FRONTIER - Maphead - page 156

Mapmakers may make all these choices with the best of intentions, but the result is still,
even if unconsciously, to reinforce some particular view of the world. I distinctly remem-
ber not believing, when my parents first told me, that Brazil was actually five times the
size of Alaska. On the map of my bedroom wall, I could see with my own eyes that they
were virtually twins! That's because my map was drawn according to the venerable Mer-
cator Projection. In 1569, the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator drew a world map
using a cylindrical projection that would neatly render a rhumb line—a ship's course in a
constant direction, like west ornorth-northeast—as astraight line. * The problem isthat this
kind of projection inflates the polar regions way out of proportion—in fact, on such a map,
the poles can never even be drawn, because they're an infinite distance from the Equator. †
Mercator maps were still used everywhere when I was growing up—classrooms, nightly
newscasts, stamps, government briefing rooms—and so my generation grew up thinking
that Greenland was bigger than Africa, since Greenland is oversized fourteenfold on Mer-
cator maps.
Of course, all map projections have to fudge somewhere, whether on area or on dir-
ection. Imagine trying to flatten an orange peel onto a flat surface, and as it tears and
scrunches,you'llseetheproblem:something'sgottogive. * ButtheMercatormapstayedso
popular inthe West forsolong,at least inpart, because ofhowhelpful its particular distor-
tions were. Most obviously, it makes North America and Europe seem disproportionately
important, while marginalizing much of the developing world. As a result, a 1996 study
found that when students all over the world were asked to draw the contours of the contin-
ents, nearly all made Europe too big and Africa too small. Even when the test was given in
Africa, the results were the same. And during the Cold War, we liked the sprawling, men-
acing Soviet Union that Mercator provided us, with the rest of Asia dangling halfheartedly
beneath it.
As a high school junior, I walked into my Spanish class on the first day of school to
see, replacing the familiar Mercator map on the teacher's wall, an equal-area Peters Pro-
jection map. This controversial map was unveiled with much fanfare in 1973 by the Ger-
man historian Arno Peters, who told the media it was a revolutionary attack on the stodgy
Mercator. † In fact, it was a simple retread of the 1855 Gall Orthographic Projection, and
many cartographers disliked its north-south distortion of the equatorial regions, which
stretched shape in order to properly represent area. The geographer Arthur Robinson com-
pared Peters's continents to “ wet, ragged long winter underwear hung out to dry on the
Arctic Circle.” But if Peters's goal was to shock, it worked on me. I stared at the map end-
lessly, marveling at the big, muscular Africa dominating its center and the anemic Russia
and Alaska hugging the North Pole. I'd been told that the maps I knew were lying to me
about the globe, but it was quite another thing to see the evidence with my own eyes.