Map of a Nation (5 page)

Accuracy, or rather ‘the quantifying spirit’, thus became a new priority for map-makers in the eighteenth century, inspiring such dramatic advances in
instruments
and methods that, by the second half of the century, Britain was home to some of the most precise map-making and astronomical instruments in the world and the most diligent, rational surveyors. The emergence of relatively trustworthy maps had profound effects on the way they were used by the general populace. As we shall see later, the new maps assisted the process by which Britain’s component regions were integrated into a unified nation. Progress in cartography occurred in parallel with the improvement of the nation’s road networks, the innovations in coach design that made travel cheaper and less uncomfortable, and historical and cultural events that heralded a new dawn in the British tourist industry. Maps became
hallmarks
of an ‘enlightened’ mind and nation. And in 1720 a surveyor called George Mark issued a call to arms to the principal players of the Scottish Enlightenment, begging them to further the state of cartography: ‘’Tis truely strange why our Scotish [
sic
] Nobility and Gentry, who are so universally esteemed for their Learning, Curiosity and Affection for their Country, should suffer an Omission of this Nature … in what so much concerns the Honours of the Nation!’

 

D
AVID
W
ATSON GREW
up in the early decades of the Scottish Enlightenment among a family who were enthusiastic sponsors of its values. In spite of a certain degree of anti-intellectual bluster on Robert Dundas’s part, and his reputation for never having been ‘known to read a book’, Arniston’s library was impressively stocked with travel-narratives,
topographical
writings, atlases, maps and expensive globes. A theoretical knowledge of surveying was considered integral to the education of an
enlightened gentleman, who was expected to be able to commission and judge maps of his own estate. Arniston House accordingly boasted an
inspiring
collection of surveying instruments and a series of cartographic depictions of the large and varied surrounding estate. We can imagine that David Watson, and Elizabeth and Robert Dundas’s own children, looked on in fascination as well-known estate surveyors, and famous architects such as William Adam, laid measuring chains along the lengths of the youngsters’ favourite avenues of trees, translating the familiar Midlothian landscape into numbers, angles and lines on a map.

The Dundases’ enthusiasm for geography was such that they even attended the prestigious lectures on surveying that were delivered by the Edinburgh mathematician Colin Maclaurin. A child prodigy who was elected Professor of Mathematics at Aberdeen University at the age of
nineteen
, Maclaurin had so impressed Isaac Newton with his work that Newton had even offered to pay his salary. At Edinburgh, Maclaurin devised a rigorous course of mathematical education that emphasised the discipline’s practical applications, especially to map-making. The
Scots Magazine
described how, in his lectures, Maclaurin ‘begins with demonstrating the grounds of vulgar and decimal arithmetic; then proceeds to Euclid; and after … insists on surveying, fortification and other practical parts’. Maclaurin’s lecture-theatre was an intellectual hothouse that produced a brood of illustrious surveyors, architects and mathematical instrument-makers such as Alexander Bryce, Murdoch Mackenzie, Robert Adam and James Short. Sitting in Maclaurin’s audience, the Dundases, and perhaps Watson too, were among inspiring cartographical company.

As David Watson approached his mid teens, his sister and her husband applied themselves to furthering his career. Characteristically of younger
relatives
of the gentry, Watson expressed an interest in joining the Army. Robert Dundas used his influence to obtain a commission for his younger brother-in-law, and Watson duly spent much of his twenties and thirties on the Continent. He endured a ‘long banishment at Gib[raltar]’, where the British were building fortifications, and he enjoyed a martial ‘Scuffle’ during the War of the Polish Succession. But while Watson was fighting abroad, tragedy struck at Arniston. In November 1733 Elizabeth and Robert’s young
son came home from the local school in Dalkeith with signs of sickness. The symptoms rapidly worsened and revealed themselves as smallpox, and the boy was dead within a week. The couple’s three other little children were infected and one by one between November 1733 and January 1734 they all died. By early December 1733 Elizabeth herself was ‘confind to her Chamber and pretty much to her bed’. When her two small daughters died at the beginning of the new year, their mother was too weak to be told. By 6 February 1734 this poor woman had finally succumbed.

Robert Dundas retreated to London to mourn ‘the best of mothers’ and ‘an incomparable wife’. But as one door closed for him, another was about to open. A couple of weeks before the arrival of the smallpox at Arniston, Dundas had paid a visit to a client in the Upper Ward of Lanarkshire, a region stretching south from the town of Carluke, about nineteen miles south-east of Glasgow. Sir William Gordon was the owner of two conjoined estates, Hallcraig and Milton, which extended west from Carluke along the dank northern edge of a small brook called Jock’s Gill, then reached up onto wide fertile plains, before dropping down into the lush crook of the river Clyde, where the road stopped for want of a bridge. Sir William was a canny operator, one of the very few to have made money from the South Sea Bubble – the stockmarket crash that had devastated Britain’s economy in 1720 – and he had been seeking legal advice from Dundas for over a decade. No doubt one of the chief attractions of Gordon’s case for his lawyer was his young daughter Ann: a spirited, flirtatious and enormously beautiful woman. Her portrait, painted by the famous Joseph Highmore and now hanging on a staircase in Arniston House, shows large dark eyes slanted in readiness to laugh, fashionably alabaster skin and teak-coloured hair from whose arrangements a few unruly curls escaped. Elizabeth Dundas, to whom
writing
did not come naturally, had not been able to accompany her husband to Lanarkshire on this occasion and she laboured over a formal apology to Ann, hoping to ‘have the happness [
sic
] to see’ the eighteen-year-old woman in Edinburgh soon.

Robert Dundas’s visit to Milton in October 1733 lasted only a few days. His carriage overturned on the bad roads that led out of Carluke on his way home, and he suffered what Elizabeth termed ‘a truble in his bake’ for many
weeks. Upon returning to Arniston, Dundas too wrote to Ann. ‘I won’t omitt ane opportunity of writing to you however litle I may have to say,’ he assured her. He was positive that, ‘when I speak of affection[,] good
oppinion
and every good wish I am capable of, these will be no news to you’. Dundas designated Ann his ‘rival wife’, and he reflected ponderously that ‘this is quite new for a man and two wifes to be all one’. He signed off by exhorting her to ‘believe me Dear Anne’ that he was ‘with the greatest esteem and pleasure, as much yours as I can be … my Dear Girl’.

In the wake of Elizabeth’s death only a few months later, Ann Gordon wrote back to Robert Dundas. She sympathised with ‘the Loss You have … Made’ but she firmly reminded him that ‘You once gave me Reason to Pretend some Tittle to Your Heart’. With a mixture of sincerity and
flirtatiousness
, Ann openly informed this man, who was almost thirty years her senior, that ‘I Intend to Pursue You with so Much Friendship & Contempt[,] Love and Indifference as Must Convince You’. He was easily convinced and the ‘rival wife’ soon became his lawful spouse. Ann and Robert’s wedding took place four months after Elizabeth’s death. There were few guests. In the circumstances of the recent devastation of Dundas’s first family, a discreet wedding seemed appropriate. Dundas did not even inform his surviving son Robert, or ‘Robin’ as he was affectionately known, who was studying law at university in Utrecht, of his remarriage until three months after the fact. ‘I did not incline to owne my mariage to any body,’ he wrote.

Robert Dundas’s second marriage to Ann Gordon did not mean that he excluded David Watson, his first wife’s younger brother, from his affections. On the contrary, Robert and Ann too continued to take an active interest in Watson’s career. In 1742 the Dundases were behind an alteration in his
profession
that capitalised on Watson’s childhood love of maps. Dundas supplicated the Secretary of State for Scotland to help move his brother-in-law from the regular army to the Board of Ordnance. He successfully persuaded that minister to intercede with the Master-General of the Ordnance, and arranged for Watson to enter ‘upon the Establishment of an Engineer’. David was instructed to ‘immediately come here’, to London, to clinch the deal, and the Secretary of State reflected with satisfaction that this ‘would be a good beginning’ for him. By 1743, thanks to Dundas’s endeavours, Watson had
taken up his new post as a military engineer under the employment of the Board of Ordnance. He became adept at reconnaissance, plotting march routes that transported armies between destinations. And one of his principal concerns was map-making.

 

A
DEPARTMENT KNOWN
as the ‘Office of Ordnance’ had existed in Britain since the late fourteenth century. The Ordnance was an adjunct to the Royal Arsenal, which was housed at the Tower of London, a large
complex
of buildings on the north side of the river Thames. Responsible for the administration of the monarch’s armaments, arsenals and fortified castles, the body was renamed in 1518 as the Board of Ordnance, a name that stuck for almost 350 years. Ordnance is abbreviated from
ordinance
, a complex word that covers a host of meanings, all united by a general sense of ‘that which is ordered or ordained’, but the word’s foremost association was
military
. Ordinance, or the French
ordonnance
, denoted an army’s arrangement in ranks or lines and most importantly the ‘ordinantia ad bellum’, the
military
equipment, guns, cannons and explosives, for whose management the Board was responsible.

The Board of Ordnance was an independent military body, separate from the Army. Where regular soldiers answered to the monarch,
employees
of the Ordnance received their instructions from the Board. This was similar to the Navy, who operated under the thumb of the Board of Admiralty. By the end of the seventeenth century, the Ordnance’s
responsibilities
were beginning to separate into two principal areas: artillery and engineering. On 16 May 1717 this polarisation was made official. Two companies were raised in the Board of Ordnance: the Royal Artillery and the Corps of Engineers. Guns and cannons were the business of the first; fortifications and harbours that of the second, whose rank and file were known as the Sappers. The intellectual sophistication of the Ordnance’s staff meant that the Engineers and the Artillery were later jointly known as ‘the scientific corps’.

Map-making was a responsibility, albeit a minor one, of both Ordnance companies. And it was also the concern of another separate body within the Board of Ordnance, which was tucked away in the White Tower at the heart of the Tower of London’s complex. Here a Drawing Room could be found, in which a host of map draughtsman busied themselves. Comprised of civilians, not military men, from 1777 onwards young draughtsmen would train here from the age of eleven or twelve, receiving instruction in the conventions of military surveying and in mathematics, especially in trigonometry and geometry. To the Engineers, which David Watson entered, map-making was especially pertinent as a way of describing sites for
fortifications
. A Royal Warrant of 1683 stipulated that a military engineer ‘ought to be well skilled in all parts of the mathematicks, more particularly in Stereometry, Altimetry, and Geodesia, to take Distances, Heights, Depths, Surveys of Land, Measure solid bodies’ and to ‘keep perfect draughts of every fortifications, forts and fortresses of our Kingdom’. Over the course of the eighteenth century the Board of Ordnance’s employees produced a
collection
of large-scale surveys of specific spots in the country that were demarcated for the erection of forts and harbours.