A map of the county of my birthplace Cornwall from over 260 years ago.
WHEN I kick the bucket or, as they say in Lancashire, “pop my clogs”, I’ll have no gold to leave my children apart from my ‘gold dust’ in old maps; books; a superb, illuminated globe; and tribal artefacts from Borneo and East Africa.
Last Christmas, my sister gave me a definitive, copy of the ‘Antique Maps of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly’, written and signed by my former Geography/Geology teacher Bob Quixley. Now, 91 years old, he still lives in the same village, in the same house, some 100 metres away from my former family house in West Cornwall, England. As my grammar school teacher, he was inspirational and persuaded me to apply to Oxford University to read Geography. Coincidentally, Mr Quixley read the same subject at a college, again less than 100 metres from the college that I later joined. His fascination for maps and their changing outlines, as cartography has portrayed through the centuries, has left a deep impression on me.
Last Christmas, my youngest granddaughter, aged 12, was given a detailed world atlas to find out and encircle the places she has visited in the world, to include Southeast Asia.
In post-war Europe, most people could never afford to travel the world and if they did it would only be via ships or liners. Package holidays were yet to be invented, as were multi-passenger aircraft. Today, we are privileged with ‘jumbo jet’ commercial aircraft, but do most travellers know where in the world they are going apart from getting from point A to point B? How many households today possess a world atlas, road atlas, or even a street plan of the city in which they live? It may be quicker to seek out a laptop website; but will such website-maps provide the real details?
GPS and Prof Parkinson
An American, Bradford Parkinson, now a retired engineer and inventor after a career in the USAF and later as a professor at Stanford University, together with his team invented the GPS in 1973. Undoubtedly, it is an amazing device for both military and civilian usages. Whilst it may be used to home in missiles on specific targets in warzones, it can also instruct pilots to turn on automatic landing systems.
We may use GPS for climbing mountains or in our own cars in navigation, with robotic recorded messages telling us how far we are away from a roundabout, and which exit to use to continue on our journey. Whilst I have such a system in my car, I never use it for I would prefer to do my research with the aid of maps. Perhaps, I am a fuddy-duddy! Recently, Parkinson stated that his greatest regret was that his GPS invention has led to the demise of map-reading.
Where are you travelling?
Recently, I heard that a UK senior student travelled on Malaysia Airlines to Sabah. When asked which airports he had visited, his reply was, “Singapore.” It was actually KLIA! He could not even remember Kota Kinabalu! Been there, done it, and ticked/ticketed it off!
An English businessman, who had spent eight years living in Singapore and had travelled to many destinations in Southeast and Eastern Asia, discovered, after his flight from London to Luxembourg, that it was not near the Swiss border. In my long haul flights to Kuching, I am amazed that most passengers watch in flight movie channels and haven’t the slightest knowledge where they actually are in the world.
My treasured possession – an illuminated globe.
I am reminded of a former teaching colleague, who boasted 25 years ago that he had the latest GPS system. On an expedition with students, who navigated via maps and compasses, this man had to be rescued after hours of searching, on a bleak moorland, with the help of his map-reading pupils!
Geological and soil maps
Such maps reveal the type of rocks and soils upon which the foundations of our houses have been laid. My house is built on a type of clay that expands and contracts according to seasonal rainfall inputs. In drier times, cracks appear in plastered walls. Despite deep piling, in former deltaic swamplands in Sarawak, similar plastered wall cracks appear from time to time in drier periods throughout the year and usually the result of a fall in the water table. I genuinely believe that all purchasers of new houses should be provided, by estate agents or marketing companies, with details of the geology and soils upon which their future homes are built.
Online maps
Website maps may tell us about where we want to go, which routes to take, and the time of our journey by whatever means of transport. In most cases, however, they do not show or inform us of the historic sites along the way. An aerial image is slightly better, but alas it does not reveal types of vegetation, the steepness of slopes, road types or classes, bridges, churches, mosques, or chapels, which we may pass. It needs a trained eye in aerial photography to interpret such details. Stereographic photos are so much more revealing but again need a trained eye.
Old maps
This antique map, dated circa 1600 was drawn by the Dutch navigator, Van Noort. The top of the map is East, bottom of map is West. ‘Monte de S Pedro’ is Mount Kinabalu. The big inlet ‘Borneo’ is KK with its offshore islands. Present day Kuching is ‘Jamestratus’. Notice that the eastern side of the island was hardly explored for fear of pirates!
As a geomorphologist, I love to view old maps to compare them with the most recent editions of national survey maps to see the changing shape of coastlines through time. Sand bars once there have since disappeared, sea cliffs have receded, and settlements have been lost to the sea. Woodlands and hedges have been scrubbed out, field boundaries have changed and urban settlements have crept ever forward, invading the countryside. New roads have been driven through hill masses. Motorway progress is one thing but at what cost to the settlements and the communities through which the route is driven?
I can think of several examples of motorways in the UK that have separated farms from their farmland and also split settlements in two! All maps, whatever their age, are beautiful in that they provide scales and compass directions. Incidentally, in many very old maps, East was at the top of the map but today this is replaced with a Northing compass point!
The oldest original map that I possess is of the former Papal City of Avignon, in Provence, France, dated 1666. In frequent visits to this city, I can see that within the city walls little has changed other than large squares created during the French Revolution of 1769 where, 103 years before, impoverished people lived in hovels. The bridge with 22 arches once connecting the east to the west bank of the huge Rhone, across an island, is now but four arches wide. Such is the power of river erosion over the centuries!
Kuching and Kota Kinabalu are not without their changes in only the last 25 years. Secondary rainforests have been removed to allow housing estate developments. The varieties of birdlife have decreased in gardens, snakes and other animals now abound in urban areas; roads have cut through kampungs. Urban ‘infill’ should not be allowed destroy human and natural history.
Are we going robotic?
A GPS is not the answer to all our navigation problems. How many families today drive their children from point A to point B with their offspring clicking on this or that on mobile phones or iPad sites without looking beyond their screens? Are they not aware of the direction they are going or what they could see whilst passing along the route? Give them a recent edition of a national survey map and get them to interrupt it aloud with precise instructions to the driver. It’s called education!
A GPS system always needs updating as, indeed, does a map and whilst the former may need constant updating and is disposable, a map, whatever its age, should always be kept to pass down through generations of a family.
It is a family heirloom. Over a half century ago, I visited a second-hand bookshop where I purchased a first edition British Ordnance Survey map at a scale of 1:63,360. The seller asked me why I needed that old map, for it was out of date. I simply relied that I liked old maps! It cost me, then, the equivalent of today’s prices a mere 60 sen and now is worth over RM5,000.
Never throw away an old map. ‘There are courses for horses’ as the old saying goes but I like to think of myself as a ‘thoroughbred’ geographer/geologist or perhaps a living fossil! Reading a map is more exciting than looking at a screen but it needs practice to fold it up!