EXPLORE
TASTE
REFLECT
CREATE
PHOTOs: chico sanchez/aurora photos (main); getty images (astrolabe)
There are not many places on Earth
left where you’re virtually guaranteed
not to hear a single human voice, but
Hashima Island is one of them. Lying
off the coast of Nagasaki Prefecture
in Japan, it is an abandoned concrete
jungle. In the late 1800s, it was a coal
mining facility. At its peak, 5,259 people
lived on the tiny island, the size of
twelve football fields, making it the
most crowded island on the planet.
Then, the coal industry died off, leaving
it totally abandoned. It’s said that the
buildings, spattered with a patina of sea
salt, are now deteriorating so rapidly
that you can hear structures collapse as
the wind blows from the ocean.
U N D E R T H E B A N YA N T R E E
07/1 2
2015
B ut I N T H AT D E S O L AT E P L AC E
one hot day in 2013, you might also
have heard footsteps of a single young
Google employee. With a 360-degree
Street View camera strapped to his
back. He had one goal: to map the
place. And so he did, meaning that you
can now click through Google Maps
and tread through this beautiful piece
of history as though you were really
following in his very footsteps.
It’s a story with all the ingredients
of adventure: exploring a totally
unknown space with new eyes, and
making it known. It’s a particular itch
mankind has wanted to scratch — to
name things, to discover, to set down,
to clarify and quantify. To map.
Dragons, Elephants and Mystery. The
Hashima story intrigues us precisely
because it feels like so much of the
world has already been mapped. In a
way, men, women and children today
interact with maps more than ever. Step
astrola b e
This nautical
astrolabe, made
of brass, was
designed by the
English explorer
and cartographer
Robert Dudley in
the 17th century. This
was an ancient type
of computer used
to solve problems
relating to time and
the position of the
stars and the sun.
L E F T: Without
modern day objects
to date it, this recent
picture of the Mexican
coastline looks almost
the same as viewed by
Samuel de Champlain
in the 1600s
into an unfamiliar neighbourhood, or off a trans-continental
plane, and you can be safely reassured that GPS is there to
guide you to the nearest Starbucks.
But there was a time when exploration was a far more
exciting affair. The map didn’t exist, so you had to make your
own. And, perhaps, embellish it a fair bit. That’s certainly what
Samuel de Champlain, the explorer, geographer, navigator
and cartographer did on his travels. Exploring the New World
from Canada to Mexico and the Caribbean in the 1600s, he
drew a swathe of maps that were quite accurate given his
limited technical resources. What are we to make then, of
the bat-like dragon lurking menacingly in the corner of one
of his charts? Though clearly fictional, Champlain treats his
beast as real, noting, “They are as large as a sheep, but are not
dangerous, and do no harm to anybody, though to see them
one would say the contrary.”
Such embellishments were fair game for the time though,
as science journalist John Noble Wilford describes in his
excellent book The Mapmakers. Back then, he writes, the only
maps to be trusted were those that stuck to already wellexplored zones. And those that described distant lands? Well,
they were “little better than exercises in conjecture based on
inadequate surveying, wishful thinking, or sheer imagination.”
If anything, the monster drawings were a design element.
Spaces “that should have been left blank were adorned with
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