Snufkin in Moominland: Frances Hardinge on Tove Jansson’s map And they are sensitive to the mysterious fourth and fifth dimensions of cartography – the relationship of mapmaker to landscape, and the relationship of map-reader to map.

They offer knowledge that might be found, as it were, off-grid. They tell of the inches and tints of things. Such maps, held in the mind, are alert to a landscape’s changeability as well as its fixtures. We would do well to recall these felt maps – for they are born of experience and of attention. Inhabitants of the Marshall Islands used sticks and shells, bound together with plant fibre, to create similarly buoyant accounts of the ocean currents that ran between the islands of their archipelago. In this way, the maps were portable, resistant to cold and, if they were dropped into water, would float and could be retrieved. The Inuit people are also known to have carved three-dimensional maps of coastlines from wood.

Unable to communicate directly with the officer, but comprehending his desire for orientation, the Inuit created a map on the beach, using sticks, stones and pebbles “in a very ingenious and intelligible manner” to build a scaled replica of the region. In 1826, at Cape Prince of Wales in the Canadian Arctic, a British naval officer encountered a hunting party of Inuit. It is a way of representing the world that has brought uncountable benefits, but so authoritative is its method, so apparently irrefutable the knowledge it dispenses about a place, that it has all but eliminated our sense of the worth of map-as-story: of cartography that is self-made, felt, sensuous.Ĭultures that grow up in close correspondence with a particular terrain often develop innovative methods of representing that terrain. The grid map has proved an efficient method for converting place into resource, and for devising large-scale approaches to a landscape. They are organised around the passage of the traveller, and their perimeters are the perimeters of the sight or experience of that traveller. They are records of specific journeys, rather than describing a space within which journeys might take place. Story maps, by contrast, represent a place as it is perceived by an individual or by a culture moving through it. Their danger is that they so reduce the world to data that they record space independent of being.Ī plan of the road from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City from an 1850 edition of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. The power of such maps is that they make it possible for any individual or object to be located within an abstract totality of space. A grid map places an abstract geometric meshwork upon a space, a meshwork within which any item or individual can be coordinated. It is instructive to consider these earlier artistic forms of mapping, for they exemplify neglected ways of proceeding within a landscape.īroadly speaking, we might say there are two types of map: the grid map and the story map. It was an art that mingled knowledge and supposition, that told stories about places, and in which astonishment, love, memory and fear were part of its projections. But before it was a field science, cartography was – as Stevenson proved – an art. We are now habituated to regard cartography as a science: an endeavour of exacting precision, whose ambition is the elimination of subjectivity from the representation of a given place. Countless children have made landfall on its blond beaches, moved cautiously through its grey woods and seen sunlight flash hard on the wild stone spires of its crags. From that flat page sprang up one of the most compellingly realised of imaginary places. Poring over the map with Lloyd, he began to populate his landscape with characters (Long John Silver, Captain Flint, Jim Hawkins) and to thicken it with plot. Stevenson’s map was drawn to set a child dreaming, but it worked most powerfully on its grownup author, inspiring him to write his great pirate novel, Treasure Island.

Magic maps grid reference