Map of a Nation (45 page)

The mapping of Ireland by a British surveying agency was always going to be contentious, given the active role in the history of Anglo-Irish relations that map-makers had played. In Henry VIII’s reign, ‘plantation’ had begun, the establishment of colonies of English and Scottish settlers on Irish land
confiscated
from rebels. This redistribution of forfeited estates created a need for new maps of Ireland during the reigns of Henry VIII and his successors, maps that were clear ‘ensigns of empire’ (in Wordsworth’s words in a
different
context). Then, after a violent uprising in 1641, Oliver Cromwell led his New Model Army into Ireland in 1649 to subdue the country again.
Following
his brutal success, a 1652 Act authorised the confiscation of lands from Irish Catholics who had opposed Cromwell’s troops and the redistribution of those lands among his soldiers. To assist this process, an English natural philosopher called William Petty offered to conduct a new survey of Ireland.
Over thirteen months, Petty sent around one thousand soldiers over the length and breadth of the confiscated lands, clutching simple measuring instruments. It was known as the ‘Down Survey’ because its results were ‘set down’ in maps, and Petty’s map was accepted in 1656 by a committee which began implementing the redistribution. A century later, a British military engineer called Charles Vallancey was posted to Ireland, where he remained for the rest of his life; in the late 1760s this ‘colourful and eccentric’ man embarked on a detailed military survey of his new home. Although it was still unfinished when he retired, Vallancey’s maps, like Petty’s, were images of Britain’s military presence in Ireland in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries
. In 1883, Lord Salisbury would express the long-running British view that Ireland’s rebelliousness could be partly controlled through cartography: ‘the most disagreeable part of the three kingdoms is Ireland, and therefore Ireland has a splendid map’.

Ireland also had its own tradition of maps made under less violent
circumstances
. By the 1790s, some of the most advanced surveys had been made by the extraordinary Anglo-Irish polymath Richard Lovell Edgeworth, who had mostly grown up in County Longford, in the centre of Ireland. Inventor, engineer, educational theorist, Lunar Society member, politician, landlord and even a dancer, Edgeworth’s fascination with science was said to have started at the age of seven, when he was shown an orrery in Dublin, a model showing the positions and motions of the solar system’s planets and moons. In his mid-twenties, Edgeworth won a medal from the Society of Arts for his innovative ‘waywiser’, or surveyor’s wheel. Shortly after this accolade, one of many in his lifetime for a host of inventions, Edgeworth’s father died and Richard inherited the family’s estate at Edgeworthstown, in County Longford. In 1782, Edgeworth, with his children and a new wife, permanently moved to this Irish estate and he became deeply involved in the land’s management and improvement, maintaining frequent contact with estate surveyors.

In the same decade, Edgeworth turned his attention to map-making. He became fascinated by William Roy’s Paris–Greenwich triangulation and composed an article that described how the event exemplified the need for an international telegraph system, which would have allowed the French and British teams to communicate remotely without having to meet up in person;
and he subsequently devised a scheme to map his home county through a mixture of astronomy and triangulation. Edgeworth used celestial
observations
to ascertain the latitude and longitude of his estate, and then measured a baseline along a straight road that ran from Edgeworthstown to Longford. Although he left his survey unfinished, a cartographic historian has labelled it ‘the first truly indigenous bid [in Ireland] for high exactitude’. And Edgeworth passed on his passion for maps to his son William. After Richard’s retirement, William Edgeworth worked for the Bogs Commission, surveying Ireland’s principal peat bogs with an eye to their later drainage and reclamation, and he finished his father’s incomplete map of County Longford. Then, after commissioning his own ultra-accurate theodolite from a Munich instrument-maker, William applied himself to the mapping of the north of County Roscommon; with his work it has been said that ‘native Irish cartography attained a new level’.

However, despite the Edgeworths’ remarkable achievements, map-making in Ireland at the beginning of the nineteenth century remained largely unsystematic, incomplete and haphazard. Maps were hard to obtain from Irish print-sellers and bookshops, and were ‘as little-known as classical
manuscripts
’, as one disgruntled map-maker remarked.

 

S
O WHEN
T
HOMAS
C
OLBY
put the Ordnance Survey forward as the most apt body to map Ireland, he was taking his place in a long history of British military efforts to subdue neighbouring territories through cartography. Early decisions about the staffing of the Irish Survey touched on nerves made acutely sensitive by that history. In 1824 a committee was formed to oversee the foundation of the ‘Irish Ordnance Survey’. Chaired by Thomas Spring Rice, Member of Parliament for Limerick, the committee debated whether the mapping project should be conducted by Irish or British surveyors. Spring Rice himself emphasised the importance of Irish involvement,
pointing
out that it would be helpful if ‘private individuals will … allow access to such maps and other documents, as can be of service’. But the imperious
Duke of Wellington had other ideas. He declared, ‘[I] was obliged to hold very strong language, stating my determination to have nothing to say to it if not allowed to perform the service in my own way, and by the qualified
officers
of the Ordnance. I positively refused to employ any surveyor in Ireland upon this service.’ Well-schooled in imperialism after his time as
Governor
-General in India, his brother Richard supported him and was adamant that an Irish map ‘cannot be executed by Irish engineers and Irish agents of any description. Neither science, nor skill, nor diligence, nor discipline, nor integrity, sufficient for such a work can be found in Ireland.’ The Wellesleys instructed the Ordnance Survey to staff its Irish endeavour with solely British military engineers, a decision which had a devastating effect on Ireland’s own map-makers, who were essentially put out of a job by the appearance of such accurate maps of the territory.

Following these orders, Thomas Colby obtained approval to raise three companies of ‘Sappers and Miners’, the rank and file of the Corps of Royal Engineers, to work on the Irish Ordnance Survey. These low-grade army personnel were significantly cheaper than civilian assistants but they were also a greater risk, being often poorly educated and with a tendency to drunkenness. Colby tried to take the Sappers’ moral health in hand and
stipulated
that they should be given Bibles, and prevented from growing beards or moustaches (so as to not ‘appear extraordinary or ridiculous’), and he demanded that their children be sent to school. In an attempt to sweeten the Ordnance Survey’s presence in Ireland, he also made it clear to his
superiors
that his men were distinguished from the regular Army and would not be prevailed upon to act as an ad hoc police force in cases of local unrest.

The Sappers required a thorough education in military surveying before departing from the mainland. Initially twenty young men were promised for the project, a number which fluctuated wildly throughout the Ordnance Survey’s time in Ireland. One newspaper described how they were sent to Cardiff ‘for further instruction in land surveying, under Mr Dawson, of the late Corps of Draughtsmen, with whom they will remain about six weeks, and then proceed to Ireland’. Colby also approached a man called Charles Pasley for help in perfecting his assistants’ skills. A venerated military
engineer
, with hooded eyes and a determined mouth, Pasley had served in
Minorca, Malta, Naples, Sicily, Denmark, Spain and the Netherlands during the Napoleonic Wars. After a horrific bayonet wound in his thigh and a bullet through his spine at the Battle of Flushing, Pasley returned to Britain with a silver war medal and a pension. He spent some of his subsequent time writing and in 1810 he published his
Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions
of the British Empire
. By November 1812 it had already gone into a fourth
edition
.

In January 1813, a copy of Pasley’s
Essay
was lying on the table of an
Lshaped
red-brick house, once a farm and inn, in Chawton village, on a busy crossroads in Hampshire. One of the occupants of this house wrote to her sister: ‘we are quite run over with books’. ‘
I
,’ she emphasised proudly, ‘am reading a Society-Octavo, an Essay on the Military Police [
sic
] & Institutions of the British Empire, by Capt. Pasley of the Engineers.’ This was ‘a book which I protested against at first,’ this correspondent explained, ‘but which upon trial I find delightfully written & highly entertaining’. Her esteem for Pasley was passionate. ‘I am … much in love with the author,’ she wrote happily: ‘the first soldier I ever sighed for, but he does write with
extraordinary
force & spirit.’

Jane Austen did not describe exactly what drew her with such ardour to Charles Pasley’s
Essay
. But in her novel
Pride and Prejudice
, she jubilantly described ‘all the glories of’ an army encampment in which ‘tents stretched forth in beauteous uniformity of lines, crowded with the young and the gay, and dazzling with scarlet’. Exhibiting such a susceptibility to the attractions of the military, it is perhaps no wonder that she was sympathetic to Pasley’s highly militaristic idea that, ‘whilst we glory in the freedom, the public spirit, and patriotism of this country, [we must] not give way to the empty delusion, that by them alone we are to be invincible’. His
Essay
’s overriding message was that Britain must become a thoroughly ‘military nation’ and that all citizens should consider themselves in ‘spirit’ as amateur soldiers, spies and surveyors in the service of the state. Pasley also stridently asserted the crucial importance of maps to military defence and attack. He emphasised that ‘wherever we act, we must have proper plans and information, if we wish to succeed’. Long
sections
of the
Essay
lamented Britain’s failure to possess ‘as good maps … of most countries, as are in possession of their native governments’.

When Colby contacted him in 1825 to help design an intensive ‘Course of Study for Surveying Companies’ in Ireland, Pasley was a tutor at an
educational
establishment at Chatham in Kent, which had been founded in 1812 to teach graduates from the Woolwich Military Academy intent on pursuing elevated careers in the Engineering Corps. At Chatham, Pasley had devised a course of instruction that over 500 days gave his students an advanced education in surveying and reconnaissance techniques, mining, bridging, architecture and siege operations, climaxing in a summer’s placement on the Ordnance Survey. On 23 February 1825 Pasley’s diary recorded that Colby paid a visit to Chatham, where this distinguished instructor ‘show[ed] him the proposed Course’ he had devised for the Interior Surveyors in Ireland, which would last about six months. One of Pasley’s pointed
recommendations
was that ‘the name Royal Sapper and Miner ought to be abolished’ to avoid antagonism with Irish locals who may harbour resentment at the
military
map-makers’ presence. The warning was prescient.

 

I
N THE EARLY
summer of 1825, following an initial reconnaissance the previous year, the Ordnance Survey formally began its operations in Ireland. Colby believed that it would take seven years to map Ireland in enough detail to clearly show its townlands’ boundaries. After those seven years were up, however, he would be forced to revise the estimated
completion
date to 1844. So for two decades, the great majority of the Ordnance Survey’s personnel were in Ireland, leaving only ten officers of engineers with ten assistant surveyors back in Britain. Very little new surveying would be done in Britain during the Ordnance Survey’s time in Ireland; its
remaining
map-makers were instructed to concentrate on implementing Colby’s reforms and revising the maps that had already been completed of a large tranche of southern England and Wales. Many of these surveyors found the task of revision dispiriting compared with the creation of new maps, but over the next twenty years they amended published and unpublished surveys of, among other locations, Glamorgan, Lincolnshire and Lundy Island (which had been so disastrously mapped the first time around). The engravers were
also hard at work during this period, and the 1820s and 1830s saw a
proliferation
of new maps reach the public, including those of Pembrokeshire, the Gower and Glamorgan. By 1841, when the Ordnance Survey started to
consider
transferring some of its personnel back to Britain, maps had been published of the whole of Wales. But the two-decade sojourn in Ireland would drastically delay the completion of the First Series of one-inch Ordnance Survey maps of England and Wales.