The Cartographer of Empty Space

A cartographer working for a mid-sized geographical society in the 1930s made his professional reputation on a single peculiarity. Where every other mapmaker of his generation was drawing, in ever finer detail, the roads, the rail lines, the towns, and the cultivated fields, he was, on his own time and mostly at his own expense, drawing the empty parts. The stretches of moorland with no path. The strips of unlogged forest between valleys. The salt marshes that appeared on no railway diagram. The quarter-mile of dune that separated one beach town from the next. His maps were famous, among the small community that noticed such things, for having more marked emptiness than any competitor's.

His employers were, for years, mildly irritated by this. Nobody, they pointed out, wanted a map of a moor. Maps were sold to people going somewhere; the empty parts were, by definition, not going anywhere. He was politely told, on several occasions, to spend more of his surveying budget on the towns.

In the winter of 1942, when the war had reached a phase in which his country's military planners suddenly and urgently needed to know, in exact detail, which stretches of moor could hide a downed pilot, which strips of forest could conceal a supply drop, which salt marshes could be crossed on foot at low tide by a small group without leaving a track — his maps, and only his maps, contained the necessary information. Every other cartographer's maps stopped, more or less, at the edge of the last village. His did not. He was, for the duration of the war, quietly the most important geographer in his country.

He never spoke publicly about this. When the war ended he returned to his maps of moors. He was made, in his sixties, a fellow of his society, which most of his colleagues thought was a slightly eccentric appointment. He died in the mid-1960s. His maps, which had been passed to a national archive, are now used, on a regular basis, by conservation biologists, hydrologists, and the small number of poets whose work depends on knowing what an unpeopled landscape used to look like.

The cartographer's private theory, which he wrote out in one letter to a nephew that has since been published, was that every map contains two kinds of information: the marked and the unmarked. The marked information — the towns, the roads, the boundaries — is, at any given time, the information the current society thinks matters. The unmarked information is what the society has, at that time, decided is not worth naming. But societies change. Wars come. Climate shifts. New uses emerge for what had been considered empty. A map that has recorded the unmarked, he wrote, is a map that will still be useful in a future the mapmaker cannot yet see.

There is a version of this in every professional life. Almost every field, at any given moment, has a widely-shared view about what parts of the field are worth attention and what parts are, essentially, empty moor. The people who make their careers by working the marked parts do well in their own time and, sometimes, are forgotten. The people who, quietly and against professional advice, spend their weekends mapping the empty parts often look, for years, like harmless eccentrics. Then a war comes. A new question is asked. A young researcher needs an old map. The moor is, suddenly, the most important part of the country. If you have, in your own working life, some small stretch of unfashionable territory that you keep returning to for reasons you cannot fully justify, do not stop. The world is unfair to cartographers of empty space during their lifetimes, and unfair the other way afterwards.