Map of a Nation (9 page)

Watson travelled down to London to choose three new map-makers from among the cadets at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich. Only founded eight years before, Woolwich had been designed to provide
instruction
for ‘the people of its Military Branch to form good Officers of Artillery and perfect Engineers’. One of eight military academies established in Europe in the mid eighteenth century, the institution offered a thorough
education
in the mathematical theory and military science required by cadets
who were destined for one of the two corps of the Board of Ordnance. Woolwich taught its cadets to survey according to different methods, to employ a variety of instruments, to use mathematical formulae to
manipulate
calculations of angles and lengths, and to reconcile a number of divergent measurements. The institution also instructed its cadets in
landscape
painting and the traditions of map draughtsmanship deriving from European military schools. It taught the technique of ‘hachuring’ to
represent
hills and mountains, a form of shading that consisted of small strokes drawn in the direction of the steepest slope. The teachers of the Woolwich Academy hoped to instil a uniformity of skill into the Corps of Engineers.

When Watson applied to the Royal Military Academy in 1749 for
assistants
for the Military Survey, that institution housed forty-seven cadets. Its exacting ‘Deputy Head Master’ John Muller was despairing of the quality of many of his students, who he dismissed as ‘Idle’, ‘Lunatic’ and lost to ‘Debauchery, and a thorough neglect of Duty’. There were only a few of whose prospects he was hopeful: a sixteen-year-old Practitioner Engineer already working for the Corps called Hugh Debbieg, a young man with a determined jaw and petulent downturned mouth, and his friend, a cadet called John Williams. William Dundas, the twelve-year-old son of Watson’s brother-in-law Robert Dundas and his second wife Ann Gordon, also happened to be studying at Woolwich. Watson duly made his choice, and Debbieg, Williams and Dundas were packed off to Scotland to join Roy on the Military Survey. Shortly afterwards, the Board of Ordnance found funds for two more assistants, and another Woolwich cadet called Thomas Howse and a slightly more experienced Practitioner Engineer called John Manson were also selected to work on the survey. Roy was thus presented with five assistant map-makers and even a few horses, plus ‘additional Servants, Guides, Interpreters & otherwise’. This was really the bare
minimum
necessary to make such a survey, and the Board’s provisions were long overdue. Nevertheless, Roy must have been delighted.

Among this band of enthusiastic but inexpert young engineers, Roy was also sent a draughtsman. After the failure of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, a sixteen-year-old Nottinghamshire boy with a sharp, intelligent face had sent samples of his landscape sketches to the Board of Ordnance. Its committee
did not consider Paul Sandby worthy of permanent employment, and a satirical sketch he later made of an Ordnance meeting, portraying its
squabbles
and prejudices, was probably fuelled by enduring hurt at this rejection. But the Board did offer Sandby ad hoc work in Scotland, and he began by assisting David Watson in the repair and construction of forts by producing large-scale military surveys of their immediate environs. These maps were clearly the product of a nascent landscape painter: Sandby surrounded his plans with meticulously detailed watercolours of the scenes that rendered the redcoats’ presence in the Highlands as natural as foliage.

In 1749 Watson sent Sandby to work with Roy on the Military Survey. In his first year of this employment, the small team of map-makers spent some time surveying the area around Kinloch Rannoch, especially the road that Wade and his successors had built from Stirling to Crieff and Dalnacardoch. From Sandby’s surviving sketches, it seems that the scenery here appeared remarkably monochrome to the young draughtsman. And so it is, especially in cloudy weather: by the sides of Loch Rannoch, black mountains with snowy toupees stand as erect as pints of Irish stout. Fog clings to their sides like wisps of grey candyfloss, and the treacly loch is wrinkled by reflections of the trees that serrate its edges. Sandby spent some of his time there
producing
drawings of his teammates amid this muted Perthshire landscape.

Paul Sandby made one particularly fascinating pen-and-ink and
watercolour
painting of a scene a mile or so east of the loch’s foot, on the banks of the River Tummel. Sandby’s
View Near Loch Rannoch
showed the ragtag bunch of young surveyors in action. On a flat plain against an arboreal background, through which the Tummel winds, two redcoated surveying assistants lay out a measuring chain; in the foreground one holds a staff, with a counterpart in the background; and three soldiers tend to the horses. Hunched over a circumferentor on a tripod is a man attired in a blue coat, and this is almost certainly a unique image of the young William Roy. But like the surveys he conducted for Watson, Sandby’s
View
was not an
impartial
representation. As a brilliant piece of visual propaganda, the young man’s sketch advertised the indomitable force of the King’s army. A craggy outcrop in the sketch’s middle-ground is locally known as Craig Varr and in Sandby’s painting it is being built over with soldiers’ lodgings, as part of
the occupation of the Highlands. Sandby’s
View
also shows locals in plaid kilts and trews assisting the military engineers, possibly translators or guides or maybe just interested bystanders. Either way, the map-makers appear to have successfully converted the Highlanders to Enlightenment science and the Army’s presence in Scotland.

What Sandby decided
not
to paint in his
View
was almost as telling. To the map-makers’ backs, entirely ignored in the young man’s watercolour, lies the best view in the entire region of a vast, symmetrical mountain called Schiehallion, which resembles an indelicate Mount Fuji. It may seem strange that a cartographic draughtsman chose to ignore such an aesthetically
fascinating
scene. But a background featuring Schiehallion would have dwarfed the surveyors, making their task to map the whole Scottish mainland appear comically absurd. Sandby’s
View Near Loch Rannoch
was an image consciously constructed to demonstrate the might of the Hanoverian military and its
relatively
tame backdrop shows his colleagues clearly in control. Furthermore, the particular region in which Sandby set his
View
was scarred by a traumatic recent history of anti-Jacobite violence. Four miles north lay a Hanoverian barracks from which redcoats had descended on the surrounding area in the aftermath of the 1745 Rebellion, seizing Jacobite estates, executing Highland criminals and razing buildings to the ground. Sandby’s painting was a barefaced celebration of Hanoverian power, its composition and
location
consciously chosen to reinforce that message. Displaying such an acute awareness of the political power of art and landscape, it is small wonder that in the decades following the Military Survey of Scotland Paul Sandby enjoyed a short spell producing satirical political cartoons. He also helped found the Royal Academy of Art (an institution designed to promote a ‘British school’ of painting), and pursued a career as a nationalist landscape painter – his obituary called him the ‘father of English watercolour’.

 

I
N THE THREE
years that followed the formation of this small and
inexperienced
map-making team, its members surpassed all expectations. They
worked on a standard pattern for surveyors that saw the men ‘in the field’ during the spring and summer months, when the days were long, the
temperatures
moderate, the winds and storms not too frequent or fierce, and the light bright. David Watson paid regular visits to his charges, reporting on their progress to the Board of Ordnance’s senior officers in London. In autumn and winter the map-makers retreated to Scotland’s capital where, in the Governor’s House of Edinburgh Castle, they collated their
measurements
of the roads and waterways and their sketches and informed guesses about the intervening landscape to construct the intricate maps that
comprise
the Highland sheets of the Military Survey of Scotland.

The climate and topography of what Watson termed the most ‘remote Corners of the Highlands’ were a consistent challenge throughout this epic enterprise. The young men’s notebooks, journals and correspondence during the project have not survived, but Sandby made an etching that captured the daily tribulations of Roy and his map-makers. He showed a small party huddled at the base of a treacherous mountain pass, raddled by gales, pitting themselves futilely against the forces of nature in their most extreme
manifestation
. In the repeated soakings that the men endured, their woollen uniforms must have become a heavy burden. Seventy years after the Military Surveyors’ extraordinary tramp across Scotland, the Ordnance Survey
followed
in their footsteps. From one map-maker’s descriptions of his ordeal, we can get some idea of the arduousness of his predecessors’ experiences. This man described ‘the really laborious part of the business’, that of ‘
conveying
the camp equipage, instruments and stores’ across the violently undulating landscape. Scotland’s notorious midge population contributed to the ordeal and ‘it was our practice in walking to put our coats and waistcoats into our knapsacks,’ the Ordnance Surveyor recounted.

9
. Party of Six Surveyors, Highlands in Distance,
1750, by Paul Sandby.

 

The weather added further trials. At 11 a.m. on 28 June, at the height of summer, the map-maker reported that his thermometer suddenly
plummeted
, closely followed by a hailstorm. With a surveyor’s eye for detail, he noted the hail’s ‘large and conical’ stones ‘with smooth convex bases and
striated
sides’. When the storm had passed, this surveyor recalled how ‘the men set-to snow-balling each other as a means of warming themselves – a rather unusual amusement at the latter end of June’.

Finally, by 1752, in the space of two years of solitary endeavour and three years of shared toil, despite indomitable hills, claggy bogs and hostile Jacobites, William Roy and his men had produced finished maps of the entire Scottish Highlands, a region comprising 15,000 square miles of mountains, lochs, beaches, cliffs, forests and glens. Back in Edinburgh, the surveyors reduced their sketches and calculations into maps on a scale of one inch to 1000 yards (so that a straight distance of 1000 yards on the ground was represented by one inch on paper).
2
The map-making project might easily have stopped there, at the outermost border of the Scottish Highlands. After all, the
principal
motivations for making the Military Survey were specific to this inaccessible home of Jacobitism. The Lowlands were less inclined to rebellion, easier to travel through and already possessed many good maps.

But the Military Survey did not wind down its operations in 1752. Instead, for reasons we shall see, it ramped them up. Large and regular donations of cash started to be pumped into the map-making project, facilitating the appointment of so many more surveyors, assistants, interpreters and draughtsman that, at the Military Survey’s high point, it was staffed by around sixty personnel. Some of this money came from the map’s progenitor, David Watson, and numerous instalments were also contributed by his brother-in-law Robert Dundas and Dundas’s now 39-year-old son Robin.
Their funding may have engineered the employment of yet another member of their family on the mapping team. David Watson had a fifteen-year-old nephew called David Dundas, Robin’s cousin, who had been eagerly
anticipating
a career in medicine until his persuasive and domineering uncle had manoeuvred him towards the Military Survey. (But he hardly did badly from this career change: within fifty years, David Dundas would become Commander-in-Chief of the British Army.) Principally, however, the
injections
of funding into the Military Survey from 1752 onwards were designed to allow William Roy to lead his expanded team across the Highland–Lowland border into the calmer realms of southern and eastern Scotland.