Star Trek and History (36 page)

16.
Agatha Christie,
Murder on the Orient Express: A Hercule Poirot Mystery
(New York: Harper, 2011); Graham Greene,
Stamboul Train: An Entertainment
(New York: Penguin, 1992).

17.
E. H. Cookridge,
Orient Express: The Life and Times of the World's Most Famous Train
(New York: Random House, 1978).

Matthew D. Mingus

“Well, I know this is all pretty dry stuff. Stellar cartography isn't everybody's cup of tea.”

—Captain Jean-Luc Picard,
TNG,
“Lessons”

As dry as this topic might be, the Borg understood the crucial importance of cartography. When the Borg were in the process of assimilating the USS
Enterprise
in
Star Trek: First Contact
, one of its first targets was the department of stellar cartography. That is not coincidental—maps and power are mutually complementary, both on Earth now and apparently in future-space. If the Borg believe the cartography of outer space is important, shouldn't we at least be thinking about it?

The USS
Enterprise
and its crew first encounter the Borg in the
Next Generation
episode “Q Who.” Having been flung far off course by the mischievous and seemingly omnipotent Q, Captain Picard struggles to understand, communicate with, and eventually retreat from this newly discovered and unabashedly aggressive quasi life-form. By the end of the episode, as the Borg cube-ship closes in on the fleeing
Enterprise
, Q snaps his fingers and sends the Federation flagship back to its original position in space—away from the Borg (for now, anyway). Almost immediately, Picard instructs his navigators to “set course for the nearest starbase,” and with his usual calm resolve he commands them to “engage.”

The usage of this term,
engage
, is not unique to this particular episode. Indeed, it is used throughout the
Next Generation
series when referring to interstellar travel.
1
When Picard delivers to his crew the imperative to “engage” with a starbase or a planetary system or the nearest M class planet, he usually does not mean to suggest that his ship literally interact with any of these spatial points. Rather, Picard is demanding that his ship and his crew engage space itself—the medium through which to get from point A to point B.

This, of course, comes as no surprise. Borrowing from the maritime tropes of exploration and adventure, the voyages of the
Enterprise
are explicitly advertised as undertakings “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life forms and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man [and, later, the more politically correct and accurate ‘no one'] has gone before.” As some have noted, each
Star Trek
series is in its own way a version of the same “heroic quest narrative”—an effort to reproduce the risks and rewards of living on the (final) frontier and encountering all sorts of strange and interesting things.
2
Star Trek
has often been criticized for what some authors see as racism, misogyny, ethnocentrism, colonialism, and imperialism. Others have often praised it for creating an idyllic model of cultural tolerance within a cohesive sociopolitical framework dependent upon expansion and discovery (that is, the doctrine of the Prime Directive). What has been surprisingly absent from all of these discussions, however, is an evaluation of
how
this interstellar exploration is accomplished.

The exploration that occurs in
Star Trek
is not simply based on its futuristic technological advancements, but it builds on early modern cartographic developments. Without the ability to map its many adventures, the crew of the
Enterprise
would be aimlessly wandering through space (at warp speed, perhaps!), yet the relationship between the history of mapmaking and
Star Trek
's professional disciplines of astrometrics and stellar cartography has never been explored. This chapter, then, will seek to fill this gap in
Star Trek
scholarship by evaluating and analyzing the cartographic shifts between the various
Star Trek
series. I want to discuss here how stellar maps and cartography serve as extensions of various historical processes and developments and also to examine the diverse approaches to mapmaking adopted by different cultures within
Star Trek.

“Before there were maps and globes, let alone radar and subspace sensors, mariners navigated by the stars. We're returning to that tried and true method, but this time there's a difference.”

—Commander Chakotay,
VOY,
“Year of Hell”

Maps are not simply pictures or representations of reality. To map something requires both an author and a perceived audience, the people who will be using the map. To map something that exists in real space and real time also requires distortion and choice. One cannot transfer the three-dimensional earth onto a two-dimensional piece of paper, for example, or even miniaturize the dimensions of the earth into a usable globe, without necessarily misrepresenting the earth's
actual
measurements. Moreover, real space is always in flux and cluttered with objects that would overcomplicate most maps of static space. Over the past few decades, especially with their increasing reliance on satellite technology, cartographers have been able to draw incredibly accurate maps, but they are still drawn from a particular perspective and are presented to the map's viewers through an imperfect medium (be it paper, a globe, or a screen).

This has led some cartographic theorists to argue that the primary function of a map is, first and foremost, to propose a particular understanding of space to the viewer.
3
Because maps require distortion, as noted in the previous paragraph, a cartographer must carefully decide what aspects of the map he or she will alter. This proposition can then be rejected or accepted (or hotly disputed!) by various map users. While it can be used to further scientific endeavors, aid in serious geographic study, and help us to understand the world around us, cartography is more a form of literature than a scientific undertaking. Cartography describes a mapmaker's understanding of his or her space more than the space itself. A brief history of cartography's development, especially in its relationship with astronomy and star charts, will make this clearer and help tease out the parallels between mapmaking and the
Star Trek
series.

The ancient Romans, Greeks, and Babylonians were among the first to begin creating maps. The mathematical calculations for measuring the earth and the star catalogues produced by Ptolemy of Alexandria (ca. 90–168) became, in fact, the most authoritative guides to mapping “the heavens” during the medieval and Renaissance periods. From the twelfth century onward, both Christian and Islamic cartographers used Ptolemaic astronomy to reinforce their respective belief systems.
4
The ability to transform Ptolemy's work into maps, however, eluded scholars until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The first example historians can point to of a modern star map—that is, a depiction of stars within a measurable coordinate framework—is included in a Vienna manuscript titled
De Composicione Sphere Solide
(ca. 1440).
5
The first star map to actually be published was a 1515 print of “more than 1,000 stars of the constellations according to Ptolemy's star catalogue” produced by Johann Stabius, Conrad Heinfogel, and Albrecht Durer.
6
But how do these developments relate to maritime navigation—the type of astronomical observation Commander Chakotay refers to in the epigraph at the beginning of this section?

As Chakotay notes, seafaring explorers had been using the stars to navigate well before either the stars or the seas were mapped. By the fourteenth century, at the latest, these explorers were creating charts of the seas (known as “portolan charts”) from descriptive guides compiled in order to accumulate and summarize the “knowledge of generations of sailors.”
7
Once combined with the mariner's compass, early cartographers began drawing rhumb lines on their portolan charts. These lines had the ability to show a ship's navigator the most advantageous straight-shot route from one point on the chart to another. The rhumb lines were crisscrossed in massive networks so that the navigator could set his ship's heading relative to true north and follow one or more of the lines to a chosen location.
8

By the sixteenth century, the German mathematician Gerardus Mercator had developed a method with which to formulaically depict rhumb lines onto two-dimensional surfaces with a great deal more accuracy than earlier portolan charts had done.
9
This supported an expansion of European maritime exploration that eventually contributed to what most historians hail as the “Age of Discovery,” or the era in which Europeans encountered the majority of the earth's geography. Combined with the advances in cartographic astronomy discussed above, humans could begin to not only comprehensively map the Earth but also the stars. By the late sixteenth century, the Dutch and other European nation-states had completed their Ptolemaic star maps and began charting the skies of the southern hemisphere—skies that Ptolemy had never seen.
10
In doing so, these Europeans had the opportunity to create their own Eurocentric constellations with which they could complement their Eurocentric maps of the New World.

Most people can likely describe early modern maps of the Old and New Worlds. They typically include merpeople, giant fish, and scary-looking monsters. The edges of continents and various territories are crosshatched because the cartographer could not exactly pinpoint where the borders are. Many of these maps are saturated with religious symbols or images of national grandeur, depending on the author. By the seventeenth century, however, a distinct shift occurred in cartographic development from the ornate and beautifully decorated maps of the medieval, Renaissance, and early modern periods to what historians in cartography have identified as “Plain Style.”
11

As the geographer Dalia Varanka notes, the Plain Style movement is not unique to cartography. In fact, its origins are bound up with the other changes in scientific study associated with seventeenth-century English theorists such as Francis Bacon and John Locke. According to such thinkers, when discussing topics where “truth and knowledge were concerned,” one ought to avoid “oratory, metaphors, emotive statements, and . . . symbolic or rhetorical style.”
12
“Manliness,” in this way, began to be “contrasted to ornament and finery, which were considered feminine and juvenile, and morally wrong.”
13
Plain Style—in both prose and cartography—sought objectivity, and in doing so unabashedly attempted to create (and draw) a world in which truth and masculinity were one and the same. Rather than impose God onto the map, these “enlightened” mapmakers would instead adopt their god's entire perspective—a “god's eye” view from nowhere that instilled within the onlooker a sense of objectivity, reality, and spatial certainty (a view that still exists today in the form of digitized weather maps, cloudless satellite images, and Google Earth).

In order to create increasingly scientific maps, cartographers needed to be able to more accurately pinpoint particular places on the Earth's surface. This required an emphasis on the development of latitude and longitude. In seventeenth-century France, a cartographer named Jean Picard (a coincidence?) helped to accurately map a survey of his nation-state by triangulating his position in relation to the angle of the sun (latitude) and by observing the eclipses of Jupiter's moons and then comparing them with tables showing the local time elsewhere in France (longitude). Picard's meticulous surveying skills were indispensable to what eventually became the first comprehensive topographic map of any modern state.
14

Longitude was particularly difficult to calculate while at sea. Maritime explorers, unable to accurately track Jupiter's moons on an ever-bobbing ship, had a difficult time estimating where their ship was in relation to where they had come from or where they wanted to go. In an effort to establish their place on the sea, crewmen were forced to keep incredibly detailed readings of both their compass bearings and their speed. The most popular way of measuring maritime speed well into the eighteenth century was to use a logline. The logline consisted of a piece of wood attached to a ship with a rope. A sailor would drop the piece of wood into the water, wait for the line to go taut, and then pull it back in. This would be repeated throughout the voyage and timed with an hourglass. The amount of time each logline took to go taut was recorded in a book, usually referred to as a “log.”
15
Our
Star Trek
captains and commanders owe a great deal, indeed, to their maritime predecessors. Where would they (and where would we) be without the “captain's log”?

Chekov:
The area was first mapped by the famous Russian astronomer Ivan Berkov almost two hundred . . .

Kirk:
John Birck.

Chekov:
Birck, sir? I don't think so . . . I'm sure it was . . .

Spock:
John Birck was the chief astronomer at the Royal Academy in Old Britain at the time.

Kirk:
Is the rest of your history that faulty, ensign?

—TOS, “The Trouble with Tribbles”