From the Congo to Nova Zembla. A small step

I referred to this beautiful book last Sunday. A year's worth of a German geographical magazine.

Not only is is 145 years old, it has the most beautiful maps. The publisher, Justus Perthes from the German city of Gotha, had a golden reputation for its map making. I also have an atlas of the classical world from these guys. Stunning work.

Not only does it have a piece on Livingstone's research into the origins of the Nile, it also has a lot of stuff on a polar exhibition to Nova Zembla. And this is where a legendary chapter in Dutch history comes to pass. Because what the polar expedition found was an old hut, known in Dutch as Het Behouden Huys, in which a group of Dutch sailors survived an arctic winter.

Here's the 1872 map, showing the location of the hut near the lowest cape on the eastern coast.

In 1596 an expedition led by captains Barentsz (yes, the sea is named after him) and Heemskerck tried to find a way to the East Indies by the north cape. It was hoped that in this way, the Spanish and Portuguese, who claimed the Indian Ocean and the Pacific as their monopolies, could be avoided.

The expedition failed, getting stuck in the polar ice. But the account of their survival during the polar winter, including fights with bears, was widely read and still forms one of the seminal elements of Dutch pride in their Golden Age. The magazine included a couple of classic prints out of the account.

With the north route proven to be unusable, Dutch traders forced more resources into breaking into the Indian Ocean, which lead to the foundation of the Dutch East India Company and a colonial empire that lasted for almost 350 years.

The Story of a Map

One of those instances where work and hobby coincide! A few weeks ago I considered doing a tweet with a thematic map to commemorate the birth of the Kingdom of the Netherlands on March 16th 1815. It is an interesting episode because it happened in the pressure cooker days after Napoleon had returned from Elba and it included at that time most of the area we now recognise as Belgium.

My take was to create a map of the Low Countries in 1815 and link it to data from our historical collection on the 1815 census. I though that sending out a tweet with the map would be a nice gesture and likely to get picked up by the media.

I set out searching for a shapefile (a file that holds the spatial information of the map, like borders of provinces) of the Low Countries in 1815 at the time but found none. Then I thought it might be possible to stick together maps of the north and the south into one map, which is what we ended up doing in two stages. I managed to find a shapefile of the north for 1815, and on the assumption that the current Belgian provinces were much like those in 1815 my colleague in the mapping department stuck  the two together. I was SO thrilled with the result.

And so were some of my colleagues, who suggested not just a tweet but a short article, using more data and adding more maps. I set to work on that, despite the fact that I would also have to hand in my two chapters for the Waterloo book this week. That was pretty stupid.

In my enthusiasm I showed the maps to my Belgian stepfather who immediately spotted some necessary changes: in 1962 a number of municipalities was exchanged between Flanders and Wallonia to conform to the language divide, and in 1920 the Belgian took an area on their eastern border including Eupen and Malmedy from the Germans as a compensation for damages in the First World War. And a few minor others.

Just as I was contemplating defeat, another Belgian connection, a very kind historical geographer from the University of Ghent, stepped in and offered the right historical shapefiles for Belgian provinces in 1815. The colleagues at the mapping department stuck those to the north (and a current shape of Luxembourg) and voilá!

The colleagues also suggested doing a storymap application which has turned out pretty awesome as well.

I struggled through the week, working on the article, the map and the book at the same time. Occasionally it looked like it would fail, but on Friday it all came together in the end: chapters went to the publisher, article was finalised and approved and the storymap finished. Much relieved and tired.

So on Monday: cake for the great people that did the mapping. They are awesome!