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Cartography and Science in Early Modern Europe: Mapping the Construction of Knowledge Spaces

DAVID TURNBULL

ABSTRACT: Science and cartography have had an intimate history which has not been simply the creation of ever more accurate scientific maps but one in which science, cartography and the state have co-produced the knowledge space that provides the conditions for the possibility of modem science and cartography. The central cartographic process is the assemblage of local knowledges and, as such, is a particular form of the assembly processes fundamental to science. The first attempts by the state to create a space within which to assemble cartographic knowledge were at the Casa da Mina and the Casa de la Contratacion, and hence they can be described as the first scientific institutions in Europe. Their failure to create a knowledge space can be attributed to the nature of the portolan charts. The triangulation of France and the linking of the Greenwich and Paris Observatories established the kind of knowledge space that now constitutes the dominant form within which modem science and cartography are produced. However, resistance to the hegemony of modem scientific knowledge space remains possible through finding alternative ways of assembling local knowledge.

KEYWORDS: Local knowledge; knowledge spaces; sociology of scientific knowledge; Padron Real; Cassini and the mapping of France; Ordnance Survey.

Maps are a prime vehide for repositioning, refraining, rethinking science because theories are maps, maps are science instantiated, without maps science would not have been possible. The art of making pictorial statements in a precise and repeatable form is one that we have long taken for granted in the west. But it is usually forgotten that without prints and blueprints, without maps and geometry, the world of modem science would hardly exist.'

The intimate connection of the history of science with the history of cartography has long been taken for granted.2 Just as significantly, its converse has also been taken for granted, that the history of cartography has essentially been the history of scientific development. However, both science and cartography have been subject to considerable re- examination in the light of the critiques of positivism during the thirty years since McLuhan's comment, but little has been done to bring these critical approaches together to 'reframe' the science-cartography relationship.

Prior to the publication of Thomas Kuhn's

Structure of Scientific Revolutions, scientific knowledge was held to be objective, universal and true and hence immune to sociological analysis, which was restricted to the institutions and social organisation of science.3 The subsequent sociological approaches to science by Barnes, Bloor and others in Britain and Europe treated objectivity, truth and univer- sality as effects to be explained rather than as the consequences of logic or the scientific method. The sociology of science was thus expanded to include the form and content of science, in addition to its rate and direction of growth, resulting in the large body of literature and research which has come to be known as the sociology of scientific knowledge or SSK.4

The Local and Spatial Nature of Scientific Knowledge

A major thrust of SSK has been to focus on what scientists actually do, which has meant that much 5

of the research has been a detailed examination of the daily practices of scientists in their laboratories. One of the findings common to the wide variety of approaches that fall under the SSK umbrella is that scientific knowledge is local in origin.5 The picture of science that has emerged from empirical inves- tigations of both contemporary and historical scientists is that all knowledge is constructed at specific sites through the engagements of particular scientists with particular skills, materials, tools, theories and techniques. Such processes of knowl- edge production are revealed as thoroughly social and contingent, requiring judgements and negotia- tions by groups of scientists in specific contexts. Thus a fundamental characteristic of scientific knowledge is its localness.

This localist thesis can be expressed in a variety of ways. In general the production, transmission and acceptance of scientific knowledge are not the consequence of the application of some set of universal standards or procedures but the outcome of an open-ended process of socially negotiated judgements by practitioners who are struggling to make their own views and skills credible and authoritative.6 Emphasising the local in this way, then, raises the question of how scientific knowl- edge becomes universal. How and why does it move from the various sites of production and become accumulated at a centre?

Movement of scientific knowledge from the local site and moment of its production and application to other places and times requires both the social strategies and the technical devices to create assemblages from otherwise heterogeneous and isolated knowledges. The effect of such social strategies and technical devices is to make local knowledges both mobile and assemblable and primarily involves creating equivalences and con- nections among the motley of practices, instrumen- tation, theories and people.7 The work involved in the creation of such assemblages has been aptly described by John Law as 'heterogeneous engineer- ing.8

By definition, the localist thesis is spatial. Knowledge is not simply local, it is located, it is situated, it has a place. An assemblage is also spatial in that it is made up of linked sites, people and activities. Thus the assemblage of scientific knowl- edge creates a knowledge space. Such spaces have a variety of structural components: psychological, cultural, physical, social, legal and moral. They are

6 simultaneously conceptual and lived spaces.9 The

approach taken here is cartographical, both because historically maps have played a central role in the construction of scientific knowledge spaces and because differing ways of mapping can be counter- poised so as to enable an exploration of the structure of these spaces.

The Power of Maps

Until recently, cartography and science have been portrayed as having a closely interwoven history. The most common metaphor for scientific knowledge or theories was the map, and the strongest thema running through the history of cartography was of maps becoming increasingly scientific and ever more accurate mirrors of nature. The development of 'scientific maps' was taken to be identical with a progressive, cumulative, objec- tive and accurate representation of geographical reality and, hence, was also assumed to be synonymous with the growth of science itself.'0 This view continues to dominate and reflects an increased synergy between science and mapping that has arisen with the expanding spatialisation of knowledge and meaning. Virtually every domain in science is now found to have a spatial dimension through the process of mapping. In the social sciences, spatial explanations are complementing the historical; in the cultural and literary arenas, cartographic and spatial tropes abound. The spatial- isation of knowledge is one of the defining characters of this phase of modernism which some would label postmodern."

However, as we have come to expect in the postmodern era, just when the positivist dream of hegemony seems about to reach fulfilment, contra- dictions and counter currents have emerged, in this case in the form of some powerful re-evaluations of the progressive character of the cartographic enterprise. 12 In particular, Brian Harley has tren- chantly criticised the realist illusion that maps simply reflect reality with ever increasing accuracy, arguing that 'cartography is primarily a form of political discourse concerned with the acquisition and maintenance of power.,'3

Compilation, generalisation, classification, formation into hierarchies, and standardisation of geographical data, far from being mere 'neutral' technical activities, involve power-knowledge relations at work. Just as the disciplinary institutions described by Foucault- prisons, schools, armies, factories-serve to normalise human beings, so too the workshop of the map-maker can be seen as normalising the phenomena of place and territory in creating a sketch of a made world that society desired.'4

Harley has done much to counter the orthodox view of maps as neutral, mimetic devices. His analyses are primarily semiotic, providing for the possibility of understanding the power effects of maps and for alternative readings of map texts. However, Harley offers little scope for analysing the ways in which maps structure the knowledge spaces we live in, or for resisting the apparent domination of the scientific map makers, since he does not consider the wider contexts of power within which the interactions between science and cartography take place and the reasons why cartography acquired its particular forms. The possibility of the knowledge/power relationship being 'other than it is' may be more readily revealed by considering the social processes of map making and alternative ways of spatially assembling knowledge. ' 5

Modern systematic maps rely on a standardised form of knowledge which establishes a prescribed set of possibilities for knowing, seeing and acting. They create a knowledge space within which certain kinds of understandings and of knowing subjects, material objects and their relations in space and time are authorised and legitimated.'6 Science and cartography co-produce each other in a common knowledge space. Maps, however, are not restricted to one register: they can occur in a variety of modes, archives and spatial discourses which may be discrete or overlap.'7 Historically and culturally, maps have been made in a variety of modes, and within contemporary Western society they range from sketch maps through Ordnance Survey maps to maps of the structure of the universe. 18

Maps of whatever register are doubly spatial in that they create social spaces while at the same time they are modes of spatial representation. They create these two aspects of spaciality through enabling two corresponding modes of connectivity. Maps connect heterogeneous and disparate entities, events, locations and phenomena, enabling us to see patterns that are not otherwise visible. They also connect the territory with the social order.'9 In so linking social order with an apparently natural

20 order, maps 'naturalise the arbitrary'. Social and representational orderings of space

are 'maps of meaning' through which groups and individuals make sense of their social world. Although such cultural maps are in some measure hegemonic, sources and sites of resistance are always found within any map.

Like any cartographic image, 'maps of meaning' codify knowledge and represent it symbolically. But, like other maps, they are ideological instruments in the sense that they project a preferred reading of the material world, with prevailing social relations mir- rored in the depiction of physical space. Some mean- ings are dominant; others result from struggle against the dominant order. As with every map, however, a certain ambiguity always remains. Cultural maps are capable of multiple readings. But, . . . dominant read- ings never go completely unchallenged; resistance is always possible.2'

Equally, maps can be resisted or challenged by other modes within a culture or by modes from other cultures.22 By recognising the opportunities for resistance in our daily practices and in differ- ences in ways of knowing and being in other cultures, we may be able to 'reposition' science. The questions thus become, how did the daily practices we now take for granted come into being, and what is the structure of the knowledge space we inhabit? To answer these we need to study the first attempt to create a national knowledge space.

The Casa de la Contratacion At the beginning of the sixteenth century,

Portugal and Spain were the first nations to attempt to construct spaces within which to accumulate and regulate all geographical knowledge. They set up bureaucracies in Lisbon and Seville to supervise their rapidly burgeoning empires in the East Indies and the Americas. Called respectively the Casa da Mina (Lisbon) and the Casa de la Contratacion (Seville), these bureaucracies were essentially Boards of Trade whose primary task was to regulate imports from the New World and the East Indies so that the state could maintain a trade monopoly and impose taxes. Within these Boards of Trade were established the first hydrographic offices, and in those offices were held the first 'maps of empire', the Padreo Real and the Padron Real, variously translated as template or pattern maps, standard maps, master charts and official patterns.23 Both these maps were intended to serve at least two purposes: to keep knowledge of new discoveries within the control of the state and to ensure the standardisation of that knowledge, so that errors and inconsistencies among charts could be elimi- nated and they could be revised and updated as new discoveries were made.24

The two Casas were Europe's first scientific institutions.25 They were the first centres where a systematic attempt was made to bring together the diverse fragments of knowledge about the newly 7

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discovered world. This was not a simple matter of collating information; it required a complex degree of heterogeneous engineering to create an assem- blage of practices, instrumentation, documents, theories and people.26 The Casas brought together a range of experts (cosmographers, astronomers, navigators and pilots, ship's masters, instrument makers and cartographers) and a variety of instru- ments, navigational techniques, tables and methods of calculation, as well as the diverse observations and practical experiences of all kinds of mariners. To achieve an assemblage of this kind it was necessary to create the equivalence and connec- tions whereby the separate local knowledges could be combined in the form of licensed charts, standardised tables and instruments, and certified practitioners.27

The Casas and the Padrons thus represent the first example of the kind of knowledge space that we now take for granted as a precondition for the production of scientific and technical knowledge. However, neither Portugal nor Spain succeeded in sustaining state control of geographical knowledge, and by the 1 560s their template maps had started to fall into desuetude.28 An examination of why this came about throws some light on the ways in which such knowledge spaces are assembled.

Unfortunately the Portuguese archives were lost in the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, though the anonymous map, known as the Cantino Plani- sphere after the man who smuggled it out of Portugal, is probably a copy of the Padreo Real and is the oldest extant map to show the Tordesillas Line and the New World and the East Indian discoveries (Fig. 1).29 So the Spanish Padron Real alone is considered here, though it is reasonable to assume that the two attempts at creating knowl- edge spaces were similar.30

The Spanish template map, the Padron Real, was a portolan chart. Such a chart has no projection and no grid of latitude and longitude and lacks a common scale or unit of measure (Fig. 2)31

Although portolan charts embodied a corpus of traditional knowledge and skills, they were by no means static or closed. They show a clear topony- mic development from the thirteenth century until the middle of the sixteenth century, when they started to decline.32 They endured despite being largely hand-drawn copies that, it might be anticipated, would have shown a history of accumulated error, distortion and degradation. Here then was a knowledge system which, though

essentially graphic and spatial, did not rely on any of the supposed prerequisites of scientific cartogra- phy. It therefore provides a counter example to the commonly held view that traditional and non- quantitative knowledge systems are inherently static and closed.33

The kinds of knowledge space that the portolan charts made possible and operated within were quite different from the knowledge space that came about with the re-introduction to western Europe of Ptolemy's grid and later with Mercator's projec- tion (1569). Portolan charts were not based on the techniques of coordinate geometry, perspective, calculation and the notion-central to our notions of science and rational action-of a mathematically and logically consistent plan or set of rules. Instead, portolan charts were based in a different set of techniques for assembling local knowledge. Their heterogeneous components were not assembled by rendering them equivalent through quantification, measurement and calculation. The diverse compo- nents were preserved in analogue rather than digital form and were assembled through the attribution of directionality.34

Several historians of cartography have shown that portolan charts have considerable regional variation, indicating that they are based on surveys of independent origin. This heterogeneity is further suggested by the variety of scales and units of measure. One chart-for example, the Beccari chart of 1403-might have several different scales and sets of latitude lines.35 David Woodward has argued that the early portolan charts may have resulted from putting together the closed traverses of eight separate basins or seas of the Mediterra- nean.36 Portolan charts are thus most likely to be a mosaic of elements loosely assembled from separate but related navigational traditions.

The most obvious feature of portolan charts is the network of rhumb lines which gives them the deceptive appearance of having a fixed, mathema- tically determined grid. In fact, the rhumbs are lines joining the named points of direction generated by drawing one or two large circles so placed so as to cover most of the chart, each circle being sub- divided into sixteen or thirty-two equidistant points (Fig. 3). The ad hoc way in which these assem- blages of geographical information were achieved is emphasised by the fact that the rhumb lines on different charts do not coincide, each chart having its own starting point.

The means of locating a port or coastal feature 9

-~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~-

Fig. 2. Detail from 'Carte Pisane', c.1290), the oldest known Western sea chart. Vellum, 50 x 105 cm. Note absence of projection, grid and scale. (Courtesy Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, Cartes et Plans; Res. G6. B 118.)

on a portolan chart was not by reference to a mathematical grid but to distance and direction, the latter originally conceived as wind direction. Later, each wind direction was translated into a compass direction through subdivision of the horizon circle into thirty-two colour-coded but unnumbered points. In short, it was directionality-the attribu- tion of direction to the observational and experi- ential phenomena in analogue rather than digital form-which allowed the process of assemblage of the heterogeneous elements on the portolan charts. Portolan charts were essentially 'catalogue[5] of directions to follow between notable points' and mnemonics for recalling lists of ports.37 This way of ordering knowledge spatially is common to all early seafaring traditions and enabled navigators as

10 disparate such as Pacific islanders and North Sea

medieval sailors to have a dynamic cognitive map in their heads (Fig. 4).38

The Portuguese and Spanish maritime explora- tions were thus based in a nautical tradition that enabled ships' masters to navigate using their own experience and charts from a variety of non-official sources. In bringing all that knowledge together in one place, the governments were attempting to construct a 'general system of metrication'.39 The state augmented this tradition by encouraging the development of instruments (including an improved compass and astrolabe), new tables for calculating distances and for giving latitudes and the sun's declination, new techniques like latitude sailing, and new forms of social organisation to assemble and standardise the information under one roof.

The Casa de la Contratacion de las Indias was

A,

Fig. 3. This Martelbio, or 'sea backcloth', by Petrus Vesconte (end of 13th century), shows how the sixteen nodal points dividing a hidden circle provide the framework of rhumb lines on which the geographical details of portolan charts were

recorded. (Courtesy Bibliotheque municipale de Lyon; MS 175, f.2'.)

founded by royal decree in January 1503. On 8 August 1508 a separate geographical or cosmogra- phical department was created within which, by the king's order, a master chart of the new territories, the Padron Real, was to be compiled under the supervision of a commission of pilots headed by Amerigo Vespucci, the Pilot Major.

We command that a Padron General be made and, so that it should be more accurate, we command our officials of the Casa de la Contratacion that they assemble all our pilots, the most skilled captains at the time, and that the said Amerigo Vespucci, our pilot major being present, a padron of all the lands and islands of the Indies hither to discovered and belonging to our kingdoms and seignories be drawn up and made ... when they find new lands or islands or shoals or new harbours or anything that should be recorded in

the said padron real on their return to Castile they go to report to you the said pilot major of the Casa de la Contratacion so that all shall be registered in the proper place in the padron real, in order that navigators be better advised and cautious.40

However, it was not by itself enough to accumulate and standardise knowledge. To keep all the components of an assemblage or network- people, instruments and data-stable requires con- stant effort.4' In order to stop their maps unravel- ling, the Casa had to set the boundaries of the knowledge space and to police the inputs and outputs as they moved across the boundaries. They had to establish what groups could contribute new knowledge, how that knowledge was to be expressed and evaluated, how it should be stored 1

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Fig. 4. A Micronesian star compass. The direction of the rising points of each star is associated with a named place or an 'aimer', a living sea mark. The breadfruit picker on the right is used to pull, in the imagination, the named direction towards the operator in the 'Island Looking' exercise, while learning the names of directions. (Micronesian Island 'Looking Exercise', from W. Goodenough and S. D. Thomas, 'Traditional navigation in the western Pacific: a search for pattern', Expedition, 29: 3

(1987), Fig. 5). (Courtesy University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia.)

and reproduced, how disputes over conflicting evidence should be settled, and what techniques were appropriate for adjudicating ownership and control. What was to count as knowledge was as much a political and moral problem as an episte- mological one, but it was also a problem that required the implementation of social, literary and technical practices of representation.42

For instance, the problem of accumulating uni- form data and representing them on a standard chart was not just a technical matter. Lacking an accurate method of time telling, navigators found it difficult to determine longitude. With no projection, no grid and no clear agreement on the length of a degree, some argued for 16' leagues and others for 171. Nor could Pedro Nufies, the Portuguese mathematician and navigator, settle the matter, and he opted to produce a set of tables for each value.

One of the principal roles of the Pilot Mayor at the Casa de la Contratacion was to ensure that ships' captains were trained and certified as competent in a uniform set of techniques and that the new compasses and astrolabes were constructed

12 according to a common set of principles. Differences

among charts became more pronounced as they proliferated, and the attempt to maintain a mono- poly of chart production broke down. In 1527 Charles V ordered the first cosmographer at the Casa, the Portuguese cartographer Diogo Ribeiro, to create a new master chart, the Padron General, in order to eliminate the disagreement and error (Fig. 5). At the same time, the king relinquished total state control of chart production and commanded that anyone be allowed to produce charts provided each met with the Casa's approval.43

The social, moral and political nature of estab- lishing the process of standardisation and stabilisa- tion is reflected in a series of disputes. One dispute began in 1493 over the position of the Spice Islands with respect to the line that the Pope had drawn to divide the new-found world into Spanish and Portuguese spheres. In 1494, following Portuguese complaints, the Treaty of Tordesillas moved the line 270 leagues to the west. While an empirical resolution remained technically impossible, the economic and political pressures of Portugal's increasing ascendancy over Spain resulted in another treaty settlement at Saragossa in 1529

Fig. 5. Part of Diogo Ribeiro's planisphere (1529). Ribeiro, Cosmographer Royal, and the Pilot Mayor who succeeded Sebastian Cabot in 1518, derived his Planisphere from the Padron Real. The chart shows the known world after Magellan's voyage, with the Tordesillas Line as it was originally drawn 'M 1494. The Moluccas are shown on the Spanish side, though Spain-was about to hand them over to Portugal after the line was redrawn 'M the Treaty of Saragossa, 1529. Vellum, 85 x

204 cm. (Courtesy Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana; Borgiano 1 11.)

which put the Spice Islands on the Portuguese side of the line.

Another dispute reveals the basic difficulty of establishing 'the facts of the matter' in the correc- tion of the Padron General: who was the proper authority and what was the proper technique for determining which piece of information was correct in a case of disagreement? In 1543, the Pilot Mayor Sebastian Cabot and the cosmographer Alonso de Chaves went to court over corrections to the Padron."1 The manufacture and sale of instruments and charts were largely a monopoly in the hands of Diego Gutierrez, a favourite of Cabot's. Pedro Medina, Chaves's ally, complained that he was not given access to the Padron and that Gutierrez's instruments were faulty. 45 Chaves also complained that the Padron was not kept up to date because pilots did not know how to collect data to give to

the cosmographers. Other noted pilots agreed the Padron was useless.

However, it was not clear where the appropriate authority to deal with these disputed claims lay. The visitor appointed by the Casa to hear the case was a good committee man who believed in consensus and argued that truth would be estab- lished by everyone agreeing to sign the Padron. Gutierrez revealed that the form of his charts was determined by the demands of his customers. Cabot claimed that he did what was required by law. Others appealed variously to the authority of the crown and God. A visiting Portuguese cartographer Francisco Falero took the modem but as yet unestablished empirical position and called for observation, description and experiment, while also pointing out the inherent flaws in the portolan chart's projectionless mode of representation. 13

In 1563 the Casa was still concerned about errors in the Padron, and in one of the earliest examples of sociological investigation, the pilots were given a questionnaire asking their opinion about how to correct the master map. The majority of respon- dents agreed that the charts were in error but, perhaps reflecting their adherence to the tradition of the portolan charts, they thought that the best solution was not to change the chart but to let individual pilots carry on using whatever tech- niques they found best. Those who liked compasses should carry several, those who liked astrolabes could try bigger ones.46 Ultimately the knowledge space that the Spanish tried to construct proved too hard to sustain. The navigational tradition of the portolan charts was immune to the state's demands, being in effect too local and too auton- omous.

The Padron General slipped into disuse in the 1560s. Many of the difficulties it revealed in the attempt to create a knowledge space capable of embracing the world are said to have been resolved by the technical solution provided by Mercator in 1569. Mercator's projection provided a grid and represented loxodromes (courses of a constant bearing) as straight lines, which was a distinct advantage. The representation of loxodromes had previously been difficult, since, as Pedro Nufies had pointed out, loxodromes on plane charts, as on portolan charts, though drawn as straight lines were in fact curves. The combination of perspective geometry with a grid of latitude and longitude created the possibility of accurately locating any spot on the earth's surface. It was this calculative framework, or space within which to assemble knowledge, that, according to some historians of the Renaissance and the scientific revolution, provided the essential condition for the possibility of modem science.47 Such a framework had, of course, been initially proposed by Ptolemy in his Geography, which reached Europe by way of Byzantium in the thirteenth century though it did not achieve wide circulation until its translation into Latin in the fifteenth century.

However, while Mercator's projection had the potential to contain the world and bring it to the desk top, considerable social and technical difficul- ties had to be resolved before a knowledge space of this kind could be fully established. As late as 1753 when Tobias Mayer published his state of the art 'Mappa Critica' of Germany in which the location

14 of 200 places was portrayed, 'only 33 were fixed by

astronomical determinations of latitude', and none was apparently well fixed by longitude.48 Mayer's map shows that accurate location was hard to achieve but cartographers were not completely dependent on fixed mathematically determined spatial structures to assemble knowledge.

The First National Survey Cartography and science did not become fully

integrated until Jean Dominique Cassini was appointed to establish the Royal Observatory in Paris in the last half of the seventeenth century. The Academie Royale was set up in 1666 for the explicit purpose of correcting and improving maps and sailing charts in the light of the recognition that the solution to the major problems in geography, chronology, and navigation lay in astronomy and geodesy. In 1667 work was begun on the Royal Observatory at Faubourg St. Jacques. The Acade- mie also sent out expeditions of trained personnel to measure the latitude and longitude of places such as Guadeloupe, since Cassini's work on predicting the eclipse times of Jupiter's satellites had made it possible to determine longitude on land.49

As head of the leading observatory, Cassini was in correspondence with astronomers all over Europe. New data began to pour in so fast that he had to devise a new way to assemble it. This was to be his famous Planisphere Terrestre, a 24-foot circle drawn on the floor of the third level of the west tower, which had been oriented by compass and quadrant when the foundations of the observatory were laid. The circle formed the outline for an azimuthal projection with the north pole at the centre, from which meridians radiated at ten degree intervals. The prime meridian was drawn from the centre to pass through the midpoint between the two south windows of the octagonal tower, and the parallels of latitude formed concentric circles. The Academie's interest focused on the precise location of places that could be used for future surveys, that is, towns, no matter how insignificant, with astronomical observatories.50

The floor map was considered a major achieve- ment and attracted a great deal of attention. James II and Louis XIV both came to see it. But its location subjected it to a good deal of wear, and though it was restored in 1690, by the turn of the century it had become effaced.5' Although large globes drew big crowds at international exhibitions into the nineteenth century, and the Lamonosov globe in St Petersburg was large enough for twelve people to

Fig. 6. The 'Planisphere Terrestre' (1696) is Jacques Cassini's printed version of the map his father Jean Dominique Cassini had laid out on the floor of the Paris Observatory. Some forty-odd astronomical stations from which the data were

assembled are marked by stars. 555 mm. diameter. (Courtesy Bibliotheque Nationale; G6. DD. 2987 and G6. C. 8479.)

15

sit inside and observe the heavens, Cassini's plani- sphere was the last attempt to build a purely physical space to record accurately the geographical details of the world.52 The abandonment of this project marked a turning point in map conscious- ness. Henceforth the rational way to represent the whole world scientifically was on paper.

In 1682 Cassini had transferred forty locations on to a sketch map that was issued as an engraved world map in 1696 (Fig. 6). The building of the observatory and the collection of more accurate measurements of latitude and longitude brought with it an enhanced capacity to assemble geogra- phical knowledge. That capacity was co-produced with the emerging demands of a centralised economy which in turn brought with it a yet greater need for a more fully articulated knowledge space. Such a space was achieved through the expenditure of much physical labour in building a network that connected all points in France and, ultimately, linked the Paris and Greenwich obser- vatories.

Until the late Middle Ages, the details of French territory were known in a 'literary mode', through itineraries, journeys and lists of places, in other words, through assembling local knowledge con- tained in written descriptions.54 That today the literary mode seems clumsy and to lack rigour and consistency shows how profound a transformation has been produced in our mapping consciousness. The literary form of spatial knowledge began to prove less adequate for the needs of the state in the mid-seventeenth century, when it became the task of the secretary of home affairs, Jean Baptiste Colbert, to restore the floundering French economy and to ensure an ever-increasing income to provide for Louis XIV's lavish expenditures. Colbert set out to develop the nation's resources and to build an infrastructure of roads and canals, but he was stymied by the lack of a map of the whole of France. Like all Europe at the time, France was a country operating almost entirely on local knowl- edge. All systems of weights, measures and taxes were local; there was no centralised uniform system of mensuration and virtually no collective topogra- phical knowledge.55

The lack of an accurate large-scale map of the kingdom prevented Colbert from having an over- view of the country's resources. He first attempted to assemble all the provincial maps and to ensure their commensurability through the use of a

16 common scale and criteria of accuracy.56 To this

end, he instructed the provincial field commis- sioners to evaluate their maps and send their amended versions to Paris. Most commissioners failed to comply.

That provincial maps already existed was not in itself sufficient to ensure their assemblage at a centre of calculation.57 To achieve such an assem- blage two problems had to be solved, one social and one technical. The provincial administrators had to be persuaded to cooperate in a national project which they saw as a way of organising their resources for the benefit of the king. At the same time, as Colbert had recognised, the provincial maps could not be assembled unless and until they had been rendered commensurable. Faced with these political and technical problems of assem- blage, Cassini, Jean Picard and the Academie proposed the creation of a network of surveyed triangles that would encompass the country and thereby would enable the drawing of a unified map of France on one grid. The proposed network of triangles would also link Paris to every part of the kingdom by invisible but powerful, 'terraforming', bonds. France would never be the same again; when the new map showed France to be smaller than previously believed, Louis XIV complained, 'I paid my academicians well and they have dimin- ished my kingdom.' Nor was 'knowing' France ever the same again. As Herv6 has remarked,

Cartography became inseparable from the affirmation of monarchic power ... The king could now sit in his chamber and 'without troubling himself greatly, see with his eye and touch with his finger' the expanse and diversity of his territory-without having to travel at all.58

Indeed, the king did not have to go to the purpose- built 'world shrinking room' at the observatory. He could survey the details of his empire in his own bedroom.

The network of triangles could provide a solution to the general technical problem of assembling the separate topographical surveys of the country. A centralised, Academie-based approach would also provide a political solution, if the king could be sufficiently diverted from his military ambitions to fund the project. Ultimately, the national map could only be achieved by bringing into line the king, Jupiter's satellites, pendulum clocks, tele- scopes, surveying chains, trigonometry, quadrants, new printing techniques, and all the provinces of France as well as the Earth itself. In aligning all these places, practices, people and instruments a

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new space was created, a space that we now take for granted but which did not come into existence naturally or even easily.

The first discussions of the project were held in 1663. Eventually, it was proposed that J. D. Cassini should survey a line from Dunkerque to Barcelona (Fig. 7). This would have the co-dependent purpose of enabling the measurement of the circumference of the earth and providing the baseline for all future surveying operations in France. A hitherto inde- pendent geodetic problem concerned the sphericity of the earth.59 Was it a perfect sphere, a prolate spheroid (elongated at the poles) or an oblate one (flattened at the poles and bulging at the equator)? Once again, the question arose that had bothered Portuguese and Spanish navigators and cartogra- phers for a century and a half: what is the length of a degree of latitude? Did it vary with distance from the pole and if so did it increase or decrease as the pole was approached? The related controversy demanded a realignment not only of ideas about the shape of the earth but also in the rivalry between French and English science. Newton's theory of gravity indicated an oblateness of the earth, while French theory and early measure- ments seemed to indicate a prolate spheroid. The disagreement created yet more pressure for greater accuracy in measuring the length of a degree. Eventually, Louis XV ordered a decisive test. Two arcs were to be measured, one near the equator in Peru (1735-1744), and one near the Arctic circle in Lapland (1734-1737). The 'toise of Peru' proved longer than that of Lapland, and the Paris meridian had to be resurveyed (1740).6

By 1739 'France was enclosed by an uninter- rupted chain of 400 triangles surveyed from 18 fundamental bases'.6' But that was only the beginning; not until 1744 was the first outline map produced.62 The complete topographical sur- vey resulting in the publication of the Carte de Cassini was not finished until 1789. Altogether it took 121 years of arduous labour by vast numbers of people at a cost of some 700,000 livres to produce the first national map of France.63

The Carte de Cassini is important historically not just because it was the first thorough topographical survey of an entire country. 'It taught the rest of the world what to do and what not to do.'64 It established the practice, subsequently adopted by all national mapping projects, of linking topogra- phical surveys with a chain of great triangles. It also

18 instigated the transformation of spatial knowledge

according to a centralised, homogenised and mathematised schema.

The implementation of such a schema is essen- tially a process of standardisation, which is techni- cally difficult. In fact in the French case, according to Revel,

a standardised national map proved extremely hard to achieve because of the difficulties of integrating all the heterogeneous local information. Cassini's project of mapping all France produced very flawed results being useful only for broad administrative distinctions.65

But standardisation is also an inherently social process, requiring conventions, negotiations and agreements. It has become one of the key processes in modern science, whereby local knowledge/ practices can be assembled. Just as it was possible for nineteenth-century American railroads to run on their own private times, so too was it possible to have different kinds of national maps based on their own local organisation of space.66 But to integrate the railroads or to have a map of the world requires laborious processes of standardisation of time and space. All places and times have to be rendered equivalent.

The First Trans-National Knowledge Space Such social processes were inherent in what, in

1783, was to be the first international cooperative mapping venture. The initial pressure for this transformation of international space did not come from either military or economic forces as one might expect. Rather, it came largely from the demands of a rapidly internationalising science. The technical problem was to measure precisely the difference in latitude and longitude between the Paris and Greenwich observatories,67 over which the English and French astronomers disagreed by a matter of 11 seconds of longitude and 15 seconds of latitude, which on the ground amounts to roughly 500 metres.68 Such technical questions are not, of course, sui generis; they are co-produced with the instruments and practices that make possible both their formulation and their solution.69 Concomitant with that enabling process is the creation of the kind of homogeneous and unified spaces in which science's universalised forms of knowledge become possible through the linking of local knowledge spaces. In turn, the creation of such a scientific knowledge space generates a different social space.

CUsar Fran~ois Cassini de Thury (Cassini III) suggested that the astronomical problem could be solved by a trigonometric survey from Greenwich

Fig. 8. Plan of the Triangles connecting the Meridians of the Royal Observatories of Greenwich and Paris, 1787. Reproduced from Ordnance Survey: Map Makers to Britain since 1791 (Ordnance Survey, Southampton 1992).

to Dover and a triangulated connection to the French national survey, thereby expanding the isolated spaces of the two observatories into one homogeneous space (Fig. 8). For General William Roy, who carried out the survey at the behest of Sir Joseph Banks, the initial problem was to develop instruments of sufficient reliability and accuracy to measure the five-mile baseline. Roy had hoped to use a steel chain whose variations could be checked with deal rods. However, it was found the length of the rods varied with humidity, and the survey was ultimately done with long glass tubes. It then took another three years to develop a theodolite capable of measuring the fractions of seconds of arc which Roy deemed necessary for his ultimate purpose, the beginning of a national survey of the British Isles.70

In 1787 England and France were invisibly but indissolubly linked. The connection between the two national spaces was established by trigonometric triangulation using lights and the new theodolite at night to span the Channel. However, the problem of creating equivalence between the pieces of hetero- geneous information was not so easily resolved. First, the French toise had to be converted to the English league. Then, having established an agreed linear distance between the meridians of Paris and Green- wich, there were difficulties in converting this value into degrees, since, once again, this depended on agreement about the precise length of a degree and the shape of the Earth. In addition, there were problems in establishing the difference in clock time between the meridians. Only when social means were found to

solve these seemingly technical problems could the astronomers measure the differences between their observatories, thereby creating one unified knowledge space and hence a new international and political space. The establishment of this new international space set in motion the process whereby the whole of the earth's territory could be mapped as one. All sites would be rendered equivalent, all localness would vanish in the homogenisation and geometrisation of space. To this day the project remains incomplete. Even though the international geoid system was accepted in 1980, the conversion of national surveys to this common reference surface still produces local difficulties.7'

In order to achieve the kind of universal and accurate knowledge that constitutes modern science and cartography, local knowledge, person- nel and instrumentation have to be assembled on a national and international scale. This level of organisation is only possible when the state, science and cartography become integrated. The first scientific institutions in Europe-the hydrographic offices in the Casa da Mina and the Casa de la Contratacion-went a long way towards achieving that degree of integration. Though ultimately a failure, they were examples of the kind of organisation that was later developed in the integration of science, cartography and the interests of the state in the triangulation of France and the subsequent linking of the French and English national surveys.72 19

This linking created a trans-national knowledge space whose ramified bureaucratic structure in providing the conditions for the possibility of modern science and cartography has the appearance of determining all our knowledge. However, such a knowledge space is not entirely hegemonic; resis- tance is possible because it has its own contra- dictions and other registers and modes of mapping are available. On the one hand, we seem to be on the verge of establishing just such a hegemonic knowledge space, where the demands of the consumer economy and the structures of the cartographical knowledge space have become so intermeshed that MacDonalds now use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to determine the loca- tion of new franchise outlets.73 On the other hand, despite all the bureaucratic organisation and agree- ments about scale, projection, meridians et cetera that have gone into the globalisation of society, and despite the talk of the global village and commu- nication super highways, the 'totalisation project' postmodernists fear so much is neither complete nor irresistible. For example, Western modes of knowl- edge assembly have proved inadequate in the third world where alternate modes are emerging as potential sites of resistance.74 However, the greatest opportunities for resistance lie in the recognition that the social labour of creating knowledge spaces has been largely suppressed and obliterated in the attempt to portray science as universal, non-local and unsituated. Precisely because knowledge spaces are social constructions we can construct alternative spaces or positions from which to know the world.

Manuscript submitted April 1994. Revised text received December 1995.

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, The Exten-

sions of Man (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1964), 157. 2. The point was first made by William M. Ivins, 'We

would not have had modern science and technology without exactly repeatable pictorial statements' (Prints and Visual Communication [Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 19531, 3). See also Helen Gardner cited in Robert A. Romanyshyn, Technology as Symptom and Dream (London, Routledge, 1989), 33. The argument has recently been persuasively developed by Bruno Latour, 'Visualisation and cognition, thinking with eyes and hands', Knowledge and Society 6 (1986): 1-40.

3. Strictly speaking the earliest works in the sociology of science were Ludwig Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact [19351 (2nd ed., Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1979), and Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (London, Kegan Paul, 1936), but the sociology of scientific knowledge was largely ignored until Thomas

Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1962). 4. Barry Barnes, Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory

(London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974); David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery (London, Routledge, 1976); Harry Collins, Changing Order, Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice (London, Sage, 1985); Karin Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge, an Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science (Oxford, Pergamon Press, 1981); Michael Mulkay, Science and the Sociology of Knowl- edge (London, 1979); Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Milton Keynes, Open University Press, 1987). The most recent general work in SSK is presented in Sheila Jasanoff et al., eds., Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (Thousand Oaks, Sage Publications, 1995). 5. David Turnbull, 'Local knowledge and comparative

scientific traditions', Knowledge and Policy 6 (1993): 29-54. 6. Much of this theoretical framework has been devel-

oped under the rubric actor-network theory by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and John Law. See, for example, Michel Callon, 'Some elements of a sociology of transla- tion: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay', in Power, Action and Belief. A New Sociology of Knowledge? ed. John Law (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 196-233; Michel Callon, John Law et al., eds., Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology; Sociology of Science in the Real World (London, Macmillan, 1986); Bruno Latour, 'The powers of association', in Law, Power, Action and Belief (see above, this note); Latour, Science in Action (see note 4); John Law, ed., A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power Technology and Domination, Sociological Review Monograph 38 (London, Routledge, 1991). On the struggle for authority see Pierre Bourdieu, 'The specificity of the scientific field and the social conditions of the progress of reason', Social Science Information 14 (1975): 19-47; and also Adi Ophir and Steven Shapin, 'The place of knowledge, a methodological survey', Science in Context 4 (1991): 3-2 1.

7. David Turnbull, 'The ad hoc collective work of building Gothic cathedrals with templates, string, and geometry', Science Technology and Human Values 18 (1993): 315-40. On the process of establishing equivalences or making commensurable the heterogeneous see Latour, Science in Action (note 4) and Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1988). The evocative term "motley' is used by Ian Hacking, 'The self-vindication of the laboratory sciences', in Science as Practice and Culture, ed. Andrew Pickering (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992): 29-64. 8. John Law, 'Technology and heterogeneous engineer-

ing, the case of Portuguese expansion', in The Social Construction of Technological Systems, New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, ed. W. Bijker et al. (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1987): 111-34. I have adopted the term 'assemblage' from Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus; Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minnea- polis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 90. For discussion see David Turnbull, 'Rendering turbulence orderly', Social Studies of Science 25 (1995): 9-33.

9. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, Blackwell, 1991), 32, distinguishes representations of space and representational spaces as conceptual and lived spaces respectively, whereas knowledge spaces are here conceived as a melding of the two.

10. J. Brian Harley, 'Deconstructing the map', Cartogra- phica 26 (1989): 1-20. 'The normative history of carto- graphy is a ceaseless massaging of this theme of noble progress ... It is the dominant theme' (p. 4). 'The history 20

of cartography is largely that of the increase in the accuracy with which ... elements of distance and direction are determined and the comprehensiveness of the map's content' (Gerald Crone, Maps and Their Makers (Folkstone, Dawson, 1953), xi). See also Denis Wood, The Power of Maps (New York, Guilford Press, 1992); Matthew H. Edney, 'Cartography without "progress": reinterpret- ing the nature and historical development of mapmaking', Cartographica 30: 2-3 (1993): 54-68; J. Brian Harley, 'Cartography, ethics and social theory', Cartographica 27: 1 (1990): 1-23.

11. For the received view see Arthur H. Robinson and Barbara B. Petchenik, The Nature of Maps, Essays towards Understanding Maps and Mapping (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1976); on spatialisation see David Turnbull, 'Constructing knowledge spaces and locating sites of resistance in the modern cartographic transformation', in Rolland Paulston, ed., Social Cartography: Mapping Ways of Seeing Education and Social Change (New York, Garland Publishing Inc. forthcoming); Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies, the Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London, Verso, 1989); and David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford, Blackwell, 1989); on maps and science see Stephen S. Hall, Mapping the Next Millennium, the Discovery of New Geographies (New York, Random House, 1992). On the continuing influence of positivism, especially in GIS, see Robert Lake, 'Planning and applied geography: positivism, ethics, and geographic information systems', Progress in Human Geography 17 (1993): 404-53.

12. Edney, 'Cartography without progress' (see note 10); Barbara Belyea, 'Images of power, Derrida/Foucault/ Harley', Cartographica 29: 2 (1992): 1-9; David Turnbull, Maps Are Territories; Science Is an Atlas (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1993); David Woodward, 'Reality, symbolism, time and space in medieval world maps', Annals of the Association of American Geographers 75 (1985): 510-21; David Woodward, 'Roger Bacon's terrestrial coordinate system', Annals of the Association of American Geographers 80 (1990): 109-22; Denis Wood, 'How maps work', Cartographica 29: 3-4 (1992): 66-74; Michael Blakemore and J. Brian Harley, Concepts in the History of Cartography: A Review and Perspective, Monograph 26, Cartographica 17: 4 (1980); J. Brian Harley, 'Maps, knowledge and power', in The Iconography of Landscape, ed. D. Cosgrove, and S. Daniels (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988), 277-312; John Pickles, 'Text, hermeneutics and propaganda maps', in Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Land- scape, ed. T. J. Barnes and J. S. Duncan (London, Routledge, 1992), 193-230.

13. J. Brian Harley, 'Silences and secrecy, the hidden agenda of cartography in early modern Europe', Imago Mundi 40 (1988): 57-76, ref. 57.

14. J. Brian Harley, 'Power and legitimation in the English geographical atlases of the eighteenth century', in Images of the World: Essays on the History of the Atlas, ed. J. A. Wolter and R. E. Grim (Washington, Library of Congress, forthcoming).

15. Some of these alternatives are discussed in Turnbull, Maps Are Territories (see note 12). The possibility of science being 'other than it is' is one of the central themes of SSK; see, for example, Pickering, Science as Practice and Culture (note 7).

16. 'One who sees is one who sees within a prescribed set of possibilities, one who is embedded in a system of conventions and limitations' (Jonathon Crary, Techniques of the Observer, on Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century [Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1990], 6).

17. On modes of mapping see Matthew H. Edney, 'Cartography without progress' (note 10); on archives see Barbara Belyea, 'Images of power' (note 12); on spatial discourses see Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1994).

18. On cross-cultural comparisons of maps see Turnbull, Maps Are Territories (note 12); and David Turnbull, Mapping the World in the Mind, an Investigation of the Unwritten Knowledge of the Micronesian Navigators (Geelong, Deakin University Press, 1991). On historical modes and overlaps see Woodward, 'Reality, symbolism, time and space in medieval world maps' (note 12), and Woodward, 'Roger Bacon's terrestrial coordinate system', (note 12); Turnbull, 'Constructing knowledge spaces' (note 11).

19. On 'the pattern that connects' see Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature, a Necessary Unity (New York, Dutton, 1979). On links to the social order see Wood, The Power of Maps (note 10), 10 and passim but especially Chapter 3.

20. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cam- bridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977). See also Nicholas Blomley, Law, Space, and the Geographies of Power (New York, Guilford Press, 1994), 8.

21. Peter Jackson, Maps of Meaning, an Introduction to Cultural Geography (London, Unwin Hyman, 1989), 185-86.

22. Turnbull, Maps Are Territories (see note 12); Wood- ward, 'Reality, symbolism, time and space' (see note 12); Woodward, 'Roger Bacon's terrestrial coordinate system' (see note 12); Robert A. Rundstrom, 'A cultural inter- pretation of Inuit map accuracy', Geographical Review 80 (1990): 155-68; Robert A. Rundstrom, 'Mapping, post- modernism, indigenous people and the changing direction of North American cartography', Cartographica 28: 2 (1991): 1-12; Benjamin S. Orlove, 'Mapping reeds and reading maps, the politics of representation in Lake Titicaca', American Ethnologist 18 (1991): 3-38; Benjamin Orlove, 'The ethnography of maps', Cartographica 30 (1993): 29-46; Helen Watson with the Yolgnu community at Yirrkala and David Wade Chambers, Singing the Land, Signing the Land (Geelong, Deakin University Press, 1989). 'There are other knowledges of space either residual or emerging operating to contend with the geo-body' (Winichakul, Siam Mapped [see note 17], 131). 23. In Lisbon Jodo H (1455-1495) set up what was first

called the Casa de Guine, then the Casa de Mina e India, and finally the Casa de India. This institution held a Padreo Real under the charge of Lopo Homem, cosmo- grapher to the King Manuel, and Pedro Reinel, master of navigational charts (Michel Mollat du Jourdin and Monique de La Ronciere, Sea Charts of the Early Explorers: 13th to 17th Century [London, Thames and Hudson, 1984], 26; see also Bailey Diffie and George Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, 1415-1580 [Minneapolis, Univer- sity of Minnesota Press, 1977], 316-17). 24. E. L. Stevenson, 'The geographical activities of the

Casa de la Contrataci6n', Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 17: 2 (1927), 39-59; Jose Pulido Rubio, El Piloto Mayor de la Casa de Contratacidn de Seville (Seville, Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1950); Henry Harrisse, The Discovery of North America, A Critical Documentary, and Historic Investigation. 1892 (Amsterdam, N. Israel, 1961), 258-59. There is some disagreement about whether a serious attempt was made to maintain the policy of secrecy that is sometimes implied in accounts of these offices, but both Portugal and Spain wanted to achieve high degrees of accuracy in their charts in order to determine the location and ownership of the new discoveries and to avoid expensive shipping losses. Bailey 21

W. Diffie, 'Foreigners in Portugal and the "policy of silence"', Terrae Incognitae 1 (1960): 23-35; Kenneth McIntyre, The Secret Discovery of Australia, Portuguese Ventures 200 Years before Captain Cook (Menindie, Souve- nier Press, 1977).

25. Pulido Rubio made the suggestion that the Casa de la Contrataci6n was the first scientific cultural institution more than forty years ago, but little attention has been paid to his claim by historians of science. His account shows that the two Casas were indeed the first scientific institutions because they were centres of calculation in the Latourian sense. Pulido Rubio, El Piloto Mayor (see note 24), 433; Latour, Science in Action (see note 4). See also G. Beaujouan, 'Science livresque et art nautique au XV siele', in M. Mollat du Jourdin and P. Adam, eds., Les Aspects internationaux de la dicouverte oceanique aux XVieme et XVIieme sieces. Actes du cinquieme Colloque International d'Histoire Maritime (Lisbone 1960) (Paris, tcole Practique des Hautes etudes, 1966); David W. Waters, 'Science and the techniques of navigation in the Renaissance', Maritime Monographs and Reports 19 (1974): 28.

26. Law, 'Technology and heterogeneous engineering' (note 8). See also John Law, 'On the methods of long distance control, vessels, navigation and the Portuguese route to India', in Law, Power, Action and Belief (note 6), 234-63; John Law, 'On the social explanation of technical change, the case of the Portuguese maritime expansion', Technology and Culture 28 (1987): 227-53. 27. David W. Waters, 'Science and the techniques of

navigation' (see note 25), 28, quotes Beaujouan, 'Science livresque' (see note 25), 13-14: 'The birth of nautical astronomy was much less a problem of science than of organisation ... King John II of Portugal had the immense merit of having known before any other head of state, how to organise the technical exploitation of contemporary theoretical knowledge'. 28. Waters, 'Science and the techniques of navigation'

(see note 25), 16; Veitia Linaje, Spanish Rule of Trade to the West Indies [1702] (reprinted, New York, AMS Press, 1977), 248-49. 29. Kenneth Nebenzahl, Maps from the Age of Discovery,

Columbus to Mercator (London, Times Books, 1990), ix, 234.

30. Waters, 'Science and the techniques of navigation (see note 25), 16. 31. Portolan charts were the first commercially produced

charts. They were considered so essential that from the mid-14th century Aragonese ship captains were required by law to carry two copies on their voyages (Tony Campbell, 'Portolan charts from the late thirteenth century to 1500', in The History of Cartography, Vol. 1, Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, ed. J. Brian Harley and David Wood- ward (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987), 404, n. 253).

32. Tony Campbell, 'Traditional warnings and coastal dangers', in Tales from the Map Room, Fact and Fiction about Maps and Their Makers, ed. Peter Barber and Christopher Broad (London, BBC, 1993), 162-63.

33. Robin Horton, 'African traditional thought and Western science', Africa 37 (1967): 50-71, 155-87; Robin Horton, 'Tradition and modernity revisited', in Rationality and Relativism, ed. M. Hollis and S. Lukes (Oxford, Blackwell, 1982), 201-60. 34. On analogous ad hoc assemblages see Turnbull, 'The

ad hoc collective work of building Gothic cathedrals' (note 7). On directionality see note 37 below.

35. Campbell, 'Portolan charts from the late thirteenth

century to 1500' (see note 31), 387; A. N. Nordenskibld, Periplus, an Essay on the Early History of Charts and Sailing Directions (Stockholm, P. A. Norstedt, 1897); James Kelley, 'The oldest portolan chart in the world', Terrae Incognitae 9 (1977): 22-48. 36. Woodward's explanation is proposed in Campbell,

'Portolan charts from the late thirteenth century to 1500' (see note 31), 387-88. 37. Denoix, in Mollat du Jourdin and de La Ronciere,

Sea Charts of the Early Explorers (see note 23), 15. 38. The anthropologist Charles Frake in considering the

seafaring ability of North Sea medieval sailors has argued that 'similar schema for segmenting the circle of the horizon with invariant directional axes characterises all known early seafaring traditions, those of the Pacific, the China Sea, the Indian Ocean, and Europe. In various traditions, compass directions could be thought of as, and named for, star paths (as in the Pacific and Indian Ocean) or wind directions (as in island Southeast Asia and Europe). In all cases the compass rose provided an invariant representation of directions which were in fact determined at sea by a variety of means, the sun, the stars, winds, swells, landmarks, seamarks, sea life and in later times the magnetic needle. The information provided by these diverse and changing signs was represented men- tally as a named direction on the compass rose. A cognitive schema of invariant directions is necessary not only for assessing present direction, but equally important for thinking about direction. The compass rose was, in essence, a cognitive scheme for organising, remembering and manipulating directional information. It was only secondarily a physical device for finding direction' (Charles 0. Frake, 'Cognitive maps of time and tide among medieval seafarers', Man 20 (1985): 254-70).

A northern sailor could 'establish a port' through an integrated assembly of time, tide, winds and moon in terms of direction. The time of high water on days of full and change moon could be expressed as north-south moon if it occurred at noon and midnight, as south-east, north-west moon if it occurred at 9 am and 9 pm (Waters, 'Science and the techniques of navigation' (see note 25), 2). See also Turnbull, Mapping the World in the Mind (note 18); and Edwin Hutchins, 'Understanding Micronesian navigation', in Mental Models, ed. D. Gentner and A. L. Stevens (New Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1983), 191-226. 39. Law, 'Technology and heterogeneous engineering

(see note 8), 126; Law, 'On the social explanation of technical change' (see note 26), 244.

40. Armando Cortesdo and Avelino Teixera da Mota, Portugaliae Monumenta Cartographica (Lisbon, Museo Nacional de Arte Antiga, 1960), 90. 41. Stability has become a key problematic following the

development of actor-network theory. See John Law and Wiebe Bijker, 'Postscript, technology, stability, and social theory', in Shaping Technology/Building Society, Studies in Sociotechnical Change, ed. Wiebe Bijker and John Law (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1992), 201-24. 42. See Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan

and the Air Pump, Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1985); and Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in 17th Century England (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994), for seminal accounts of the way experimental knowledge was established as authoritative in 17th- century England, through the introduction of a variety of technologies of representation. 43. Harrisse, Discovery (see note 24), 264-65. 22

44. The details of the following disputes are drawn from the illuminating account given in Ursula Lamb, 'Science by litigation, a cosmographic feud', Terrae Incognitae 1 (1969): 40-57, esp. p. 42; and Ursula Lamb, 'The Spanish cosmographic juntas of the sixteenth century', Terrae Incognitae 6 (1974): 51-64. 45. Gutierrez had developed two solutions to the phenom-

enon of magnetic variation, a problem that became apparent as the knowledge space grew more structured. Mariners had found that compass readings varied as one moved and that they did not always concur with directions determined by solar position, though why this should happen was not understood at the time. Was it a characteristic of the compass and hence an artefact, or was it a terrestrial phenomenon, or even a celestial one? Gutierrez's solution was to make compasses with fixed compensation and to draw charts with different latitude scales for each side of the Atlantic. This eliminated the variation in some circumstances but com- pounded it in others. 46. Lamb, 'The Spanish cosmographic juntas' (see note

44), 59. Between 1569 and 1577 the Consejo Real y Supremo de las Indias tried similar sociological techniques and sent out questionnaires to establish the latitude and longitude of places in the New World. On the whole this attempt to assemble the empire failed because of the lack of trained and disciplined personnel. Many failed to answer the questionnaire; those who did often misunder- stood the questions or the instructions on making observations or gave inaccurate responses (Clinton R. Edwards, 'Mapping by questionnaire, an early Spanish attempt to determine New World geographical positions', Imago Mundi 23 (1969): 17-28, esp. 17-18). 47. James Burke, The Day the Universe Changed (London,

BBC, 1985). 48. Eric G. Forbes, Tobias Mayer (1723-62), Pioneer of

Enlightened Science in Germany (Gottingen, 1980), 63. I owe this reference and the following point to an anonymous referee, whom I would like to thank for his useful and constructive comments. 49. Kevin Krisciunas, Astronomical Centers of the World

(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988), 64-65; C. Wolf, Histoire de l'Observatoire de Paris de sa fondation a 1793 (Paris, Gauthier-Villars, 1902). 50. Lloyd Brown, The Story of Maps (Boston, Little

Brown, 1949): 219. 51. Christian Jacob, L 'Empire des cartes. Approche thiorique

de la cartes a travers l'histoire (Paris, Albin Michel, 1992), 131-32. 52. On the display of globes see Giulio Macchi, VL'Image

impossible', and Helen Wallis and Monique Pelletier, 'Les Globes du Roi Soleil', in Cartes et Figures de la Terre (Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1980), xi & xii-xiv.

53. Crone, Maps and Their Makers (see note 10), 88. 54. On the literary mode see J. Revel, 'Knowledge of the

territory', Science in Context 4 (1991): 133-61. Buisseret notes that by the time Louis XIV came to power there had been a long period of map use in France beginning with military use in the early 16th century and reaching a peak of sophistication with Nicholas Sanson's basemaps (David Buisseret, 'Monarchs, ministers, and maps in France before the accession of Louis XIV', in Monarchs, Ministers and Maps, The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of Government in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Buisseret [Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992], 99-123, esp. 120). However, Joseph Konvitz, Cartography in France, 1660-1848, Science Engineering and Statecraft (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987), 2, points out the maps were at too small a scale for effective policy. See P.

D. A. Harvey, Maps in Tudor England (London, The Public Record Office and The British Library, 1993), for similar remarks about estate surveys, and Peter Barber, 'England I: pageantry, defense, and government: maps at court to 1550', in Buisseret, Monarchs, Ministers and Maps (see above), 26-56. See Turnbull, 'Constructing knowledge spaces' (note 11), for a general discussion of the origins of map consciousness and the use of maps in state decisions in England.

55. Ronald Edward Zupko, Revolution in Measurement, Western European Weights and Measures since the Age of Science (Philadelphia, American Philosophical Society, 1990); Witold Kula, Measures and Men (Princeton, Prince- ton University Press, 1986); J. L. Heilbron, 'The measure of enlightenment', in The Quantifying Spirit in the 18th Century, ed. Tore Frdngsmyr, J. L. Heilbron, and Robin E. Rider (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990), 207-42.

56. Buisseret, 'Monarchs, ministers, and maps in France' (see note 54), 99.

57. Latour, 'Visualisation and cognition' (see note 2). 58. Herv6 cited in Revel, 'Knowledge of the territory'

(see note 54), 150. 59. Sven Widmalm, 'Accuracy, rhetoric and technology,

the Paris-Greenwich triangulation, 1784-88', in Frdngs- myr, The Quantifying Spirit in the 18th Century (see note 55), 179-206; on page 180, Cassini du Thury is quoted as saying in 1765: 'le seul moyen de perfectionner la geographie, 6toit de suivre pour la description d'un pays la meme methode que 1'on avoit employee pour la determination de la figure de la terre'. 60. Konvitz, Cartography in France (see note 54), 10-12;

Monique Pelletier, La Carte de Cassini (Paris, Presses de l'tcole nationale des Ponts et Chaussees, 1990), 67.

61. Brown, Story of Maps (see note 50), 252. 62. Pelletier, La Carte de Cassini (see note 60), 69. 63. Brown, Story of Maps (see note 50), 254. 64. Brown, Story of Maps (see note 50), 255. 65. Revel, 'Knowledge of the territory' (see note 54),

155. 66. Eviatar Zerubavel, 'The standardization of time, a

sociohistorical perspective', American Journal of Sociology 88: 1 (1982): 1-23.

67. Widmalm, 'Accuracy, rhetoric and technology' (see note 59).

68. W. A. Seymour, ed., A History of the Ordnance Survey (Folkstone, Dawson, 1980), 14. The ground-difference calculation was kindly provided by an anonymous referee.

69. See, for example, Adele E. Clarke and Joan H. Fujimura, 'What tools? Which jobs? Why right?' in The Right Tools for the Job, at Work in Twentieth-Century Life Sciences, ed. Adele E. Clarke and Joan H. Fujimura (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1992), 3-46. 70. Widmalm, 'Accuracy, rhetoric and technology' (see

note 59), 188. 71. I owe this point to one of the anonymous referees. 72. Waters suggests the failure was due to the inherent

over-regulation and inertia of centralised administrative organisations ('Science and the techniques of navigation' (see note 25), 16). 73. Jon Goss, "'We know who you are and we know

where you live": the instrumental rationality of geodemo- graphic systems', Economic Geography 71 (1995): 171-98, ref. on 175.

74. Mark Hobart, ed. An Anthropological Critique of Development (London, Routledge, 1993); Blomley, Law, Space, and the Geographies of Power (see note 20); Turnbull, 'Constructing knowledge spaces' (see note 11). 23

RESUMEI: Science et cartographic sont intimement liees dans leur histoire, qui ne consiste pas a dresser des cartes toujours plus exactes, mais dans laquelle science, cartographic et ttat ont cree L'espace de connaissance qui a fourni les conditions necessaires a la science et a la cartographic modernes. L'essence du developpement cartographique reside dans la reunion de la connaissance des lieux, et ainsi est un aspect particulier des developpements fondamentaux pour la science. On trouve reunies tres tot des tentatives par l'Etat de creer un espace epistemologique pour la connaissance cartographique dans la peninsule iberique, oui la Casa da Mina et la Casa de Contratacion peuvent se targuer d'etre les plus anciennes institutions scientifiques des debuts de l'Europe moderne. Ces tentatives echouerent du fait que les cartes-portulans avaient leurs propres traditions de navigation, independamment de L'tat. Un exemple tardif est la triangulation de la France et la liaison des Observatoires de Greenwich et de Paris, qui crea L'espace de connaissance de la science et de la cartographic modernes. Cependant on peut aussi trouver d'autres facons de reunir la connaissance des lieux et les espaces de creation de la connaissance.

ZUSAMMENFASSUNG: Wissenschaft und Kartographie hatten eine innige Geschichte, nicht eine von immer genaueren Karten, sondern eine in welcher Wissenschaft, Kartographie und Staat den Kenntnisraum schufen um die Voraussetzungen fur eine moderne Wissenschaft und Kartographie zu liefern. Der zentrale kartographische ProzeB ist eine Ansammlung von ortlicher Kenntnis. Es ist eine besondere Form des Prozeles, fundamental gegenuber jeder Wissenschaft. Fruhe Beispiele von Bemiihungen durch den Staat um einen erkenntnistheoretischen Raum zu schaffen, in welchem kartographische Kenntnis zusammengetragen werden konnte, waren auf der Iberischen Halbinsel, wo die Casa da Mina und die Casa de la Contratacion sich berufen konnen die ersten wissenschaftliche Institute des fruhen modernen Europas zu sein. Diese Bemuhungen miglungen da die Portolankarten ihre eigenen, vom Staat unabhangigen, Navigationstradi- tionen hatten. Ein spateres Beispiel ist die Triangulation von Frankreich, und die Zusammenarbeit der Observatorien in Greenwich und Paris, welche den Kenntnisraum der modernen Wissenschaft und Kartographie grundeten. Auch alternative Wege der Zusammenstellung von lokaler Kenntnis und der Schaffung von Kenntnisraumen konnen ebenfalls gefunden werden.

A Carto-bibliography of New England Barbara McCorkle is working on a project to identify all pre-1900 maps showing New England. While there have been good carto-bibliographical studies of other areas of the United States, such as Louis Karpinski, Historical Atlas of the Great Lakes and Michigan ( 1931); Henry Raup Wagner, Cartography of the Northwest Coast of America to the Year 1800 (1937); Carl Wheat, Mapping the Transmississippi West (1957); and William Cumming, The Southeast in Early Maps (1958), and several recent books for the Gulf Coast, including James C. Martin and Robert S. Martin, Maps of Texas and the Southwest, 1513-1900 (1984), there has been no comprehensive treatment of New England, one of the earliest settled and historically most important areas of the country. The aim of the project, which is sponsored by the John Carter Brown Library, is to produce a carto-bibliography with the following coverage: maps of the Western Hemisphere before 1600, maps of North America or of its northeastern part before 1700, and maps of northeastern North America before 1800. The net is spread especially widely for the early years because it was some time before the area which eventually became New

24 England came under specific cartographical scrutiny.