of Darjeeling, which shows that the map must have been made in or after 1881 when the railway was opened. There is no portrayal of hills or mountains within Sikkim, which is of course a mountainous region.

Along and outside the border of Sikkim, ranges of hills and high mountains are shown pictorially, in a style more commonly found in Tibetan maps. To the north, into Tibet, a river valley leads off between mountain ranges and the furthest mountains become a picture outlined against deep blue sky. The images that look like a bit like windmills are prayer flags on top of Mani stones; these are found on mountain passes in Tibet and people pray at these sites for a safe journey.

International boundaries are shown conspicuously in bold colour. The borders of Sikkim are marked in red, with green for Nepal to the west, orange for Bhutan to the east, and yellow for Tibet. Across the northern part of Sikkim in orange is the old boundary between Tibet and Sikkim; the new one was decided in Calcutta (now Kolkata) between the British and the Chinese in 1890, and imposed on the Tibetans in 1904.

Part of the map strongly resembles one made by the Survey of India in 1890, Skeleton map of Sikkim. The squared area strongly resembles it in scale, content and layout, and most of the placenames correspond (although the Survey of India map is in English); the only exceptions are the old Tibetan border, which is shown on the manuscript map only, and the border between Sikkim and India (then separate countries) which is shown on the published map only. The areas shown pictorially on the manuscript map are not represented on the Survey of India map. This map may have been drawn by the Sikkimese or Tibetans for the British in India; certainly the 1890 Survey of India map of Sikkim far exceeds earlier maps of the area by the same organisation.

An intriguing pencil note on one corner of the manuscript map adds to the mystery: ‘Map of Sikkim and Tibet, presented to me by … ‘ it is dated Dec 1906 but the names of the donor and the note writer are illegible. The map is on fragile paper and has been backed with cloth; the backing has a Bodleian stamp from 1961. It is hoped that high resolution scanning of this map may cast more light on its origin and provenance.

[Manuscript map of Sikkim and Tibet]. [1881-1890]. MS D10:33 (4)

Skeleton map of Sikkim. Survey of India, 1892. D10:33 (1)

We are very grateful to Charles Manson, Tibetan Subject consultant librarian at the Bodleian Library, and Tsering Wangyal Shawa, GIS and Map Librarian at Princeton, for their help in interpreting this map.

Time zones

In the September of 1881 Sandford Fleming, a Scots born inventor, gave a paper to the International Geographical Congress in Venice. Entitled ‘The adoption of a prime meridian to be common to all the nations. [And] the establishment of standard meridians for the regulation of time’, the paper was to address the pressing need for a universal time, set from one location, in a World increasingly linked by communication and transport. In the speech Fleming alludes to the difficulties in selecting just one meridian, ‘Repeated efforts have been made to gain general concurrence to the adoption of one of the existing national meridians, but these proposals have tended to retard a settlement of the question by awakening national sensibilities, and thus creating a barrier difficult to remove’. Fleming’s hopes for an outcome to this problem were soon answered, in 1884 at an International Meridian Conference in Washington delegates agreed to Greenwich being the prime meridian, 0ᵒ, the place where everywhere else takes its measure.

One of the consequences of this idea of a global time was the creation of time zones, the important way of keeping time in relation to the position of the Sun. A system of 24 time zones was first suggested by the Italian mathematician Quirico Filopanti but it was a proposal by Fleming in 1876 of a 24 zone system, which each zone 15 degrees longitude that has been gradually adopted, and feature in these two zone maps.

Planisphère des fuseaux horaires, 1917. B1 (1749)

This map is from the Ministère de la Marine, the department in the French Government dealing with the navy and colonies that in its original form dates back to the 1600s. The map shows 24 time zones with duplication at either end and includes both the ‘Méridien international de Greenwich‘ and, halfway between the two Greenwichs shown, the ‘Antiméridien de Greenwich‘. A French map showing the World like this was only recently possible as the country had only agreed to the Greenwich Meridian as the prime meridian in 1911. The simplicity of the design can’t hide though the complex exemptions across the World due to sizes of some countries and old rules in place. Take the Netherlands, which ran on Amsterdam Time, 20 minutes ahead of Greenwich up until the Second World War.

La Mondiale riforma del tempo coi 24 fusi… c1894. B1 (1750)

Simplicity isn’t a term you could use to describe our second map. ‘La Mondiale riforma del tempo coi 24 fusi e loro 24 simboli orari : Di Creazione ed Organizzazione definitiva del Prof. D. Errico Frassi Comense’, is a wonderfully confusing series of diagrams explaining the different proposals for zonal systems between 1873 and 1894. As well as a 24 zonal southern view of the World (top right) there are also two hemisphere maps at the bottom showing a more conventional zonal view of the World. At top left is a guide to the 24 time zones but the text is near impossible to read due to size and fading. The map is a jumble of information, and the confusion isn’t helped by the lettered order of the zones, which isn’t alphabetical but according to the areas or locations the zone goes through, so for example zone XIII is S, for the Sandwich Islands (an old name for Hawaii), while zone XIV is Y for the Yukon and XV is C for Colombia.

One of the earliest attempts to introduce a time common to all was called railway time. Introduced by the Great Western Railway company in 1840 railway time was designed to standardize time across Britain, which up until that point was set by local clocks, working at different speeds according to time set, condition and weather. As railways increased along with railway journeys the need for a standard set time according to one precise clock became paramount, without this in place coordinating rail journeys would be impossible and the risk of accidents due to inaccurate timetables would only increase. Soon the other train companies adopted this fixed time, and other countries followed the practise from the 1850s onwards. The introduction of railway time, along with the increased connectivity of the World through the telegram and telegraph*, paved the way for what we now call Coordinated Universal Time. The inset shows the first of a series of timetables by the firm Hotson’s, from 1863. Inside are a series of timetables showing the times of stops at each station along a route.

*This blog was written on the 24th May 2024, the 180th anniversary of the first telegraph message, sent by Samuel Morse from Washington to Baltimore.