Cartographical imperatives

If you were taught the “correct” way to draw a map at school, this doubtless involved including a scale, having a key for your symbols and adding a compass rose with north at the top. You probably weren’t encouraged to reflect on the arbitrary nature of this last operation: why should north be placed at the top, as opposed to west, east or south? But perhaps such thoughts could have floated into your consciousness if you were bitten by the cartography bug and went to see the mappa mundi in Hereford Cathedral, with east to the top of its depiction of the globe. Jerry Brotton’s Four Points of the Compass delivers a panoramic tour of “these four apparently simple and universally accepted terms [that] are far more subjective and specific to time, place, language and culture than we might realize”, and thereby opens up a world of geographical lore and ideas.

Brotton offers what might be framed as a history of the cultural politics of the cardinal directions. The scope of the book is breathtaking, commencing with the first inscribed maps from Mesopotamia, c.2250 BCE, coming down to the present day and seeking to be a resolutely global history rather than one with a restrictedly western focus. With this much time, this many cultures and four directions to be traversed in a mere 160 pages of text, Four Points of the Compass is breathless as well as breathtaking, traversing its subject at breakneck speed. Fascinating titbits abound in the four core chapters, each of which is broadly chronological in its organization. We learn that the term “cardinal” for the four directions comes from the Latin for fundamental or hinge, and that this is then spliced in medieval Europe with the four cardinal virtues by the Catholic church, directionality and morality becoming blurred in complex yet intellectually productive ways. We are told about the primacy of a southerly orientation in early Islam, this being the qibla (direction) from Muhammad’s location in Medina to the Kaaba in Mecca. South was also a prime orientation for the ancient Egyptians, Brotton writes, for the rather different reason that it was the mysterious source of the lifegiving Nile. North is linked in many cultures to death, which explains why, for example, doors to the north in medieval churches were often dubbed “the Devil’s Door”. The author also narrates the triumph of north as the cardinal direction for maps as a product of the conjunction of magnetic compasses and the rediscovery of classical, Ptolemaic mapping conventions in the Renaissance: “over time, the compass would eventually conquer Christ in returning north to the top of world maps”.

As well as charting the cultural politics of direction, Brotton also makes pertinent interventions in those politics. In particular, his chapter on the north notes that climate change is all but eliminating the inaccessibility of the Arctic as framed by Robert Peary in the early twentieth century. As the ice melts, so the Northwest and Northeast Passages, which claimed many lives and spawned as many myths, will become mere ocean routeways, open to all. And in closing Brotton turns from the four cardinal directions, anchored in the planetary realities of the trajectory of the sun and of global magnetism, to an emerging “blue dot” culture where GPS-enabled devices make us our own directional centre. Will what might be called “geo-narcissism” finally unseat the rich cultural baggage of the cardinal directions? And, with their external referents, were those directions quite as arbitrary as the author has suggested? Brotton doesn’t have any simple answers, but he gestures towards the fact that our planetary orientations may be transformed once more in the Anthropocene as they were in the Age of Discovery.

Four Points of the Compass frustrates as well as stimulates. Provocations to thought and further inquiry abound, but Brotton has to hurry on. Where his History of the World in Twelve Maps (2012) dug deep and used pinpoint interventions to tell a bigger story, Four Points of the Compass is faster, travels further, but inevitably sacrifices depth. Let us hope the rich seams the author has opened up are mined by others.

In a sense, what Brotton’s work evidences is the contemporary continuation of a venerable element of the culture of geographical writing; the art of compilation. If geography as a form of inquiry is often tied to exploration, it has also always been about the collation, compilation and editing of reports from travellers, even though this side of its activities has been less trumpeted. In This Earthly Globe, Andrea di Robilant offers a well-written, accessible introduction to the achievements of one of the great geographical collators of the Renaissance, the Venetian Giovambattista Ramusio. Ramusio’s work was elephantine, his Navigationi et viaggi (1550–9) amounting to about two million words and bringing together a vast collection of travel narratives, notably from the Age of Discovery.

The author gives a good overview of Ramusio’s fascinating life as a successful civil servant in the Republic of Venice. We learn of the diplomatic links that allowed him to access travel accounts that were, in essence, state secrets, and we are given an insight into his training as a humanist scholar in the circle of Aldus Manutius. Centre stage, however, goes to the travellers whom Ramusio would collate and publish at the end of his life. There are long chapters on the travel writings and geographical descriptions of Marco Polo, Antonio Pigafetta, Peter Martyr, Leo Africanus and Gonzalo Oviedo. These are good distillations of the achievements of their respective subjects, but they are already well known. What is far less recognized and deserves greater emphasis is Ramusio’s contribution as a humanist geographer, something that becomes clear only in the final chapter. It is here that Robilant lays out for the reader the magnitude of Ramusio’s achievement: essentially, Navigationi et viaggi saw the editing and publication of the texts that would form Europeans’ understanding of their achievements in the Age of Discovery. And it did so in a way that was nuanced and thoughtful, not simply jingoistic and triumphalist. Ramusio’s decision to take state secrets and make them public reversed the habits of a lifetime of public service. To the extent that publishing these travel accounts opened the eyes of Renaissance readers to the vastly expanded geographical horizons of the period, it was Ramusio who made the historiographical concept of an Age of Discovery as much as the explorers themselves. It is a shame, then, that his great text isn’t given more prominence in what is an otherwise hugely entertaining account.

Both of these works show the fruitfulness of geography’s entwinement with humanist practices, in the Renaissance and today. If, in Andrea di Robilant’s words, Ramusio showed that “geography was still a humanistic field based on the written word rather than on scientific data”, mutatis mutandis, Jerry Brotton shows the same scholarly conjunction nearly half a millennium later. In an age of closeted scientism, both of these books are to be welcomed in these terms.

Robert Mayhew’s books include Enlightenment Geography: The political languages of British geography, 1650–1850, 2000

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