Map of a Nation (52 page)

A
PLAY FIRST
performed in 1980, which is now a stalwart of school
syllabuses
, has meant that the Irish Ordnance Survey is most popularly thought of as a tool of English imperialism. Brian Friel’s
Translations
was the first play to be staged by the Field Day theatre company, which had been established by Friel and the actor Stephen Reagh to take drama to rural Irish communities. ‘Field Day’ is a pun on Friel-Reagh, in which the phrase’s military
connotations
are overturned in favour of more joyous associations. Friel and Reagh entertained particular hopes for Ireland. Alongside the nation’s traditional four provinces of Leinster, Munster, Connacht and Ulster, Field Day wanted to provide ‘a fifth province to which artistic and cultural loyalty can be offered’. Friel described how the theatre company ‘has grown out of that sense of impermanence, of people who feel themselves native to a province or certainly to an island but in some way feel that a disinheritance is offered to them’.

Translations
used the Ordnance Survey’s naming activities in 1830s Ireland as an image of this disinheritance. It tells the story of the clash of a fictional rural Irish community with the military might of the British Engineers of the Ordnance Survey, and narrates how the map-makers’ brutal translation of Ireland’s native place names ‘into the King’s good English’ left its residents ‘imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of … fact’. In the play, the Ordnance Survey’s acts of Anglicisation are nothing more than ‘a bloody military operation’, perpetrated by brutal and philistine English colonisers on the disenfranchised Irish. In Friel’s eyes, John O’Donovan was a perfidious ‘quisling’ whose actions were an ‘eviction of sorts’.

Translations
is a play about bad acts of translation, and Brian Friel carried out many of his own wilful mistranslations of history in the play, such as describing how the surveyors carried firearms (they didn’t). Most
importantly
, we have seen how the Irish Ordnance Survey’s character was much more complicated than the purely imperialist endeavour that Friel describes. Comprised almost entirely of Irish-speaking Catholics, the Topographical Branch’s ‘imperative duty’ was to promote Irish cultural heritage in the face of the ‘collective folly and stupid intellect of the Empire’, in Eugene O’Curry’s words. O’Donovan’s defence of the seriousness of the study of Irish literature played a crucial role in a movement known as the ‘Gaelic revival’, in which Ireland’s ancient culture was seen to contribute meaningfully to the nation’s contemporary identity and confidence. The Topographical Branch has even been termed ‘the first peripatetic university Ireland had seen since the wanderings of her ancient scholars’.

So
Translations
is hardly a faithful account of the Ordnance Survey’s
activities
in Ireland. But Friel never intended that it should be. His next play,
Making History
, explored how the ‘empirical truth’ of history might be
justifiably
transformed into ‘a heroic literature’ for the purposes of bolstering national self-confidence.
Making History
authorised ‘the tiny bruises’ that Friel openly admitted had been ‘inflicted on history’ by his earlier play.
Translations
had turned the Ordnance Survey into a mythical villain on which audiences could project frustration and anger at imperial history. Friel openly admitted in his diary that
Translations
was ‘inaccurate history’ and he expressed frustration that it ‘was offered pieties that I didn’t intend for it’.

 

I
N ITS
T
OPOGRAPHICAL
Branch and memoir project, its geological interests and its boundary delineation, the Irish Ordnance Survey showed just how ambitious a map could be. It was Thomas Colby’s proudest achievement and his most luminous legacy. He saw the survey as ‘a
monument
for future generations’: a testimony to his own achievements and an aid to Irish economic progress. But the same all-embracing character that made the Irish Ordnance Survey such an awe-inspiring achievement was also the greatest hindrance to its principal objective: the completion of six-inch maps of the entire nation. Thanks to Colby’s obsessive perfectionism, the project advanced very slowly in the years following its foundation. The Survey’s lack of tangible results provoked a governmental enquiry in 1827 and 1828. The chair of this investigation, a rather overbearing military engineer called James Carmichael Smyth, who had been chosen specially by the Duke of Wellington, insisted on the Ordnance Survey’s adoption of a number of time-saving and cost-cutting measures. He recommended that its director stay focused on the completion of the Irish map, and then the First Series of England and Wales, with as much expediency as possible, and put a stop to the Ordnance Survey’s geological researches. Colby was incensed and he complained so vociferously at Smyth’s downright philistinism that a new enquiry was set in place a year or so later. This time, Colby’s old compadre Charles Pasley was appointed as its chair. Pasley’s diary described
confidentially
how ‘our report went to give the responsibility to Colby again, giving him his own way as far as we could’.

Colby had initially quoted
£
300,000 for the completion of the Ordnance Survey’s national map and boundary survey of Ireland. But by 1832 its
various
projects had consumed this entire amount and not a single finished map had yet been published. Colby blamed the boundary measurement for much of the expense, arguing that he could not have known either how many townlands Ireland possessed or the complexity of their borders. He also pointedly remarked that the time-saving devices that had been implemented by Smyth in 1828 had only succeeded in producing sub-standard maps, whose revision had significantly delayed the Ordnance Survey’s progress:
‘You recollect the cry of haste, haste, etc., useless accuracy and so forth against me. Now the valuation is delayed, the survey is delayed, by the unavoidable revision [of] the early plans.’ At this point, he estimated that another
£
420,000 and twelve years would be required to finish the Irish map. The Board of Ordnance and the government had little choice but to acquiesce.

In 1835, the newly founded British Association for the Advancement of Science hosted its annual meeting in Dublin. Its conferences were lively and pioneering affairs: the very word ‘scientist’, now such a staple of our
vocabulary
, had been coined by ‘some ingenious gentleman’ at an early gathering. (It is sometimes said that it was invented by Coleridge who, along with Wordsworth, attended a number of the Association’s assemblies.) The 1835 Dublin meeting lived up to the British Association’s illustrious reputation. William Rowan Hamilton was secretary, and he presented an address in which he argued that collaboration between different scientists from a host of multiple disciplines and nations was the bedrock of progress. ‘Genius is essentially sympathetic,’ Hamilton urged. It ‘is sensitive to influences from without, and fain would spread itself abroad, and embrace the whole circle of humanity with the strength of a world-grasping love’. He held up an early copy of the first production of the Ordnance Survey’s Irish memoir project and circulated it among the British Association’s delegates as an epitome of the ‘social feelings’ that he encouraged. The response to this short draft of the Ordnance Survey’s memoir of the parish of Templemore, in County Londonderry, was overwhelmingly positive. The British Association’s
Report
of its Dublin meeting heaped praise on the book and its members urged Colby not to relinquish the memoir project until every one of Ireland’s parishes possessed such an admirable volume.

Buoyed up by the British Association’s praise, Colby and Larcom spent eighteen months greedily cramming their tome with as many products of the surveyors’ researches as possible. When the
Ordnance Survey of the county of Londonderry, volume the first: memoir of the city and north western liberties of
Londonderry, parish of Templemore
was published in November 1837, it began by describing how ‘a map is in its nature but a part of a Survey, and that much of the information connected with it, can only be advantageously embodied
in a memoir, to which the map then serves as a graphical index’. Over the next 350 pages, the memoir provided a compendious account of the ‘
physical
features of the ground’ of Templemore, its

Behind a contents page that resembled an Enlightenment tree of knowledge, the Ordnance Survey’s memoir tried to produce ‘a full face portrait of the land’.

It is possible to view Colby and Larcom’s memoir project as the creation of an imperialist archive of knowledge about Ireland, and some historians have done so. That Larcom went on to supervise the 1841 Irish Census also demonstrated how the field of statistics emerged in this period as a means of social control. The two map-makers’ hopes that their researches might tend towards the improvement of Ireland’s manufactures, communications and industry echoed certain colonial ‘experiments’ that had been conducted in Ireland by British map-makers in the past. The seventeenth-century surveyor William Petty had openly compared himself to a ‘political anatomist’ who, just ‘as students in medicine practise their inquiries upon cheap and common animals’, had ‘chosen Ireland as such a political animal … in which, if I have done amiss, the fault may be easily mended by another’. And that Larcom later prepared an edition of Petty’s ‘Down Survey’ for publication only reinforces the comparison between his and Petty’s endeavours. But however one interprets the political implications of the memoir project,
there was no denying that it far exceeded its original remit. Larcom had initially estimated that each parish memoir would occupy only six pages, and the Templemore volume was spread over 350. He had budgeted
£
500 to produce memoirs for one county, but this single tome, which covered a
solitary
parish, had cost
£
1700. The Templemore memoir was relatively popular among readers and sold 1250 copies in the space of six years (Wordsworth bought one), but its exorbitant production costs meant that the memoir project’s days were numbered.

Colby and Larcom’s brainchild had, in fact, been deeply flawed from the start. The military engineers found it extremely tricky to make time for both surveying and memoir research. At the British Association’s Dublin meeting, the mathematician Charles Babbage had optimistically claimed that the memoir work could be conducted ‘in the evening’ after a full day’s
map-making
, but this was ludicrous: both tasks were full-time jobs in themselves. Even more problematically, the map-makers were not trained in
anthropological
research methods. The quality of their investigations was inconsistent and their discoveries were occasionally ‘
manifestly
wrong’, as John O’Donovan put it. He acknowledged that ‘the officers of the Royal Engineers were most excellent Mathematicians and accurate Surveyors’ but he was extremely ‘doubtful as to what extent their habits and education had qualified them to judge of the nature and quality of soils or the rotation of crops, &c.’ An anxious witness of the surveyors at work on the memoir project warned that ‘if such descriptions and remarks … should ever be published, they would be laughed at by all those who are acquainted with the soil and productions of the respective townlands’. In the late 1830s, the
Dublin University Magazine
and
Dublin Evening Post
foresaw that, thanks to its excessive costs and imperfect researches, the memoir project was doomed. Despite fierce protestations about its closure from certain Irish nationalist political groups (whose support for the memoir project perhaps gives the lie to those historians who interpret it as an imperial endeavour), by 1840 it was stuttering to a halt.

The memoir project was arguably also affected by a pronounced change in the spirit of the age. William Rowan Hamilton had celebrated Larcom as ‘somewhat of a universalist’ and the Irish Ordnance Survey’s embrace of anthropology, statistics, toponymy, antiquarianism, geology and map-making
was held up as an exemplary model of interdisciplinarity. Such an approach can be construed as a product of the Enlightenment’s enthusiasm for
universalism
and a vibrant ‘public sphere’ of fevered collaborative discussion. With these same ambitions, the Royal Irish Academy had been founded in 1785 to promote the combined ‘study of science, polite literature and
antiquities
’, and it openly sought to incorporate ‘
all
the objects of rational inquiry’. But by the middle of the nineteenth century, the zeitgeist was changing and such ‘general knowledges’ began to be considered dangerously amateurish. As the century progressed, the literary personalities of the Royal Irish Academy were increasingly separated from the scientists, until two
distinct
cultures of ‘the Arts’ and ‘the Sciences’ had emerged. It is possible that the Ordnance Survey was also affected by this shift from universality to specialisation. In July 1840 Colby was commanded to forget his fascinating sidelines and to ‘revert immediately to [his] original object’, map-making and nothing more. The memoir project was doomed, and over in Britain, the Geological Survey also suffered under this changing spirit of the age: it was detached from the Ordnance Survey and handed to the Office of Woods and Forests.