The Face of the World

THE STORY OF MAPS (397 pp.)--Lloyd A. Brown--Little, Brown ($7.50).

Until late in the 18th Century, no ship's captain was ever dead sure of his position at sea. It was not uncommon, on long voyages, to miscalculate port by a hundred miles and miss island destinations entirely. Reason: no one had ever discovered a means of determining longitude.

In 1598, Philip III of Spain vainly offered a fat pension to the man who could solve the mystery. In 1707, a British fleet homeward bound from Gibraltar groped about blindly for twelve days in bad weather before it ran aground on the Scilly Islands with a loss of 2,000 men; seven years later, Parliament put up an enormous prize of -L-20,000 for a device that would measure longitude within 30 minutes. In 1761, the problem--which had stumped the massive minds of Scientists Newton, Halley and von Leibnitz--was finally solved by an uneducated Yorkshire carpenter and clock maker named John Harrison. He invented the marine chronometer.

The story of John Harrison (he had to work almost as hard to pry loose his prize as he did inventing his chronometer) is one of the remarkably readable stories in The Story of Maps. A scholarly survey that moves logically and smoothly from the map makers of ancient Egypt to contemporary cartography, the book is also, quite properly, one of the handsomest of the year, attractively illustrated with maps and charts that complement the narrative.

Author Brown, Librarian of Baltimore's Peabody Institute and lecturer in cartography at Johns Hopkins University, seems happiest with such canny ancients as Eratosthenes, who came within 300 miles of accurately measuring the earth's circumference almost three centuries B.C. without the aid of telescope or precision instruments. Another favorite is Ptolemy, whose Geographia (c. 150 A.D.) was so sound that it lasted as a standard cartographer's bible for 15 centuries.

The first known map (2,300 B.C.) was a Babylonian real-estate survey to help tax assessors, but it was not until 1789 that a nation got around to mapping its entire area. The nation was France, and the job took more than 45 years.

Author Brown naturally pays his respects to such map-making giants as the 16th Century Dutchman Mercator who, by the unprecedented accuracy of his projections, "perhaps did more than any other one man to raise map making from a low art form to an exact science." Readers will be grateful that Brown also finds space for such lesser geniuses as 17th Century William Gilbert of Colchester, who proved that a steersman with garlic on his breath would not necessarily deflect a delicate compass needle. Gilbert tried "breathing and belching" garlic on the needle himself, and could "observe almost not the least difference."

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