NON SEQUITIR, ANYONE?:

-REVIEW: of Measuring America: How the United States Was Shaped by the Greatest Land Sale in History by Andro Linklater (Andy Beckett, Guardian)

In the mid-19th century, when the cold tongue of land that is the Michigan peninsula was first being sliced up for development, the surveyors began to discover problems with their measurements, particularly during the winter. The lengths of metal chain they doggedly carried and laid out like giant rulers across the forests and swamps would shrink when the temperature dropped below zero.

The resulting inconsistencies would only add up to a few inches a day, but over the vast distances of midwestern America the shrinking chains threatened to cause future disputes between landowners. Until a conscientious surveyor called William Burt came up with a solution: every frosty morning, he built a fire and warmed up his chain until it expanded back to exactly its original length.

Such diligence, respect for figures, and slightly bloody-minded defiance of the elements is a very American combination. So to try to understand the country by describing how it was first surveyed and divided up, as this book does, is likely to be a fruitful enterprise.

At first, in fact, Measuring America seems almost too neat a project, full of charmingly eccentric explorers, with echoes of two recent bestsellers about map-making, Dava Sobel's Longitude and Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon. It details quirky discoveries about the 19th century and about America, two of contemporary publishing's favourite subjects. The opening sentences could almost be a cosy, sepia voiceover from the History Channel: "The imposing library of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors in London is strategically situated. In one direction its tall windows look over the street to Whitehall, where the Tudor and Stuart sovereigns ruled..."

Yet Andro Linklater is too restless and intelligent a writer to take a predictable route through the subject for long. He begins not with America, but with the pioneering land surveys in England and Holland during the early 16th century. [...]

The measuring of America was more or less finished by the 1930s. Parts of Alaska remain unsurveyed. Perhaps they never will be now. America, to its foreign critics at least, has become less the world's great rational civilisation and more a sort of neurotically religious semi-democracy, where creationism is taught in school instead of science and family dynasties occupy the White House. Linklater is too optimistic and pro-American to say it, but these days, someone surveying the American wilderness from a hilltop might be arrested as a terrorist.

Does that strike anyone else as gratuitous, or am I being too touchy? Posted by Orrin Judd at March 3, 2003 6:01 PM