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00:03August 2007, a nuclear-powered Russian icebreaker cuts its way through the Arctic Ocean, on
00:11board a mini-submarine. It's about to dive two and a half miles to the seabed. There,
00:21the Russians will plant a titanium flag directly beneath the North Pole to symbolize Moscow's
00:27claims to the Arctic. But Russia isn't alone. The United States, Canada, Denmark and Norway
00:38are all staking similar claims. As the polar ice melts, it's becoming much easier to gain
00:47access to the gas, oil and minerals beneath the seabed. The scramble is on to claim the
00:55right to exploit them. And the first ever political map of the Arctic is being drawn
01:02up to identify the disputed territories.
01:12I've been studying maps for most of my life, and this is the most intriguing attempt I've
01:17seen to map the future. This is an extraordinary map. What this map shows is all these different
01:26countries looming up onto the North Pole. Russia, USA, Canada, Greenland, Scandinavian countries,
01:37laying claim to different bits of the pole. All these different colours show competing
01:43political and economic interests. Map-making has always been bound up with politics.
01:51From attempts to map the known world in the Middle Ages,
01:57to the age of exploration and discovery,
02:02to Imperial Britain's claim to be the centre of the world.
02:08And now the new Arctic map brings together geography, economics and international law,
02:15in an attempt to settle the latest territorial dispute.
02:20Map-makers are now at the heart of a really charged struggle around political influence
02:26and access to riches. But it's not for the first time, because the history of maps
02:31is also the history of power, plunder and possession.
02:53Palermo Cathedral, Christmas Day in the year 1130.
03:01A Norman warrior is crowned Roger II, King of Sicily,
03:08one of the wealthiest and most influential kingdoms in Europe.
03:18Roger's kingdom was composed of a rather volatile mix of Christians, Greeks and Muslims,
03:23and Roger wanted to stamp his authority across all of them, but not just through brute force.
03:28He commissioned a team of scholars dedicated to the mapping of the culture and territories
03:33of the entire Mediterranean region and the world beyond it.
03:39Roger entrusted the making of the map to the foremost Muslim scholar of the day, Muhammad Al Idrisi.
03:47Over 15 years, Idrisi gathered travellers' accounts of distant lands and the latest information about trade,
03:55transport and political power in each territory.
04:00He then began work on a series of regional maps covering the whole of the known world.
04:07The maps stretch all the way from China in the east to Spain in the west.
04:15In an accompanying text, Spain is described in great detail as a land of fine estates,
04:22defended by well-fortified castles.
04:27To the north, Britain is located in the sea of darkness and described as being the shape of an ostrich
04:34head.
04:36Its inhabitants are said to be brave, active and enterprising, but all is in the grip of perpetual winter.
04:47The western Mediterranean is dominated by Roger's kingdom.
04:52Sicily's size is exaggerated.
04:56Idrisi calls it the pearl of the age.
05:03The maps were bound together with the text describing the regions of the world and became known as the Book
05:09of Roger.
05:15This is the book that Roger asked him to write to put in all the information that he had assembled
05:24about the inhabited world in his day.
05:28And it consists of 70, seven-zero maps, each accompanied by several pages of text,
05:37telling you about the cities, how you get from one city to the next, how long it takes you,
05:44discussions of harbors, a great deal about commodities, resources.
05:52The Book of Roger is full of vivid geographical detail,
05:56but Idrisi's maps clearly aren't the result of a scientific survey.
06:01What we see here is North Africa. This is the Mediterranean.
06:07Look at this coast. That is anything but accurate. It's just a wavy line with the cities just lined up
06:15on
06:15them. So what he's actually giving you is the sequence of the harbors, probably, along here.
06:23So the text is necessary for any kind of detail. Text and map are integral, extremely clever,
06:32innovative. Simple but brilliant. Yes.
06:37While Idrisi was working on his maps, Roger was still expanding his kingdom,
06:41gaining strategic footholds in Greece and North Africa.
06:47What do you think that Roger's trying to do with Idrisi?
06:50He's trying to get as much information out of him as possible about all of the areas of the world
06:56that Roger didn't rule. So that not only was Idrisi commissioned to draw a map, but he was
07:04commissioned to find out everything he could about trade and travel and distances between cities and
07:12fortresses, all the sorts of things that someone wishing to conquer an area would need to know.
07:17Roger, of course, had political designs himself on Spain. He dreamed of possibly conquering Spain,
07:25possibly North Africa. So the knowledge that Idrisi had would have been very useful to Roger.
07:36From his island kingdom in the middle of the Mediterranean, Roger was playing for high stakes
07:41in international politics. He'd realized that maps weren't just about the quest for knowledge,
07:46and he appreciated that you could now use maps to put his tiny kingdom onto a much larger world stage.
07:59Roger's map of the known world was being used to describe and celebrate his expanding empire.
08:05But maps would later become much more powerful tools of conquest.
08:12The great leap forward came at the turn of the 15th century, with the translation into Latin of a
08:18rediscovered classical work called simply The Geography.
08:25Its author was a Greek scholar called Claudius Ptolemy, also known as the father of geography.
08:31Working in the great library of Alexandria in Egypt in the second century,
08:36Ptolemy built up a vast knowledge of the world.
08:43This is Bosom. Now a tiny village on the Sussex coast, it was once a bustling port on the edge
08:50of
08:50the Roman Empire, called Magnus Portus. And Ptolemy managed to plot its position in his geography
08:582,000 years ago.
09:01Someone has to come here. Someone has to do lots of observations, observing the stars,
09:07observing the sun. Then it has to get back to Ptolemy. And then Ptolemy has to do the geometry,
09:16he has to do the mathematics, to work out what the correct latitude and longitude should be,
09:21given what the traveler has reported. So one line in this is a huge amount of work.
09:31Ptolemy's system of mapping was inspired by his knowledge of astronomy.
09:37He devised a grid of intersecting lines to map the position of the stars,
09:42and then transferred this web-like grid to the globe.
09:54Ptolemy used astronomy, geometry and mathematics to plot the positions
09:59of 8,000 places in the known world.
10:06He's sitting in Alexandria, and he's actually marking Magnus Portus' bosom here,
10:11thousands of miles away.
10:13He's like the spider sitting in the middle of the web, pulling it all in, isn't he?
10:19It's a purely geometrical principle, and that's the genius of what Ptolemy does.
10:24He puts that across the earth. He allows us to understand where every location is in relation
10:31to every other location. And it's a fantastic, enduring principle, which takes us right through
10:37to the modern age of map-making.
10:40Ptolemy was tackling the greatest challenge of map-making, finding a way to represent the
10:45spherical shape of the earth on a flat surface.
10:49As you can see, a globe doesn't look very flat, does it?
10:53And the question is whether you could actually take the surface of a sphere and flatten it out.
10:57And the easy way to see that is actually to peel off part of the surface.
11:02This is probably a good enough bit.
11:06Okay, so here's a little piece of the earth. It's about quarter of the whole thing.
11:10If I try and flatten this out, it doesn't want to go. It really does not want to be flattened.
11:16What that means is that if you're going to draw a map that's flat,
11:21you can't get all of the geometry of the real globe correct.
11:27There's no way to map the globe exactly onto a flat surface.
11:31But Ptolemy perfected a working compromise we still use today, projection.
11:37Ptolemy's idea is very straightforward. Draw a grid on a piece of paper.
11:43And it doesn't have to be exactly the same shape as the grid on the sphere.
11:49We have here a diagram from his book telling you how to do it.
11:56These circles are lines of latitude.
12:00These straight lines are the lines of longitude.
12:04So those correspond to the lines on the sphere.
12:09There's this catalogue of latitude and longitude for various points.
12:13And you can just look at the grid and say,
12:15ah, such and such a city should go here, such and such a city should go there.
12:19And you mark all the cities in,
12:21all the points, bits of coastline, rivers, everything is listed.
12:25And then you kind of join up the dots and you've got your map.
12:32We're going to test Ptolemy's calculations
12:34against the pinpoint accuracy of 21st-century GPS.
12:39North, 50 degrees, 49.6 minutes.
12:43West, 0 degrees, 51.5 minutes.
12:48Let's have a look at what Ptolemy's geography tells us.
12:52Magnus Portus has coordinates longitude 19, latitude 53.
12:59So why is the longitude? It seems so far out.
13:02And the answer is he didn't put his zero longitude where we do.
13:05So this is coordinates from nearly 2,000 years ago,
13:09and he's only a few degrees out.
13:11So he's pretty close considering, you know, the reports he's getting from travelers
13:16will not be fantastically well observed and fantastically accurate.
13:20It's impressive for 2,000 years ago.
13:33It's no wonder that Ptolemy was known as the father of geography,
13:36because this map-making kit that he put together was one of the great achievements
13:41of the classical world and a pinnacle of Greek science.
13:45And for the next 14 centuries, it remained seriously and challenged.
13:49Instead, it was being used throughout that period to chart the known world,
13:54to imagine it, and to even start to control it.
14:00Once translated, Ptolemy's geography was distributed throughout Renaissance Europe
14:06and fueled curiosity about the world beyond the Mediterranean.
14:16An hour before dawn, the 3rd of August, 1492.
14:21Three ships with a 90-strong crew are leaving the Spanish harbor of Palos
14:27and heading west.
14:29Leading the expedition, Christopher Columbus.
14:34A new age of exploration was just beginning.
14:39Columbus was bound for China,
14:40and he was inspired by the most up-to-date map of the day,
14:45the Martellus map.
14:48The map extends from the canaries in the west to the east coast of China.
14:54It also shows the first sea route round the Cape of Good Hope to the Far East,
14:59newly discovered by the Portuguese.
15:03The Martellus map convinced Columbus that he could open up a faster sea route
15:08to the riches of Asia by sailing directly west.
15:13The expedition was driven by Columbus's overweening desire for fame, titles and riches.
15:19But this was an incredibly risky venture.
15:22The sailors on board all three ships were full of doubts and fears,
15:26and they referred to the voyage as this mad fantasy.
15:34In 1989, Sir Robin Knox Johnston single-handedly retraced Columbus's journey across the Atlantic,
15:41using the same kind of instruments that Columbus had used.
15:47What was it that inspired you to follow Columbus's voyage?
15:51Well, primarily, I wanted to see how accurately they could navigate in those days.
15:56I'd sail those waters before, but we'd never been focusing on that.
15:59So I said, right, now, if I'm just going to do nothing but just think about Columbus,
16:02do this voyage like Columbus, I'm going to pick stuff up.
16:09When he leaves from near Cadiz and goes down to the Canary Islands, which are also Spanish,
16:14so that's a voyage they make quite frequently, but it's from here.
16:19This is where he takes his last food and water on board, and then he sets off into the blue.
16:23It's pretty risky.
16:25Oh, certainly it's risky, but he was right in a way that, you know, if you keep going west,
16:31you would eventually reach Japan or China had he... Well, he didn't know America was in the way.
16:39Um, but the theory was right. You know, the Martellus map would say to him,
16:43if I keep going on this latitude all the way around, I'll pop up that side of the map.
16:49Somewhere here.
16:50Somewhere here.
16:51Mm.
16:54The Martellus map convinced Columbus that China was much closer than it really was.
17:01Following Ptolemy's calculations, Martellus underestimated the circumference of the Earth,
17:06and it turned out to be a massive 7,000 miles wider than he thought.
17:13What we're missing totally here is the full extent of the Atlantic,
17:16the whole of the Americas and the Pacific Ocean.
17:18Quite a lot we're missing.
17:20Ptolemy didn't know anything about it.
17:21Exactly.
17:26He sort of guessed it'd be 21, maybe 28 days, ended up being 35. But, you know, in 21 days,
17:33he's going to reach China.
17:35Um, well, that's okay. According to the distance he's calculated to be.
17:40But he passes that distance, and it's still empty ocean.
17:43Mm.
17:44And the days go on after, one after another, still no land, still not sighting anything,
17:48crew getting fed up.
17:50Hey, we don't want to die here.
17:57Here I am, 25 days at sea, on my own.
18:00I haven't seen a ship now for well over a week.
18:04And I think I've got about 1,000 miles to go.
18:07And at this speed, oh, I'll make it in about 10 days. I'd say maybe 11.
18:15Cheers.
18:22He just goes on until he starts saying, birds, wait a minute, they've got to come from land.
18:27Watch where they go at night, because they always go home at night.
18:31Okay, that's where land is.
18:39About 20 minutes ago, day 20 exactly, I sighted some land.
18:43And at first I wasn't sure, but now I'm absolutely sure it is land.
18:47It's up to the northwest, so I expected it to be down to the southeast, if anything.
18:52Sir Robin Knox Johnston made land after 34 days at sea.
18:59Columbus and his crew took a day longer.
19:12For Columbus, it now seemed that the riches of the east were spread out before him.
19:16He eagerly went ashore in an armed boat and was greeted by crowds of curious local people, eager to see
19:23the new arrival.
19:26Columbus named the new territory San Salvador.
19:29We now know it's an island in the Caribbean.
19:33Columbus was convinced he'd landed in China.
19:35And he had no idea that his massive miscalculation would make him the most famous explorer in history.
19:44Columbus had discovered a new continent, America.
19:47But such was the power of his belief in the map that he was using, that he went to his
19:52grave 14 years later, still convinced that he discovered a western passage to Asia.
19:58To this day, we still celebrate Columbus as the discoverer of America.
20:02But it was a place that he never believed even existed.
20:08When Columbus returned to Europe, the map of the world was redrawn.
20:20This strange but incredibly beautiful map is the first ever that records the land discovered by Columbus on his first
20:27voyage.
20:28You can see here the Bahamas and over here San Salvador.
20:32It was made by Juan de la Cosa, who went with Columbus on his first voyage and all his subsequent
20:38expeditions to the new world.
20:39It was probably made to show to the Spanish sovereigns, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, back here in Spain,
20:46to give them a sense of the extent of the new world over here to the west.
20:51And as if to emphasize the point, the new world is like this big verdant green claw,
20:58in complete contrast to the rest of the map, giving the Spaniards a sense of entitlement, the enticement of the
21:05new world.
21:11As European powers vied for control of these lucrative new territories,
21:16maps became vital tools in a global struggle for dominance.
21:28In 1502, an Italian undercover agent smuggled this map out of Portugal.
21:36It shows all the new Portuguese discoveries, from India to the Persian Gulf,
21:44East Africa to Brazil.
21:48But like all maps of this era, it marks the vast new world in the west as largely uncharted territory.
22:00In 1503, an Italian explorer published a set of pamphlets announcing his own discoveries in the new world.
22:11His name was Amerigo Vespucci.
22:26This was a groundbreaking statement, because maps of the time suggested that the new world was somehow connected to Asia.
22:35All of these maps show that new world without a complete west coast.
22:40They are somehow joining that new world to Asia.
22:44So Vespucci's claim to have discovered a separate fourth continent was completely at odds with what everybody really believed.
22:53Vespucci's description of a fourth continent fired the imagination of a German map maker, Martin Waldseemuller.
23:00In 1507, he incorporated its outline into a pioneering new work.
23:07Vespucci's map is absolutely vast, much bigger than this projection actually shows.
23:13When these 12 printed sheets are all stuck together, it stands one and a half meters tall and two and
23:20a half meters wide.
23:22And that was deliberate because Vespucci wanted this map to hang on the great aristocratic courtly walls of Europe.
23:32That's where you will be.
23:33No European had yet seen the ocean on the far side of the new world.
23:37But here it was shown by Wolltsumuller for the first time.
23:42In contrast to all the other maps showing the latest discoveries,
23:46this continent is shown completely surrounded by water.
23:50It's totally navigable.
23:52This is the first map ever that shows America as a separate fourth continent.
23:58And Waldseemüller labels it for the very first time down here, America, in honor of Amerigo Vespucci.
24:16The only surviving copy of Waldseemüller's map of the world was bought by the U.S. Library of Congress.
24:21In 2003, it was the first document of any kind that introduces the word America to the world.
24:35The map is now known as America's birth certificate.
24:48Maps have played a crucial role in forging national identities across the world.
24:54But sometimes mapmakers purposefully bend the truth to serve the interests of powerful nations.
25:05The year is 1529.
25:09A fertile archipelago in the Pacific Ocean known as the Moluccas, or Spice Islands, is at the heart of a
25:16bitter dispute.
25:19Spain and Portugal were battling over two of the most valuable commodities in 16th century Europe.
25:26Nutmeg and cloves.
25:33This was a very serious business.
25:36Clothes may not seem to be terribly priced today, but at the time, in the 16th century, they were literally
25:41worth their weight in gold, used for medicinal and also culinary purposes.
25:48A summit was called to try to settle the dispute between the two imperial superpowers of the age.
25:56The Portuguese initially had the upper hand.
25:58They were effectively in control of the Moluccas.
26:01But as the superpowers summit began, the Spanish king produced his trump card.
26:07A new map of the world that claimed to be more authoritative than any other so far.
26:14This beautiful hand-drawn map had been specially made for the king by a virtuoso mapmaker called Diego Ribeiro.
26:25It features finely drawn navigational and scientific instruments, as if to emphasise its authority.
26:32For the map's primary purpose was political.
26:38Ribeiro's map shows how the two superpowers had previously agreed to divide the world into two spheres of influence.
26:46Here you can see the two flags of the contending empires.
26:50There's the Portuguese flag, and there's the Spanish flag.
26:54Everything to the east belongs to the Portuguese, and everything to the west of this line belongs to the Spanish.
27:03The Spice Islands had always been placed in the Portuguese sphere of influence, on the far eastern side of the
27:09world.
27:10But on Ribeiro's new map, they've moved.
27:13Here they are, the Moluccas Islands, all picked out here.
27:16So what he's done is he's actually put them in the Spanish half of the western hemisphere.
27:23And you can tell because here is the Spanish flag, and clearly laying claim to all these islands here, the
27:30Moluccas.
27:33So convincing was Ribeiro's map that the Portuguese reluctantly accepted that the Moluccas were in Spanish territory.
27:41Ribeiro had pulled off a brilliant con trick.
27:45His map had cooked the books.
27:47And this is what I find so fascinating about world maps.
27:51We look at them and think that we're seeing an accurate standardized representation of the Earth.
27:57But the more we dig down beneath the layers of the map, we start to see selection going on, we
28:03start to see manipulation and even deception.
28:06Beautiful scientific objects they may be, but it is that ability of the map to fuse all those different elements,
28:14high politics, science, art, commerce, that makes them so irresistible to rulers throughout history.
28:26In the early 16th century, navigating at sea was a perilous business.
28:33Ships crossing the Atlantic could find themselves hundreds of miles off course, with deadly consequences.
28:40Starvation.
28:42Dehydration.
28:44Shipwreck.
28:48And maps were the problem.
28:51Due to the curvature of the Earth, ships trying to follow a straight line on a map ended up veering
28:57dangerously off course.
29:06But in the mid-16th century, there was a map-making revolution.
29:13It would solve this navigational problem and inspire the creation of the most influential map in history.
29:23It still defines our vision of the world in the 21st century.
29:35The man behind this revolutionary projection is proudly celebrated in his hometown of Ruppelmonde in Belgium.
29:45The map-maker Gerard Mercator.
29:52He's known as the prince of modern geographers, but Mercator had a humble start in life.
29:59So here we come at the house where Mercator was born on the 5th of March, 1512, 6 o'clock
30:07in the morning.
30:08It was a hospital for poor people.
30:11That was the original use? It was a hospital?
30:13It was a hospital. And his uncle was here a priest in the hospital.
30:18I taught him here mathematics and Latin.
30:21And Mercator's uncle made it possible for this young boy, poor boy, brilliant boy to go to university
30:29and become what he has become, the map-maker of the navigation.
30:41As a boy, Mercator often came here to the quay side on the river Skelt.
30:47So this is the harbour where the young Mercator, five, six years old, got in touch with the world, the
30:54sea, the sailing.
30:56Of course, Columbus discovered America. Certainly he must have talked about it with the sailors, talking about navigation.
31:03And he had all that in mind.
31:05And where does the river take us?
31:07Well, the river take us from here to Antwerp, then to the sea, and then to the whole world.
31:16After studying mathematics, geography and astronomy, Mercator began making globes for European royalty and other wealthy patrons.
31:27To do this, he outlined the countries of the world onto a series of long segments of paper called gauze.
31:35When joined together, they would fit perfectly around a globe.
31:42This globe is made in 1541 by Mercator.
31:46It's beautiful. It's absolutely exquisite.
31:49So how would you make a globe like this?
31:51When you make a globe like this, you had to put on plaster.
31:57And then you had to put on it the gores who were engraved in copper.
32:03To make a gore has to be very accurate.
32:06But what's amazing is the stream continues on the other sheet.
32:11I can't see the joins here on the gauze. It's done with incredible skill.
32:17Building on his work as a globe maker, in 1569, Mercator devised a new method of projection onto a flat
32:24surface to help navigators at sea.
32:30Mercator began by straightening the lines of longitude, or meridians.
32:36He then increased the spaces between the lines of latitude, moving away from the equator.
32:47Here is the famous world map from Mercator.
32:52Here is the famous world map from Mercator.
32:52He made this map in 1569.
32:55A new map for sailors in his time.
33:03For the first time, navigators would be able to plot a straight line between two points on a map and
33:10safely reach their destination.
33:15To achieve this, Mercator struck a cartographic compromise.
33:21To ensure navigational accuracy, his projection increasingly distorts the size of countries the further they are from the equator.
33:33They're actually mapped to infinity. I mean, they're vast.
33:40And it's the same down here.
33:42On the pole, yeah. So the south pole goes like this.
33:45Goes like that.
33:48So it's a way of stretching. Stretching the world.
33:51But as a result, you do get this massive distortion.
33:56Mercator distorts the globe in other ways, too.
34:00By deliberately placing the equator south of the center, he gives Europe a dominant position in the world.
34:09These distortions have been retained as the map projection has been updated over the centuries.
34:16There's no doubt, as far as I'm concerned, that the Mercator world map is the most important one ever made.
34:23It defines the history of cartography for the next four centuries.
34:27And it is used everywhere, in school atlases, the British Empire even adopts it, to get a sense of its
34:33imperial dominion.
34:34This is the map which, for us in the West, defines the world as we understand it, still to this
34:40day.
34:48Designed for navigation, Mercator's projection made maps more useful as aids to exploration.
34:56And no one understood this better than the merchants of the Dutch East India Company, established in 1602.
35:05They used the latest maps to lead them to the treasures of the East, and the company quickly became a
35:11mighty global force.
35:17Well, at the beginning of the 17th century, maps stopped being, or become less, gorgeous hand-painted objects to be
35:28exchanged, to be presented as gifts by ambassadors.
35:32And they become part of the paraphernalia and business of travel.
35:38So they are part of a commercial toolbox for exploring the globe with a view to making profit.
35:51The vast corporate empire of the Dutch East India Company, or VOC as it was known, stretched from Africa to
35:58Japan.
36:01It was run from its headquarters here in Amsterdam.
36:05This was the hub of a global information network, where the company's own cartographers drew up their own maps.
36:14These maps were closely guarded commercial secrets.
36:18The ships of the Dutch East India Company had a combination of small-scale maps and large-scale maps on
36:25board.
36:25The small-scale maps were crossing the big oceans, the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean.
36:31This one was used for crossing the Atlantic, although there's only a little piece left.
36:36When they had crossed the ocean, they needed larger-scale maps.
36:40Of course, the inland is hardly visible, because that was of no use, but everything on the shore or in
36:46front of the shore was very clear and very accurate.
36:49Because this is really a map about commerce, it's about marking the coastline and working out where you can land
36:55and where you can trade your goods.
36:56When you were nearing your goal, it was very essential that you had a very accurate map.
37:01In fact, there was a whole circulation of communication that took place.
37:06So the pilots, they took their charts again back to Amsterdam and they said,
37:11this is wrong, this is better, I made that one better.
37:14The chief chart maker, he improved the maps and sent the ships with new improved maps.
37:24As the Dutch mapped the world with increasing accuracy, they were also staking their claim on new territory.
37:30They're using the equivalent of the tube map. They can get wherever they want.
37:35They can confidently trade across the hinterlands of before uncharted territories.
37:42They know where people are. That is a very modern idea.
37:47That you are somewhere extremely remote, that you arrived at by sea, but you know where other people are, other
37:54Westerners in relation to yourself.
37:56In 1633, the VOC hired Willem Blau as its chief map maker.
38:03Blau had his own successful map making business, and his new job gave him access to highly classified information.
38:11Rather odd that a man like Willem Jansson Blau, that he both had his own business.
38:18He made atlases and atlas maps, and next to that he was the chief cartographer of the Dutch East India
38:25Company.
38:26And whereas these maps were secret, because that was commercial capital,
38:31these maps were in the end little puzzle pieces that fitted into the big puzzle of the world map that
38:37improved steadily on and on.
38:40So Blau is using this kind of raw material to then put together an updated version of the world map?
38:46Yes.
38:54Blau's atlas was a luxury object, beautifully bound and engraved, full of colour and intricate typography.
39:03Blau used the latest data gathered by the Dutch East India Company to update the map of the world using
39:09Mercator's projection.
39:12This was the first time that a Mercator projection was included in a world atlas.
39:18In this way, he popularized a projection that wasn't popular at all.
39:24It was a projection that was made for the seafaring people, for the pilots.
39:28And now he included the map on which he apparently was so proud in his atlas.
39:36In the 1630s, Blau's atlas was translated into many languages and became a huge success.
39:43And the Dutch East India Company was now eclipsing Portugal and Spain in global trade.
39:52The big innovation from the middle of the 17th century for the Dutch is that they stop carrying in gold
39:59and silver simply to buy and sell in the Indies and carry the trade back.
40:04They now trade across the Indies with other nations, with other Dutch parts of the East India Company.
40:14They transact goods for other goods.
40:16They use copper. They use silk for spices.
40:21There's a whole burgeoning, really commercial marketplace, which is remote from Holland.
40:27They are an autonomous bazaar in the East Indies, and the maps have enabled that.
40:38By the end of the 18th century, the VOC had sent over a million people to work in the Asian
40:44trade.
40:45They dispatched nearly 5,000 ships and netted millions of tons of goods and commodities.
40:58The VOC brought huge prosperity to Holland and kick-started a sophisticated international market.
41:09But in the 19th century, the failure to standardize maps began to hold back the development of an efficient global
41:16economy.
41:20Navigation relied on comparing the time at your current location with the time on a fixed line of longitude, called
41:27a prime meridian.
41:32Britain's prime meridian ran through Greenwich, where the time was marked once a day by the time ball at Flamsteed
41:39House.
41:44Passing Flamsteed House as the time ball fell here, ships leaving the London docks could now quite accurately set their
41:51clocks to 1pm Greenwich Mean Time.
41:54But that, of course, was just the British ships.
41:56Trading nations all the way from France right through to Japan were still using their own measurements of time according
42:03to their own prime meridians.
42:05It was absolute chaos.
42:08So, could the world's maps be standardized around a single line?
42:14In 1884, representatives of 25 countries came together to decide where the world's prime meridian should be.
42:24The meridian lines that had ranged across the world's maps since Ptolemy were now symbols of imperial prestige.
42:34Proceedings were dominated by Britain and France, who were by now the preeminent imperial powers of the age, with each
42:41lobbying for the supremacy of their own prime meridian.
42:47The French delegates regarded themselves as part of a long and extremely distinguished tradition of scientific map-making.
42:54They were going to fight their corner really hard.
42:56They had no intention of giving up the prime meridian here in Paris to the British.
43:03But Britain's claim found support from the United States delegate, Commander William Sampson.
43:09Commander Sampson argued that the meridian should be selected which is now in most general use.
43:16More than 70% of all the shipping of the world uses the Greenwich meridian.
43:20Britain.
43:22Britain now had the advantage.
43:24When it came to the vote, only San Domingo opposed the British claim.
43:28The French abstained.
43:32Britain was absolutely triumphant.
43:34And this 1886 British Empire map shows Britain right at the centre of the world, with the Greenwich meridian running
43:43right down the middle.
43:46And across the map, in red, British imperial dominions.
43:52And just to make the point very clear about what's happening here, Britannia is shown lounging on a globe.
44:01The French delegation returned home to Paris with their tails between their legs.
44:05But they still refused to concede defeat.
44:08This French world map, produced eight years after the meridian conference, stubbornly sticks to Paris as the prime meridian,
44:17and by implication, France as the centre of the world.
44:20It would be another quarter of a century before the French map-makers adopted Greenwich as their prime meridian.
44:36The international battle over the prime meridian is long over, and the mapping of the whole world is almost complete.
44:44But disputes over unclaimed territory continue.
44:49In 2007, the age of discovery and plunder was given a new lease of life when a Russian submarine planted
44:56a titanium flag on the seabed directly beneath the North Pole.
45:03And the rush by other nations to claim rights over natural resources beneath the Arctic ice is now putting today's
45:10map-makers at the heart of a new struggle for power and wealth.
45:20The International Boundaries Research Unit at Durham University is drawing up new maps of the Arctic in an effort to
45:26resolve potential territorial disputes.
45:29This is the political map and this is the physical map.
45:32That's correct, yes.
45:33Why is this map so important now?
45:35The need for the physical mapping is because so little is known about what lies under the Arctic because it
45:42has been covered by ice.
45:43So global warming is creating a much more politically charged area around claims to the North Pole here?
45:50To some extent. The opening up of the Arctic waters means that the areas where there's potential resources, it's becoming
45:58much, much clearer.
46:00So what are the resources involved here?
46:02It's huge. I think it was something like 20 billion barrels of oil and gas in the Arctic region.
46:12Areas likely to be rich in gas and oil have already been partially mapped.
46:17But who owns these resources?
46:20It all depends on who can establish their claim to the seabed.
46:26The Durham team have created the first political map of the Arctic to show who is currently laying claim to
46:33what.
46:35We have the land territories of Russia, which has the longest coastal frontage on the Arctic.
46:41The USA through its sovereignty over Alaska.
46:46We have Canada with the Canadian archipelago.
46:51Then we have Greenland under the sovereignty of Denmark.
46:53And finally Norway through its sovereignty over the Svalbard archipelago.
47:04States have rights over the resources up to 200 nautical miles from their coastline.
47:10But in exceptional circumstances, it's possible for a country to extend this boundary.
47:16And that's what the Russians are trying to do.
47:19They're laying claim to a raised area of the seabed extending all the way from Siberia to the North Pole.
47:26It's called the Lomonosov Ridge.
47:29The famous flag-planting incident on the North Pole seabed came as part of Russia's attempt to gather more evidence
47:35that the Lomonosov Ridge really is physically connected to the continental margin of Russian land territory.
47:43Which caused quite a hostile reaction from some of its neighbors, particularly Canada, which said that why was Russia claiming
47:51the North Pole as Russian?
47:52Legally, it has no effect at all.
47:55Planting a flag, certainly these days, does not say anything about title to territory.
48:02I think having a good map on the table in a negotiation is extremely important.
48:10As that ocean becomes more navigable, there's a risk of naval incidents.
48:17Who knows what kind of geopolitical games could be played in the regions?
48:24From medieval times to the age of discovery and the era of empire, map-making has always been bound up
48:32with conquest, imperial expansion and conflict.
48:40This modern map-in-progress depicts the fault lines of the future.
48:46It's a warning of potential conflict ahead as the Arctic ice melts.
48:57The lessons of history would suggest that where there's a world map, plunder will surely follow.
49:02But this time the map-makers are ahead of the game, because when the ice melts and the exploitation really
49:08starts,
49:08there'll be an internationally recognized chart of the region to take the heat out of the conflicts over mineral wealth,
49:15which will surely take place.
49:18In the 21st century, map-makers have become peacemakers.
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