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00:00August 2007. A nuclear-powered Russian icebreaker cuts its way through the Arctic Ocean.
00:11On board, a mini-submarine. It's about to dive two and a half miles to the seabed.
00:20There, the Russians will plant a titanium flag directly beneath the North Pole to symbolise Moscow's claims to the Arctic.
00:29But Russia isn't alone. The United States, Canada, Denmark and Norway are all staking similar claims.
00:42As the polar ice melts, it's becoming much easier to gain access to the gas, oil and minerals beneath the seabed.
00:51The scramble is on to claim the right to exploit them.
00:58And the first ever political map of the Arctic is being drawn up to identify the disputed territories.
01:13I've been studying maps for most of my life, and this is the most intriguing attempt I've seen to map the future.
01:20This is an extraordinary map.
01:24What this map shows is all these different countries looming up onto the North Pole. Russia, USA, Canada, Greenland, Scandinavian countries.
01:38Laying claim to different bits of the pole. All these different colours show competing political and economic interests.
01:46Map-making has always been bound up with politics.
01:52From attempts to map the known world in the Middle Ages.
01:58To the age of exploration and discovery.
02:03To imperial Britain's claim to be the centre of the world.
02:09And now the new Arctic map brings together geography, economics and international law in an attempt to settle the latest territorial dispute.
02:22Map-makers are now at the heart of a really charged struggle around political influence and access to riches.
02:29But it's not for the first time.
02:31Because the history of maps is also the history of power, plunder and possession.
02:37immortality or Imperialления
02:55Palermo Cathedral, Christmas Day in the year 1130.
03:00A Norman warrior is crowned Roger the Second, king of Sicily.
03:06one of the wealthiest and most influential kingdoms in Europe.
03:18Roger's kingdom was composed of a rather volatile mix
03:21of Christians, Greeks and Muslims,
03:23and Roger wanted to stamp his authority across all of them,
03:26but not just through brute force.
03:28He commissioned a team of scholars
03:30dedicated to the mapping of the culture and territories
03:33of the entire Mediterranean region and the world beyond it.
03:40Roger entrusted the making of the map
03:42to the foremost Muslim scholar of the day, Muhammad al Idrisi.
03:48Over 15 years, Idrisi gathered travellers' accounts of distant lands
03:53and the latest information about trade, transport
03:56and political power in each territory.
03:59He then began work on a series of regional maps
04:04covering the whole of the known world.
04:08The maps stretch all the way from China in the east
04:11to Spain in the west.
04:16In an accompanying text, Spain is described in great detail
04:20as a land of fine estates defended by well-fortified castles.
04:29To the north, Britain is located in the Sea of Darkness
04:32and described as being the shape of an ostrich head.
04:37Its inhabitants are said to be brave, active and enterprising,
04:41but all is in the grip of perpetual winter.
04:48The western Mediterranean is dominated by Roger's kingdom.
04:53Sicily's size is exaggerated.
04:56Idrisi calls it the pearl of the age.
04:59The maps were bound together with the text describing the regions of the world
05:08and became known as the Book of Roger.
05:11This is the book that Roger asked him to write to put in all the information
05:24that he had assembled about the inhabited world in his day.
05:28And it consists of seventy, seven-zero maps,
05:34each accompanied by several pages of text
05:38telling you about the cities,
05:41how you get from one city to the next,
05:43how long it takes you,
05:45discussions of harbours,
05:47a great deal about commodities, resources.
05:53The 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.
06:06This is the Mediterranean.
06:08Look at this coast.
06:10That is anything but accurate.
06:12It's just a wavy line with the cities just lined up on them.
06:17So what he's actually giving you is the sequence of the harbours,
06:22probably, along here.
06:23So the text is necessary for any kind of detail.
06:28Text and map are integral.
06:30Extremely clever, innovative.
06:34Simple but brilliant.
06:36Yes.
06:38While Idrisi was working on his maps,
06:40Roger was still expanding his kingdom,
06:43gaining strategic footholds in Greece and North Africa.
06:45What do you think that Roger's trying to do with Idrisi?
06:51He's trying to get as much information out of him as possible
06:55about all of the areas of the world that Roger didn't rule.
06:59So that the, not only was Idrisi commissioned to draw a map,
07:05but he was commissioned to find out everything he could about trade
07:08and travel and distances between cities and fortresses.
07:13All the sorts of things that someone wishing to conquer an area would need to know.
07:18Roger, of course, had political designs himself on Spain.
07:23He dreamed of possibly conquering Spain, possibly North Africa.
07:26So the knowledge that Idrisi had would have been very useful to Roger.
07:37From his island kingdom in the middle of the Mediterranean,
07:40Roger was playing for high stakes in international politics.
07:44He'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
07:51onto a much larger world stage.
08:00Roger's map of the known world was being used to describe and celebrate his expanding empire.
08:06But maps would later become much more powerful tools of conquest.
08:09The Great Leap Forward came at the turn of the 15th century,
08:17with the translation into Latin of a rediscovered classical work called simply The Geography.
08:26Its author was a Greek scholar called Claudius Ptolemy,
08:30also known as the Father of Geography.
08:32Working in the Great Library of Alexandria in Egypt in the 2nd century,
08:36Ptolemy built up a vast knowledge of the world.
08:44This is Bosom.
08:46Now a tiny village on the Sussex coast,
08:49it was once a bustling port on the edge of the Roman Empire,
08:53called Magnus Portus.
08:55And Ptolemy managed to plot its position in his geography 2,000 years ago.
09:01Someone has to come here.
09:03Someone has to do lots of observations, observing the stars, observing the sun.
09:09Then it has to get back to Ptolemy.
09:12And then Ptolemy has to do the geometry, he has to do the mathematics,
09:18to work out what the correct latitude and longitude should be,
09:22given what the traveller has reported.
09:24So one line in this is a huge amount of work.
09:30Ptolemy's system of mapping was inspired by his knowledge of astronomy.
09:36He devised a grid of intersecting lines to map the position of the stars,
09:42and then transferred this web-like grid to the globe.
09:46Ptolemy used astronomy, geometry and mathematics to plot the positions of 8,000 places in the known world.
10:03He's sitting in Alexandria, and he's actually marking Magnus Portus' bosom here, thousands of miles away.
10:13He's like the spider sitting in the middle of the web, pulling it all in, isn't he?
10:16It's a purely geometrical principle, and that's the genius of what Ptolemy does.
10:26He puts that across the earth, he allows us to understand where every location is in relation to every other location,
10:34and it's a fantastic, enduring principle which takes us right through to the modern age of map-making.
10:39Ptolemy was tackling the greatest challenge of map-making,
10:45finding a way to represent the spherical shape of the earth on a flat surface.
10:50As you can see, a globe doesn't look very flat, does it?
10:54And the question is whether you could actually take the surface of a sphere and flatten it out.
10:58And the easy way to see that is actually to peel off part of the surface,
11:03which is probably a good enough bit.
11:06OK? So here's a little piece of the earth, it's about a quarter of the whole thing.
11:11If I try and flatten this out, it doesn't want to go. It really does not want to be flattened.
11:17What that means is that if you're going to draw a map that's flat,
11:22you 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.
11:38Ptolemy's idea is very straightforward.
11:41Draw a grid on a piece of paper.
11:44And it doesn't have to be exactly the same shape as the grid on the sphere.
11:48We have here a diagram from his book telling you how to do it.
11:56These circles are lines of latitude.
12:01These straight lines are the lines of longitude,
12:05so those correspond to the lines on the sphere.
12:09There's this catalogue of latitude and longitude for various points,
12:14and you can just look at the grid and say,
12:16ah, such and such a city should go here, such and such a city should go there.
12:20And you mark all the cities in, all the points, bits of coastline, rivers,
12:25everything is listed.
12:27And then you kind of join up the dots, and you've got your map.
12:29We're going to test Ptolemy's calculations against the pinpoint accuracy of 21st century GPS.
12:40North 50 degrees, 49.6 minutes.
12:44West 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.
13:00So why is the longitude, it seems, so far out?
13:03And the answer is he didn't put his zero longitude where we do.
13:06So this is coordinates from nearly 2,000 years ago,
13:10and he's only a few degrees out.
13:12So he's pretty close, considering, you know,
13:15the reports you're getting from travellers will not be fantastically well observed
13:19and fantastically accurate.
13:20It's impressive for 2,000 years ago.
13:35It's no wonder that Ptolemy was known as the father of geography
13:38because this map-making kit that he put together
13:40was one of the great achievements of the classical world
13:44and a pinnacle of Greek science.
13:46And for the next 14 centuries it remained seriously and challenged.
13:50Instead, it was being used throughout that period to chart the known world,
13:55to imagine it and to even start to control it.
13:59Once translated, Ptolemy's geography was distributed throughout Renaissance Europe
14:07and fuelled curiosity about the world beyond the Mediterranean.
14:10An hour before dawn, the 3rd of August, 1492.
14:20Three ships with a 90-strong crew are leaving the Spanish harbour of Palos and heading west.
14:28Leading the expedition, Christopher Columbus.
14:35A new age of exploration was just beginning.
14:39Columbus was bound for China and 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,
15:00newly 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.
15:14The expedition was driven by Columbus's overweening desire for fame, titles and riches.
15:20But this was an incredibly risky venture.
15:23The sailors on board all three ships were full of doubts and fears
15:27and they referred to the voyage as this mad fantasy.
15:33Whoa!
15:34In 1989, Sir Robin Knox Johnston single-handedly retraced Columbus's journey across the Atlantic,
15:43using the same kind of instruments that Columbus had used.
15:48What was it that inspired you to follow Columbus's voyage?
15:52Well, primarily, I wanted to see how accurately they could navigate in those days.
15:57I'd sold those waters before, but we'd never been focusing on that.
16:00So I said, right, now if I just go and do nothing but just think about Columbus,
16:03do this voyage like Columbus, I'm going to pick stuff up.
16:09Well, he leaves from near Cadiz and goes down to the Canary Islands, which are also Spanish,
16:15so that's a voyage they make quite frequently.
16:18But it's from here.
16:20This is where he takes his last food and water on board,
16:23and then he sets off into the blue.
16:25It's pretty risky.
16:26Oh, certainly it's risky.
16:27But he was right in a way that, you know, if you keep going west,
16:32you would eventually reach Japan or China,
16:35had he...
16:37Well, he didn't know America was in the way.
16:40But the theory was right.
16:41You know, the Martellus map would say to him,
16:44if I keep going on this latitude all the way round,
16:47I'll pop up that side of the map.
16:50Somewhere here.
16:52Somewhere here.
16:56The Martellus map convinced Columbus that China was much closer than it really was.
17:01Following Ptolemy's calculations,
17:04Martellus underestimated the circumference of the Earth,
17:07and it turned out to be a massive 7,000 miles wider than he thought.
17:14What we're missing totally here is the full extent of the Atlantic,
17:17the whole of the Americas and the Pacific Ocean.
17:19Quite a lot were missing.
17:21Ptolemy didn't know anything about it.
17:23Exactly.
17:25He sort of guessed it'd be 21, maybe 28 days.
17:31Ended up being 35.
17:33But, you know, in 21 days he's going to reach China.
17:36Well, that's okay.
17:38According to the distance he's calculated to be.
17:41But he passes that distance,
17:43and it's still empty ocean.
17:45And the days go on, one after another, still no land,
17:48still not sighting anything.
17:50Crew getting fed up.
17:51Hey, we don't want to die here.
17:54Here 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.
18:08And at this speed...
18:10Oh, I'll make it in about 10 days, I'd say.
18:13Maybe 11.
18:15Cheers.
18:16Cheers.
18:23He just goes on until he starts on birds.
18:25Wait a minute.
18:26They've got to come from land.
18:28Watch where they go at night.
18:30Because they always go home at night.
18:32Okay, that's where land is.
18:33About 20 minutes ago, at 8.20 exactly, I sighted some land.
18:44And at first I wasn't sure, but now I'm absolutely sure it is land.
18:48It's up to the north-west, so I expected it to be down to the south-east, if anything.
18:51Sir Robin Knox Johnston made land after 34 days at sea.
18:57Columbus and his crew took a day longer.
19:01San Salvador, San Salvador, may work forever, keep it free.
19:13For Columbus, it now seemed that the riches of the east were spread out before him.
19:18He eagerly went ashore in an armed boat and was greeted by crowds of curious local people, eager to see the new arrival.
19:27Columbus named the new territory San Salvador.
19:31We now know it's an island in the Caribbean.
19:34Columbus was convinced he'd landed in China.
19:37And he had no idea that his massive miscalculation would make him the most famous explorer in history.
19:46Columbus had discovered a new continent, America.
19:49But such was the power of his belief in the map that he was using, that he went to his grave 14 years later,
19:55still convinced that he'd discovered a western passage to Asia.
19:58To this day, we still celebrate Columbus as the discoverer of America.
20:03But it was a place that he never believed even existed.
20:05When Columbus returned to Europe, the map of the world was redrawn.
20:13This strange but incredibly beautiful map is the first ever that records the land discovered by Columbus on his first voyage.
20:15You can see here the Bahamas and over here San Salvador.
20:16It was made by Juan de la Cosa, who went with Columbus on his first voyage and all his subsequent expeditions to the New World.
20:25It was probably made to show to the Spanish sovereigns, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand back here in Spain, to give them a sense of the extent of the New World over here to the West.
20:39And as if to emphasise the point, the New World is like this big verdant green claw, in complete contrast to the rest of the map, giving the Spaniards a sense of entitlement, the enticement of the New World.
20:53As European powers vied for control of these lucrative new territories, maps became vital tools in a global struggle for dominance.
21:13As European powers vied for control of these lucrative new territories, maps became vital tools in a global struggle for dominance.
21:23In 1502, an Italian undercover agent smuggled this map out of Portugal.
21:38It shows all the new Portuguese discoveries, from India to the Persian Gulf, East Africa to Brazil.
21:47But like all maps of this era, it marks the vast New World in the West as largely uncharted territory.
22:02In 1503, an Italian explorer published a set of pamphlets announcing his own discoveries in the New World.
22:09His name was Amerigo Vespucci.
22:15Vespucci wrote,
22:16This was a groundbreaking statement, because maps of the time suggested that the New World was somehow connected to Asia.
22:34All of these maps show that New World without a complete West Coast.
22:41They are somehow joining that New World to Asia.
22:45So Vespucci's claim to have discovered a separate fourth continent was completely at odds with what everybody really believed.
22:52Vespucci's description of a fourth continent fired the imagination of a German mapmaker, Martin Waldseemuller.
23:01In 1507, he incorporated its outline into a pioneering new work.
23:06Vespucci's map is absolutely vast, much bigger than this projection actually shows.
23:14When these 12 printed sheets are all stuck together, it stands one and a half metres tall and two and a half metres wide.
23:23And that was deliberate because Vespucci wanted this map to hang on the great aristocratic courtly walls of Europe.
23:29No European had yet seen the ocean on the far side of the New World, but here it was shown by Valtseemuller for the first time.
23:42In contrast to all the other maps showing the latest discoveries, this continent is shown completely surrounded by water.
23:51It's totally navigable.
23:53This is the first map ever that shows America as a separate fourth continent.
23:59And Valtseemuller labels it for the very first time down here, America, in honour of Amerigo Vespucci.
24:17The only surviving copy of Valtseemuller's map of the world was bought by the US Library of Congress in 2003.
24:23It 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.
24:38Maps have played a crucial role in forging national identities across the world.
24:54But sometimes map makers purposefully bend the truth to serve the interests of powerful nations.
25:01The year is 1529.
25:09A fertile archipelago in the Pacific Ocean, known as the Moluccas, or Spice Islands, is at the heart of a bitter dispute.
25:18Spain and Portugal were battling over two of the most valuable commodities in 16th century Europe.
25:27Nutmeg and cloves.
25:30This 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 worth their weight in gold,
25:44used for medicinal and also culinary purposes.
25:50A summit was called to try to settle the dispute between the two imperial superpowers of the age.
25:55The Portuguese initially had the upper hand.
25:59They were effectively in control of the Moluccas.
26:02But as the superpowers' summit began, the Spanish king produced his trump card.
26:08A new map of the world that claimed to be more authoritative than any other so far.
26:13This beautiful hand-drawn map had been specially made for the king by a virtuoso map maker called Diego Ribeiro.
26:26It features finely drawn navigational and scientific instruments, as if to emphasise its authority.
26:33For the map's primary purpose was political.
26:36Ribeiro'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.
26:51There's the Portuguese flag, and there's the Spanish flag.
26:55Everything 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 world.
27:11But on Ribeiro's new map, they've moved.
27:14Here they are, the Moluccas Islands, all picked out here.
27:18So 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 Moluccas.
27:34So convincing was Ribeiro's map that the Portuguese reluctantly accepted that the Moluccas were in Spanish territory.
27:42Ribeiro had pulled off a brilliant con-trick.
27:46His 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 start 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, high politics, science, art, commerce, that makes them so irresistible to rulers throughout history.
28:24In the early 16th century, navigating at sea was a perilous business.
28:30Ships crossing the Atlantic could find themselves hundreds of miles off course, with deadly consequences.
28:41Starvation.
28:43Dehydration.
28:45Shipwreck.
28:49And 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 dangerously off course.
29:07But in the mid-16th century, there was a map-making revolution.
29:10It would solve this navigational problem and inspire the creation of the most influential map in history.
29:24It still defines our vision of the world in the 21st century.
29:27The man behind this revolutionary projection is proudly celebrated in his hometown of Ruppelmonde in Belgium.
29:46The map-maker Gerard Mercator.
29:48He's known as the prince of modern geographers, but Mercator had a humble start in life.
30:00So here we come at the house where Mercator was born on the 5th of March, 1512, 6 o'clock in the morning.
30:08It was a hospital for poor people.
30:12That was the original use? It was a hospital?
30:13It was a hospital.
30:14It was a hospital. And his uncle was here a priest in the hospital.
30:18Taught 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 and become what he has become, the map-maker of the navigation.
30:35As 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 sea, the sailing.
30:55Of course, Columbus discovered America, certainly he must have talked about it with the sailors, talking about navigation, and he had all that in mind.
31:06And where does the river take us?
31:08Well, the river takes us from here to Antwerp, then to the sea, and then to the whole world.
31:13After studying mathematics, geography and astronomy, Mercator began making globes for European royalty and other wealthy patrons.
31:28To do this, he outlined the countries of the world onto a series of long segments of paper called gauze.
31:36When joined together, they would fit perfectly around a globe.
31:40This globe is made in 1541, by Mercator.
31:47It's beautiful, it's absolutely exquisite.
31:50So how would you make a globe like this?
31:52When you make a globe like this, you had to put on plaster, and then you had to put on it the gauze, who were engraved in copper.
32:03To make a gauze has to be very accurate.
32:06But what's amazing is the stream continues on the other sheet.
32:12I 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 surface to help navigators at sea.
32:27Mercator began by straining the lines of longitude, or meridians.
32:37He then increased the spaces between the lines of latitude, moving away from the equator.
32:42Here is the famous world map from Mercator.
32:52He made this map in 1569.
32:56A new map for sailors in his time.
32:59For the first time, navigators would be able to plot a straight line between two points on a map, and safely reach their destination.
33:16To achieve this, Mercator struck a cartographic compromise.
33:19To ensure navigational accuracy, his projection increasingly distorts the size of countries, the further they are from the equator.
33:32They are actually mapped to infinity, I mean they are vast.
33:41And it's the same down here.
33:43On the pole.
33:44So the south pole goes like this.
33:46Goes like that.
33:50So it's a way of stretching.
33:51Stretching the world.
33:52But as a result you do get this massive distortion.
33:57Mercator distorts the globe in other ways too.
33:59By deliberately placing the equator south of the centre, 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.
34:17There'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 imperial dominion.
34:35This is the map which for us in the west defines the world as we understand it, still to this day.
34:44Mercator was a brilliant scientist.
34:47But his strange map of the Arctic reveals that he also believed in all the myths and superstitions of his age.
34:53Nobody had been to the North Pole, so it shows an entirely imaginary geography.
35:00In the centre is a huge black mountain.
35:05Around the pole are the northern countries of the Arctic Circle.
35:18Norway.
35:21Russia.
35:23North America.
35:26And Greenland.
35:29It was this mythical Arctic map that caught the imagination of an Englishman called John Dee.
35:36Dee had studied with Mercator and was now an influential advisor to Queen Elizabeth I.
35:44He was driven by a desire to build a British Empire.
35:47Dee was fascinated but also really puzzled by Mercator's map, so he demanded an explanation from his old friend.
35:55Mercator wrote back, describing the ancient travellers' tales and strange myths that inspired his map.
36:01In the midst is a whirlpool, wrote Mercator, onto which there empty four in-drawing seas.
36:10Little people live there, pygmies, not above four feet tall.
36:16Dee was delighted by this tale, but was even more excited when Mercator suggested that the lands of the Arctic
36:22had been colonised by ancient Britons 1,000 years earlier.
36:28For Dee, this provided historical justification for the English to reclaim these northern lands.
36:39Dee now made his own map to convince the Queen.
36:41At 11am on the 3rd of October 1580, John Dee presented himself to the Royal Court at Richmond Palace.
36:52He solemnly gave the Queen a rolled-up map very similar to this one,
36:57and it showed all the northern regions that he laid claim to on behalf of the Queen,
37:03stretching all the way from the New World here, right over here, to the Arctic.
37:08On the back of the map, he also listed all the foreign lands that he laid claim to on behalf of the English Crown.
37:19The Queen did not want to risk provoking Imperial Portugal and Spain with such claims.
37:25But some were less cautious.
37:28The boldness of Dee's vision encouraged other members of the court to think big
37:33and start putting the British Empire on the map.
37:35Sir Walter Raleigh was one of the great explorers of the Elizabethan age, and a favourite of the Queen.
37:44She presented Raleigh with a townhouse in London, lands in Ireland, and the magnificent Sherborne Castle here in Dorset.
37:56Sir Walter Raleigh and John Dee would sit up talking deep into the night here in this study.
38:05They discussed all the pressing questions of the day, religion, sorcery, exploration, and empire.
38:11Both men were eager to establish an English empire that would rival Portugal and the great enemy, Spain.
38:19Raleigh had heard travellers' tales about a rich and beautiful empire called Guyana in South America, with a great and golden city called El Dorado.
38:30His people were said to blow gold dust onto their naked bodies at drunken feasts.
38:37Raleigh wanted to win this territory for the Queen and bring her treasures from across the seas.
38:53In February 1595, Raleigh set off with three ships in search of the legendary city in what's now Venezuela.
39:00And as he made his perilous journey, Raleigh drew a map.
39:14This is a copy of Sir Walter Raleigh's extraordinary treasure map of Guyana.
39:19It's got north at the bottom because that's how Raleigh would first have encountered the coastline.
39:23And then it gets increasingly blank the further into the interior you go because, of course, it's virgin, unmapped territory.
39:37And then looking at it right in the centre is this huge lake with these tributaries coming off like tentacles.
39:44And down here, cutting in to the territory, is the river Orinoc. This is the Orinoco, flowing right across the map.
40:03Raleigh wrote this book about his travels, which is called The Discovery of Guyana.
40:07And in it he describes how his tiny fleet of vessels arrived at the great river of Orinoc, which he describes as being 300 miles wide at its entrance into the sea.
40:21Raleigh also describes a series of islands which he says are very great, many of them as big as the Isle of Wight.
40:27And he believed that if he travelled up the Orinoc, or Orinoco River, he would finally reach his destination, the fabled city of El Dorado.
40:42Raleigh's expedition sailed on hundreds of miles through the jungle.
40:50Throughout his voyage, Raleigh kept hearing ever more fabulous accounts of the treasures of El Dorado.
40:55He even felt confident enough to mark its location on this map.
41:00And here, just off the great lake, a tributary runs along here.
41:04And in faded letters, I can just make out El Dorado.
41:09Here it is. This is the location where Raleigh believed he'd find the great treasures of the city of El Dorado.
41:16But then the furious storms of the rainy season set in.
41:24The Orinoco flooded, and the expedition was forced to turn back.
41:30On his return, Raleigh pleaded with the Queen to claim the treasures of El Dorado for England, and declare herself Empress of Guyana.
41:44But the Queen was reluctant to antagonise the Spanish, who already had prior claims to the area.
41:53So instead, she did nothing.
41:55And when she died, Raleigh's look finally ran out.
41:58The successor King James I immediately allied himself to the Spanish.
42:01He charged Raleigh with treason, confiscating all his assets, including Sherbourne Castle, and imprisoned him in the Tower of London.
42:12Raleigh spent 13 years in the Tower, but the dream of El Dorado never died.
42:18In 1617, James I became desperate for money and gold.
42:25He released Raleigh to make one more attempt to find the Golden City.
42:30The King had only one condition. Raleigh mustn't antagonise the Spanish.
42:36But as they sailed further up the Orinoco than ever before, Raleigh's men found themselves in Spanish territory.
42:48After a bloody encounter with Spanish settlers, Raleigh was once again forced to return home empty-handed.
42:57And he wouldn't get another chance.
42:59Furious at the failure of the mission, and at his disobedience, the King ordered Raleigh's execution.
43:07He was beheaded in 1618.
43:12El Dorado was a dream that brought Sir Walter Raleigh nothing but trouble.
43:15No wealth, no colonies, not even a pardon from the King.
43:19But over the next 200 years, the legend of his map of El Dorado would inspire countless adventurers
43:26to embark on reckless missions of plunder and possession.
43:29While Raleigh and the English were pursuing fantasies of El Dorado, Dutch merchants were using the latest maps to unlock real treasure.
43:44The exotic spices of the East.
43:49The Dutch East India Company was set up in 1602 and quickly became a mighty global force.
43:57Maps were vital to the company's success.
44:00Well, at the beginning of the 17th century, maps stopped being, or become less, gorgeous hand-painted objects to be exchanged, to be presented as gifts by ambassadors.
44:20And they become part of the paraphernalia and business of travel.
44:27So they are part of a commercial toolbox for exploring the globe with a view to making profit.
44:37The vast corporate empire of the Dutch East India Company, or VOC as it was known, stretched from Africa to Japan.
44:48It was run from its headquarters here in Amsterdam.
44:52This was the hub of a global information network, where the company's own cartographers drew up their own maps.
45:02These maps were closely guarded commercial secrets.
45:07The ships of the Dutch East India Company had a combination of small-scale maps and large-scale maps on board.
45:14The small-scale maps for crossing the big oceans, the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean.
45:19This one was used for crossing the Atlantic, although there's only a little piece left.
45:25When they had crossed the ocean, they needed larger-scale maps.
45:29Of course, the inland is hardly visible, because that was of no use, but everything on the shore or in front of the shore was very clear and very accurate.
45:38Because this is really a map about commerce, it's about marking the coastline and working out where you can land and where you can trade your goods.
45:45When you were nearing your goal, it was very essential that you had a very accurate map.
45:51In fact, there was a whole circulation of communication that took place.
45:55So the pilots, they took their charts again back to Amsterdam, and they said, this is wrong, this is better, I made that one better.
46:03The chief chart maker, he improved the maps and sent the ships with new improved maps.
46:10As the Dutch mapped the world with increasing accuracy, they were also staking their claim on new territory.
46:19They're using the equivalent of the tube map. They can get wherever they want.
46:23They can confidently trade across the hinterlands of before uncharted territories.
46:30They know where people are. That is a very modern idea, that you are somewhere extremely remote, that you arrived at by sea, but you know where other people are, other Westerners, in relation to yourself.
46:44In 1633, the VOC hired Willem Blauw as its chief map maker.
46:51Blauw had his own successful map making business, and his new job gave him access to highly classified information.
46:58Rather odd that a man like Willem Jansson Blauw, that he both had his own business.
47:07He made atlases and atlas maps, and next to that he was the chief cartographer of the Dutch East India Company.
47:14And whereas these maps were secret, because that was commercial capital, these maps were in the end little puzzle pieces that fitted into the big puzzle of the world map that improved steadily on and on.
47:29So Blauw is using this kind of raw material to then put together an updated version of the world map?
47:35Yes.
47:36Blauw's atlas was a luxury object, beautifully bound and engraved, full of colour and intricate typography.
47:52Blauw used the latest data gathered by the Dutch East India Company to update the map of the world using Mercator's projection.
47:59This was the first time that a Mercator projection was included in a world atlas.
48:07In this way, he popularized a projection that wasn't popular at all.
48:13It was a projection that was made for the seafaring people, for the pilots.
48:18And now he included the map on which he apparently was so proud in his atlas.
48:22In the 1630s, Blauw's atlas was translated into many languages and became a huge success.
48:32And the Dutch East India Company was now eclipsing Portugal and Spain in global trade.
48:41The big innovation from the middle of the 17th century for the Dutch is that they stopped carrying in gold and silver simply to buy and sell in the Indies.
48:51They now trade across the Indies with other nations, with other Dutch parts of the East India Company.
49:02They transact goods for other goods.
49:06They use copper.
49:08They use silk for spices.
49:10There's a whole burgeoning, really commercial marketplace, which is remote from Holland.
49:15They are an autonomous bazaar in the East Indies, and the maps have enabled that.
49:27By the end of the 18th century, the VOC had sent over a million people to work in the Asian trade.
49:33They dispatched nearly 5,000 ships and netted millions of tons of goods and commodities.
49:47The VOC brought huge prosperity to Holland and kick-started a sophisticated international market.
49:52But in the 19th century, the failure to standardise maps began to hold back the development of an efficient global economy.
50:09Navigation relied on comparing the time at your current location with the time on a fixed line of longitude, called a prime meridian.
50:17Britain's prime meridian ran through Greenwich, where the time was marked once a day by the time ball at Flamsteed House.
50:28Passing Flamsteed House as the time ball fell here, ships leaving the London docks could now quite accurately set their clocks to 1pm Greenwich Mean Time.
50:43But that, of course, was just the British ships.
50:46Trading nations all the way from France right through to Japan were still using their own measurements of time according to their own prime meridians.
50:53It was absolute chaos.
50:58So, could the world's maps be standardised around a single line?
51:03In 1884, representatives of 25 countries came together to decide where the world's prime meridian should be.
51:14The meridian lines that had ranged across the world's maps since Ptolemy were now symbols of imperial prestige.
51:20Proceedings were dominated by Britain and France, who were by now the pre-eminent imperial powers of the age, with each lobbying for the supremacy of their own prime meridian.
51:33The French delegates regarded themselves as part of a long and extremely distinguished tradition of scientific map making.
51:43They were going to fight their corner really hard.
51:46They had no intention of giving up the prime meridian here in Paris to the British.
51:50But Britain's claim found support from the United States delegate, Commander William Sampson.
51:58Commander Sampson argued that the meridian should be selected which is now in most general use.
52:05More than 70% of all the shipping of the world uses the Greenwich meridian.
52:09Britain now had the advantage. When it came to the vote, only San Domingo opposed the British claim. The French abstained.
52:19Britain was absolutely triumphant and this 1886 British Empire map shows Britain right at the centre of the world with the Greenwich meridian running right down the middle.
52:32And across the map, in red, British imperial dominions.
52:41And just to make the point very clear about what's happening here, Britannia is shown lounging on a globe.
52:50The French delegation returned home to Paris with their tails between their legs, but they still refused to concede defeat.
52:56This French world map produced eight years after the meridian conference stubbornly sticks to Paris as the prime meridian and by implication France as the centre of the world.
53:09It would be another quarter of a century before the French map makers adopted Greenwich as their prime meridian.
53:15The international battle over the prime meridian is long over, and the mapping of the whole world is almost complete.
53:32But disputes over unclaimed territory continue.
53:36In 2007, the age of discovery and plunder was given a new lease of life when a Russian submarine planted a titanium flag on the seabed directly beneath the North Pole.
53:52And the rush by other nations to claim rights over natural resources beneath the Arctic ice is now putting today's map makers at the heart of a new struggle for power and wealth.
54:02The International Boundaries Research Unit at Durham University is drawing up new maps of the Arctic in an effort to resolve potential territorial disputes.
54:18This is the political map and this is the physical map.
54:21That's correct, yes.
54:23Why is this map so important now?
54:24The need for the physical mapping is because so little is known about what lies under the Arctic because it has been covered by ice.
54:33So global warming is creating a much more politically charged area around claims to the North Pole here?
54:40To some extent. The opening up of the Arctic waters means that the areas where there's potential resources, it's becoming much, much clearer.
54:48So what are the resources involved here?
54:52It's huge. I think it was something like 20 billion barrels of oil and gas in the Arctic region.
54:59Areas likely to be rich in gas and oil have already been partially mapped.
55:04But who owns these resources? It all depends on who can establish their claim to the seabed.
55:13The Durham team have created the first political map of the Arctic to show who is currently laying claim to what.
55:22We have the land territories of Russia, which has the longest coastal frontage on the Arctic.
55:31The USA through its sovereignty over Alaska.
55:35We have Canada with the Canadian archipelago.
55:39Then we have Greenland under the sovereignty of Denmark.
55:43And finally Norway through its sovereignty over the Svalbard archipelago.
55:47States have rights over the resources up to 200 nautical miles from their coastline.
55:58But in exceptional circumstances, it's possible for a country to extend this boundary.
56:04And that's what the Russians are trying to do.
56:08They're laying claim to a raised area of the seabed extending all the way from Siberia to the North Pole.
56:14It's called the Lomonosov Ridge.
56:18The famous flag planting incident on the North Pole seabed came as part of Russia's attempt to gather more evidence that the Lomonosov Ridge really is physically connected to the continental margin of Russian land territory.
56:33Which caused quite a hostile reaction from some of its neighbours, particularly Canada.
56:38Which said that why was Russia claiming the North Pole as Russian?
56:41Legally it has no effect at all.
56:44Planting a flag, certainly these days, does not say anything about title to territory.
56:51I think having a good map on the table in a negotiation is extremely important.
56:59As that ocean becomes more navigable, there's a risk of naval incidents.
57:04Who knows what kind of geopolitical games could be played in the regions.
57:13From medieval times to the age of discovery, and the era of empire, map making has always been bound up with conquest, imperial expansion and conflict.
57:25This modern map in progress depicts the fault lines of the future.
57:34It's a warning of potential conflict ahead as the Arctic ice melts.
57:39The lessons of history would suggest that where there's a world map, plunder will surely follow.
57:51But this time the map makers are ahead of the game.
57:54Because when the ice melts and the exploitation really starts, there'll be an internationally recognised chart of the region.
58:01To take the heat out of the conflicts over mineral wealth, which will surely take place.
58:07In the 21st century, map makers have become peacemakers.
58:16Tomorrow night here on BBC HD, don't miss drama with Inspector George Gently at half past eight.
58:23Next tonight, an electric prom from the incomparable Dame Shirley Bassey.
58:26We'll see you next time we leave.
58:28I'll see you next time.
58:30Bye for now.
58:32Bye for now.
58:34Bye for now.
58:36Bye for now.
58:38Bye for now!
58:40Bye for now.
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