Map of a Nation (13 page)

The Society of Arts advertised its first prize of
£
100 for the map-making competition in 1759. The response was somewhat underwhelming. In its first six years, only eleven candidates applied for the prize, out of whom a mere two were successful. Some applicants were full-time map-makers or estate surveyors, who could use the products of their day-to-day work in the task; but others were teachers, publishers or map-sellers, who were forced to work around other commitments. In the event, only one professional county
surveyor
applied and many candidates were put off by the meagreness of the prize.
£
100 was not adequate to fund such maps as the Society envisaged. The cost of instruments, assistants and above all the time required to make
a good county map could exceed twenty times that amount, as one of the winning candidates discovered. The Society’s prize acted as a gratifying award once the work had been completed, but it was not a proper salary.

The competition’s time-limit also dissuaded many potential applicants. One year to map an entire county from scratch was terrifyingly rapid, and many contenders were forced to apply for extensions. Benjamin Donn, a teacher of mathematics and natural philosophy from Bideford, began his survey of Devon shortly after the Society first advertised its competition, but he did not publish it until 1 January 1765. Another candidate took seven years to complete a map of Somerset. The productions of other applicants were rejected by the Society for a variety of reasons: some petty, some sensible. Unsuccessful candidates were refused on the grounds of their maps’ inaccuracy; failure to pay the Society of Arts’ annual subscription;
incompletion
of the map or insolvency; ineligibility on the grounds that they had not declared entrance to the competition prior to beginning surveying; and the submission of a map that had been begun for another purpose many years before the contest was advertised in 1759.

Between the beginning of the map-making competition and the last
official
prize offered in 1802 the Society of Arts paid out a mere
£
460 in cash, plus seven medals and a silver palette, in reward for only thirteen county
surveys
. The accuracy and topographical detail of these maps showed a considerable improvement on their predecessors, but the Society of Arts’ competition had failed to compile Britain’s first complete, accurate national survey on a uniform scale. Nevertheless, the event was a notable stepping stone in the progress of eighteenth-century cartography. Its members had emphasised the importance of accurately surveying the ground from scratch using the most innovative methods and sophisticated instruments available, and the competition had cemented the one-inch scale as the standard for county maps. It has been claimed that the improvement of English county surveying in this period could ‘without much doubt be traced to the offer by the Society of a prize of
£
100’.

When the Society of Arts decided to close its competition in 1802, it was because it had been superseded by the Ordnance Survey. Although it would be a military establishment that was ultimately responsible for creating Britain’s
first national mapping agency, the Ordnance Survey’s ambitions and methods owed not a little to the traditions of civilian county surveying that had fuelled the Society of Arts’ competition. That contest’s progenitor, William Borlase, had been remarkably prophetic in his hope that such an event would prompt the government to instigate a national surveying programme. And in the meantime, between the opening of the Society of Arts’ competition and the foundation of the Ordnance Survey, a number of other developments were also involved in the gestation of Britain’s national mapping agency.

 

I
N
1763 W
ILLIAM
R
OY
had signed the lease on his first London
property
, a four-storey brick residence on Great Pulteney Street, a small thoroughfare in London’s fashionable West End on which both General Wade and Paul Sandby had once lived. Sixteen years later, in 1779, he upgraded, and moved a few streets further north to a handsome modern townhouse on Argyll Street, a road running parallel to Regent Street, in a quarter set aside for military officers. Today, a blue plaque marks the house that belonged to ‘the founder of the Ordnance Survey’, but its interior has changed beyond almost all recognition. Roy had used the fourth floor as an observatory and this entire storey has been demolished and replaced with an elaborate fire-escape. Offices now orbit a central staircase that spirals up to a radiant stained-glass ceiling and the ground floor is currently leased out to the clothing chain French Connection: an amusing serendipity, for, as we shall see, one of Roy’s greatest contributions to the earth sciences was a measurement conducted between the Royal Observatory at Greenwich and the Paris Observatory, a different sort of ‘French Connection’. The Argyll Street house has not shrugged off all traces of its map-minded proprietor, however. A few years ago, the property’s current owner prised open a bricked-up fireplace to discover, stashed away for around two hundred years, a presentation copy of Roy’s
Military Antiquities of the Romans in North Britain.

Roy’s lease of these prestigious quarters indicated a shift in his emotional landscape. In 1767, his brother James, who had been a Presbyterian minister
in East Lothian, died. His elderly mother was still alive, living in Lanark, and Roy paid her a visit every few years, but London was gradually replacing Scotland as the map-maker’s home. Its clubs and societies were the focus of Roy’s perambulations around the capital. He was a committed and active member of the Society of Antiquaries, which was based at the site of Robin’s Coffee-House on Chancery Lane until 1780, when it moved to Somerset House on the Strand, near the Royal Academy of Arts. In 1812 the satirical cartoonist George Cruickshank drew a caricature of ‘the Antiquarian Society’ that conjured up the rambunctious atmosphere of its meetings: in this print, greying sages confer in cabals with the utmost sincerity about items of dubious authenticity. A figure on the far right of Cruickshank’s
picture
, attired in a natty red military jacket, with a pocket stuffed full of papers marked ‘Ordnanance [
sic
] Affairs’, looks covetously at a Roman vase in the middle of the table. It has been suggested that this balding gentleman is a rare representation of the late-middle-aged Roy. But fond as he was of the Society of Antiquaries, it was Roy’s immersion in the activities of another prominent London organisation that was to introduce him to those in the vanguard of research into the earth sciences.

William Roy was admitted as a Fellow of the Royal Society, England’s chief crusader in the ‘Improv[ement of] Natural Knowledge’, on 9 April 1767. He was recommended by the telescope-maker James Short, the astronomer John Bevis and the horologist William Harrison as ‘highly worthy of that Honour’ of fellowship and ‘likely to become a very useful Member’. Roy threw himself into the life of the Royal Society, regularly attending the dinners that were organised by its official dining society, the ‘Royal Philosophers’ Club’, which offered a forum for relaxed, intellectual chatter. It is interesting to reflect on whether Roy’s Scottish accent ever proved a burden at this time: it was a
difficult
period to be a Scot in London. In the wake of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, the long-standing antagonism between the English and the Scots had grown more pronounced. And shortly after the coronation of the young King George III in 1760, his childhood tutor John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, had been appointed First Lord of the Treasury (to all intents and purposes, Prime Minister). Bute was Scottish, and in his election many saw a similar abuse of kingly power to that associated with the Stuart monarchs. Scotophobic
cartoons flooded London’s print-shops, casting immigrants from North Britain as vagrants that were bleeding England’s prosperity dry. Booksellers touted manuals that promised the dilution of a Scottish accent and the complete eradication of ‘the expressions of a beggarly Scot’. In William Roy’s case,
however
, his nationality did not hinder the progress of his career.

Four years after Roy’s election to the Royal Society, in July 1771, Captain James Cook returned to England after a three-year voyage to the South Pacific in the ship
Endeavour
. Cook’s return sent London’s intelligensia wild with enthusiasm for tales of exotic exploration and the advanced empirical methods he had used to record his findings. Cook was a talented naval
surveyor
, and one contemporary commentator has defined his voyage as the moment that ‘
truth
became our central criterion’ in the field of geography. But the public were even more taken with Cook’s co-traveller, a 28-year-old aristocratic botanist called Joseph Banks.

A striking young man with dominant features and sparkling, dark eyes, Banks bubbled over with tales of his exploits in ‘paradise’. One of the Royal Society’s most illustrious members, he revelled in the attention he garnered at the
dinners
of the Royal Philosophers’ Club. It was on one of these occasions that Roy first made Banks’s acquaintance. We can imagine the pair sitting beside each other at the large oak table, Roy initially reticent, a little gruff even, but
warming
up, and occasionally smiling as the young man entertained him with stories of his attempts at surfing in Tahiti. We can imagine Banks, too, leaning in to catch Roy’s hushed accounts of his mapping exploits in the Scottish Highlands, an area considered less known ‘than either of the Indies’. But Banks soon tired of the Royal Philosophers’ rules that restricted the number of
nonmember
guests that could attend its dinners. He decided to start his own breakaway dining association with a more relaxed admissions policy, which he called the Royal Society Club. Roy was not the only one to follow Banks to this new dining club. The young Henry Phipps, Lord Mulgrave, who would later become Foreign Secretary, transferred his affections too, as did Charles Blagden, an eminent physician who soon became the botanist’s right-hand man. On 23 November 1775 the Royal Society Club held its first meeting, at the Mitre Tavern on Fleet Street. It was a resounding success, and Roy became a fixture at the hearty, convivial dinners that followed.

These were not just free lunches: Roy well and truly earned his fellowship of the Royal Society over the course of the next decade, attending its social gatherings and presenting the results of his work. At that association he found a storehouse of talented scientists whose research prompted him to think in new and exciting ways about the process of mapping. Although Roy continued to work for the Board of Ordnance, in the period that followed the rejection of his proposal for a national military survey in 1766 it was his contact with the ripening field of geodesy, ‘earth-measurement’ (from
geo
, earth, and
daiein
, to divide), that edged him closer to the foundation of the mapping agency of which he dreamed.

 

I
N THE EARLY
1770s, William Roy became fascinated by ‘that curious and useful branch of philosophy, whereby vertical heights are determined to a great degree of exactness by the pressure of the atmosphere alone’: that is, the use of barometers to measure altitude. Roy carried his barometer around London, systematically measuring and recording heights. He lodged himself at the top of the stairs in St Paul’s Cathedral, reporting also that ‘I have
sometimes
found, particularly in frosty weather, that a thermometer placed on the pavement of the North-side of St Paul’s Church-yard … would stand two degrees lower than that which was exposed on the North-side of the iron gallery over the dome.’ And he enjoyed the experience of measuring the air pressure on the first floor of the dining room of the Spaniard’s Inn, a
sixteenth
-century oak-panelled public house that still crowns the north-western corner of Hampstead Heath. Roy also enlisted the help of friends scattered across Britain to glean as great a variety of barometric observations as
possible
. He asked the extremely thin Edinburgh-based physician and amateur astronomer James Lind – ‘a mere lath’ who was married to a ‘fat handsome wife’, Ann Elizabeth Mealy, ‘who is as tall as himself and almost six times as big’ – to carry a barometer to ‘the summit of Arthur’s Seat’ and ‘the
observatory
of Hawk-hill westward’. Lind’s ‘spirit of the kindest tolerance and the purest wisdom’ was praised by his adoring surrogate son, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (who, it was rumoured, was saved from the asylum by the
physician’s intervention), and Lind gladly agreed to Roy’s request. In 1774 Roy had a friendship with a fellow member of the Royal Society whose
ambitious
project gave the map-maker an opportunity to take his barometer to Scotland in person.