December 2011: Early South African maps were extremely inaccurate,” says retired history professor Andrew Duminy (left). “The Dutch didn’t bother with the Cape coast. They occupied Table Bay but avoided the rest as much as they could by sailing south and skirting the African continent.” This was largely because they lacked the means to accurately map the treacherous coastline.
Then, in 1752 there was a rapid transformation when a French navigator and sea captain called Mannevillette drew a detailed chart after conducting a running survey along the coast.
“Today it’s extremely rare because after he had it printed in France he simply inserted it in some of the volumes of a book titled Le Neptune Oriental that he’d published a few years before. I had the utmost difficulty in tracking it down but managed to find one in the British national library that they were kind enough to scan for me. It hasn’t really been seen much before now.”
Andrew, a resident at Simbithi, says his four-year project tracking down maps of southern Africa and the stories of the people who drew them would have been impossible without the internet and modern scanning technology. “The only way some of these maps could be reproduced was on massive flatbed scanners that have only been in existence for three or four years.”
Andrew’s book, Mapping South Africa, has 136 pages, of which about 90 are taken up by maps, many of which haven’t really been available to the public before.
One good thing that came of the countless wars that ravaged our country for most of the 19th Century was the input by military surveyors and engineers who drew up urgently-needed maps of the region. “My book is the first of its kind because other books dealing with South African maps are merely catalogues,” Andrew says. “The maps don’t tell you what really happened behind the scenes, and nine times out of 10 you’ll find that some outstanding individual has devoted his life to accumulating information through exploration and surveying.”
Multi-talented
Many of the people concerned were extremely multi-talented; Sir Francis Galton, a half cousin of Charles Darwin, was an anthropologist, explorer, inventor, meteorologist, mathematician and statistician who pioneered the use of population surveys and questionnaires to collect data for his works. He devised the first ever system of categorising fingerprints for forensic science, and in the 1850s spent two years exploring and carrying out a cartographical survey of then South West Africa, for which he received the Royal Geographical Society’s Gold Medal in 1853.
Artist, author and explorer Thomas Baines accompanied David Livingstone on an 1858 expedition during which he charted sections of the Zambezi River before getting fired for neglecting his duties as a storekeeper. Today he is recognised as one of the great mapmakers of the 19th Century.
Results came slowly in those days, due to 19th Century transport and communication issues, and Baines’ map of the goldfields of South Africa, considered the most impressive work depicting the interior of our country at the time, was published in 1876, a year after the artist died in poverty in Durban.
Andrew Duminy has a special interest in one of the book’s characters – his great great grandfather Francois Renoir Duminy, a French sea captain and prominent 18th Century surveyor and cartographer tasked by the Dutch East India Company with mapping the Cape’s southern coastline. This kept him busy from 1781 to 1787, after which he surveyed and mapped the west coast until the British took over in 1795.
“He entered service with the French East India Company when he was nine years old, and became a captain at 27 years of age,” says Andrew, who has also written a biography of the man. “He, like Mannevillette, was one of the first to perfect the technique of establishing latitude and longitude by means of what was called lunar distance.”
Using a sextant that could accurately measure angles between the stars and the moon, in conjunction with nautical almanacs supplied by observatories, co-ordinates could be established with reasonable accuracy.
Revolutionised
“All this was superseded by the early 19th Century through the invention of the chronometer that completely revolutionised the whole question of maritime survey work,” says Andrew. “It didn’t happen as quickly as people sometimes think because chronometers lost time and had to be wound. Ships would meet in mid-ocean and compare their clocks, and when in harbour they’d reset them. In Cape Town there was a noon gun that was used to check clocks and synchronise time, and here in Durban we had a time ball. The task of the observatory – and there was a little observatory here – was to establish accurate time by means of astronomical observations and then translate that to somebody who would drop the time ball so ships could check and set their chronometers accordingly.”
Editor’s note: Andrew’s book covers far more territory than we have space for here and will be of enormous interest to history and travel buffs. R295 from Exclusive Books or from the author on 082 441 6129. – This article was written by Gavin Foster
10 Comments
One must assume that the author of this review knows little about the subject as he really says nothing about the book itself. Several international professsionals in the topics discussed are extremely worried because of the very large number of errors, mis-statements and dubious interpretations of the facts that can be found in this book. It is quite possible that professional journals will carry very critical reviews.
Interesting. I thought Gavin’s review was quite a good read, actually. – Editor.
I am doing extensive research into mapping in Natal focusing on the work of my great grandfather August Hammar (1886-1931). Prof Elri Liebenberg pointed me towards the KwaZulu-Natal Archives – she is a great admirer of his topographical maps. The search has been worth it; they are magnificent.
My feeling is that Duminy book is extremy superficial. Most of the maps he has published are available on the internet. He certainly has made no attempt to source the rare and important maps hidden in archives. Prof Liebenberg is given a superficial “thank you” but Duminy has, in my view, abused the integrity of the cartographic and land surveying professions.
The concern over this book is truly astounding, and the idea that this historical work has “abused the integrity of the cartographic and land surveying professions” is laughable.
Clearly the book is intended for a certain audience, and is written from a certain perspective, and this is not a strictly professional or academic one, and is certainly not a scientific one. It does not aim for mindless detail or strict scientific accuracy. It aims for interpretation, as this is the basis of doing good history.
If these commenters and professional reviewers cannot accept that the value of the work is something other than its lists of facts, then they are missing out, and I will spare my efforts at convincing them, because I simply do not respect such dogmatism. I would not recommend that they go near magisterial histories of science written by people like Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault, because no doubt they will not be able to get past the “lack of detail”. They will also not understand the basic point of the work, which is their loss.
What the writer above does not seem to appreciate is that irrespective of what level the book is aimed at, it is peddling incorrect facts – over 150 of them. Does he want today’s youngsters to grow up with a whole raft of incorrect understanding? I would trust not.
At the risk of attracting the ire of the proprietor by referencing another publication …..
“Position IT” ( EE Publishers ) ( A journal for the South African Geo-Spatial industry — survey , geodesy , remote sensing , GIS , Aerial Survey etc etc )
Will have the full review of the book in their March edition
An online edition is freely available.
Thereafter the reader will be free to come to their own conclusions.
Editor: Thanks Chris. Perhaps it would be better to reference a review in an industry-sepcific publication that specialises in surveying, mapping etc. The Ridge is a lifestyle and community magazine. Our review focused more on Andrew Duminy the person (as a member of our community) and his achievement in publishing this work, it was not intended to be a learned and academic appraisal of the work at question.
The assertion that the book has over 150 incorrect facts would require all the evidence to be presented and argued in a fair-minded, impartial manner. Prof Liebenberg’s review does not mention all of these, and the fair-mindedness I will leave for others to decide. I feel that it is unfair for the author above to mention this supposedly unquestionable ‘list of errors’ in public, to the utmost humiliation of the author, without his opportunity of reply.
For the record, I would want my and other children to read interesting stories, that are not bound by mundane successions of empirical facts. I would want them to be interested in history, not obsessively and aggressively opposed to anything that does not satisfy peer review, which quite clearly is a straw-man contest in the academia.
I feel that as a member of this community, I should standup for Professor Duminy. His work is being misrepresented and slandered by a small group of people. I feel that it smacks of professional territoriality.
The last writer is, of course, quite at liberty to feed his children fiction rather than fact. The trouble is that later in life they could use some of that fiction as fact.
As the editor pointed out, I didn’t write a review of the book. Knowing nothing about the topic I would never dream of judging it. I wrote about the man and the subject he chose. It seems that some academic feathers have been ruffled though.