A Book For Chart Loving Sailors

Maphead; Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks             

                                                                                                  by Ken Jennings

I was given this book by Lloyd and Rhoda who know of my love of maps and of my work as a volunteer in the New York Public Library’s Map Room where I have been “cataloging” several thousand nautical charts published by the U.S. Navy's Hydrographic Office during 1850 to 1950. (My project will be the subject of a post after it is completed.) And such a great gift this book was! Maps have been a special love of mine since elementary school, and for the author as well. Like me, he judges other books by the presence and quality of the maps they contain. I once drew a map of the apartments in an alley, whose occupants' lives was the subject of a novel I read. Ken Jennings' claim to fame is that he won big on Jeopardy a few years ago.

Charts are such an important part of navigation in sailing that this book review has claimed space in this blog.  Jennings loops together disparate thoughts in an imaginative way making  new insightful discoveries in each chapter. The book is quite readable with simple words and sentence structure.

The bad news is that Jennings devotes precious little ink to “charts” even though they cover roughly two thirds of the earth’s surface -- the wet parts. His focus is on the dry bits. He even has a few paragraphs on the last place in the US to be mapped in any detail, out west, a century ago. No more “terra incognita” he bewails, noting that as a result map lovers have mapped things other than the surface of the earth, such as the human genome. He thus ignores the fact that there remains plenty of “agua incognita”. One example is the Caicos Bank, several hundred square miles of shallow ocean bottom on which the charts note that they have not been surveyed  -- virtually no soundings, requiring sailors to maintain a sharp lookout for underwater rocks. Yet the book’s descriptions of the exploits of the explorers, the Mercator projection (which permits great circle navigation to be drawn as a straight line by expanding polar regions relative to equatorial ones) and the marvels of GPS, make the book valuable even for sailors. The “charting” in the subtitle is not of the “world” as such, but of the “world of the geography wonks” of which I am only a minor grade compulsive.

I do not collect maps, except those I use in navigation and none of the valuable antique ones with pictures of natives or sea monsters in their corners. I do not read books about fantasy worlds, which map those worlds exquisitely. Travel, until the railroad and airplane, was rarely of great length. A world leading explorers club of London in the 19^th century required a member to have traveled at least 500 miles from home, which very few people had done. Today there is a club that admits to membership only those (mostly retired wealthy people) who have visited 100 countries. (I counted and I’m at 54 and not at all compulsive to achieve 100.) Others try to travel, as a few examples, to the highest point in every state or to every Starbucks in their state (which is another form of mapping and collecting destinations).

Other people collect photos of and are experts on highway signs on interstates. There is this new group of geeks (and Jennings admits he has become an addict): “geocachers.” They place little waterproof boxes in myriad places identified on a website by their longitude and latitude. Others of their breed look up the locations, use their GPSs to find the locations, sign their name to the log in the containers and record their personal finds on the website. Some try to collect the most sites, the most in one 24 hour period or the most as to which they are the “first” to find it. There are millions of geocache sites! I’m not addicted to this either. 

Nor am I a “Degree Confluence” collector: people who try to get to the exact spot where a whole degree of latitude and one of longitude cross – frequently in someone’s back yard.  Google Earth, Rand McNally and The National Geography Bee are each given their own chapters as are people who engage in a paper and pen nationwide road rally.

The future of maps and of people are discussed. Will paper remain? Will the content richness of electronic charting rule the world, destroying privacy? Does GPS destroy people’s ability to navigate on their own by making it unnecessary, like spell checker and calculators have allegedly destroyed people’s abilities to spell and do simple math? My own though on this is that the greatest danger to human navigation ability is the “Head Up”, rather than “North Up” display on people's chart plotters. There is nothing inherently logical about north being up other than that its consistency permits people have a sense of where they are going which Head Up destroys.

Jennings’ wife, he reports, like my own, has a poor sense of geography. He, like I have, has told his wife to take her best guess and then go in the opposite direction.

Those of you who enjoy maps will enjoy this book. Thanks again, Lloyd and Rhoda!