Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Koch's 1891 panoramic view of Seattle, reproduced from the Library of Congress's copy,
hangs above my piano at home.
But Hébert's most frequent request isn't so scholarly. “Most of the time we're getting
people who think treasure maps exist,” he says with a rueful smile.
Boy's-own-adventure pirate maps, with carefully counted paces from the gnarled tree to
the big X on the sandy island shore, were a big part of my childhood love affair with maps.
“
Are
treasure maps real?” I ask eagerly.
Hébert has evidently had some experience answering this question without popping the
bubbles of wide-eyed kids and gullible get-rich-quickers. “I'd say it's very hard to say that
they are,” he hedges.
Translation:no,there'snotasingledocumentedcaseofapiratedrawingamaptoburied
treasure. This was a trope invented by the likes of Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Louis
Stevenson, not Captain Kidd and Blackbeard. I make a mental note not to mention this at
my son's upcoming birthday party, for which a buccaneer theme is planned. I'm still reel-
ing from my geographic faux pas of a few months back—when I told my kids that there's
no land at the North Pole the way there is in the Antarctic, just water and sea ice, it led to
some uncomfortable Santa-related follow-up questions. Sometimes careful cartography is
good for the imagination, but other times you'd rather have the mystery.
The Map Division's visitors come from all over the world. Recently, scholars flew in
from Beijing to look at nineteenth-century plans of the Chinese capital, because Washing-
ton had better maps than anything they could find in China. In 2001, a Japanese research
group stopped by the library to see what they could find on Ino Tadataka, the legendary
shogun-era surveyor whose team produced the first modern map of Japan in 1821. That
map was later lost in a fire, and modern scholars had been able to locate only 46 of his
map's 214 tatami-mat-sized pages in Tokyo's Diet Museum. They were shocked to find
that207pages—nearlyacompleteset—hadbeengatheringdustintheGeographyandMap
DivisionfordecadesandsoonsecuredaquarterofamilliondollarsfromtheJapanesegov-
ernmenttoscanandrestorethem.ThefinalmapwasfinallyexhibitedinaNagoyabaseball
stadium, laid out neatly along the right-field line. Thirty-five thousand people filed by to
look. “This collection is full of gems like that, just waiting to be discovered,” says Hébert.
In fact, there's no catalog at all for the vast majority of the pre-1970 material here; there's
just too much of it. Millions of maps will sit unseen until someone looks for them.
Sometimestheforeignvisitorsareofficialslookingtosettle—orstart—aborderdispute.
It might be a South Korean delegation hoping to discredit Japanese claims to some tiny
islets in the Sea of Japan or a group of Congolese and Ugandan bureaucrats wondering
whereexactlyinLakeVictoriatheirnationsmeet.“TheyhadgonetoBrussels,they'dbeen
to London, couldn't find the official maps. We had 'em,” says Hébert proudly. In the late
1970s,ChileandArgentinawerelockedinadisputeoverwhocontrolledtheeasternendof
the Beagle Channel, a narrow strait running between the islands of Tierra del Fuego. This
