Cook’s last resort: ‘Nobody knows what’

Press, 20 July 1984, Page 13

Cook’s last resort: ‘Nobody knows what’

The Canterbury Museum collection of old maps—battered, torn and stained as some are—reveals at times the temperament and fallibility of the cartographer as well as encapsulating pipe dreams of the future. In the course of Captain Cook’s exploratory voyages of the Pacific he visited and charted much of Fiordland, including the inner reaches of Breaksea Sound. At some stage during the mapping of the numerous inlets, bays and capes, apparently overcome by the impenetrability of the sheer forested mountains comprising the shoreline, he threw up his hands in despair and printed across an uncompleted part of his chart “Nobody knows what.” The words were faithfully reproduced when .this chart was drawn and published. The French decided that what was good enough for Cook was good enough for them, so they reprinted his chart in its entirety including “On ne connoit pas cela.” However Vancouver, who had been one of Cook’s officers on the original voyage and who may have been slightly critical of Cook’s mapping abilities, called in at Breaksea Sound on his way to chart the West Coast of America.

He sailed from the sound again after making a triumphant emendation to Cook’s chart. “Nobody knows what” had been defiantly changed to “Somebody knows

what” and is. shown as such on John Arrowsmith’s map of New Zealand published in 1850. Modern maps of the sound show that Vancouver Arm and Broughton Arm begin at the point of Vancouver’s intervention. In the early 1850 s the Canterbury Association arranged for a map of Canterbury to be published by Trelawney, Saunders and Co. of London. Possibly the information given the cartographer was scanty. When he came to print the names of the towns he started off correctly “Port of Lyttelton.” He must then have said to himself “If that’s the port this, then, will be Lyttelton,” looking at the rectangular pattern of future streets in the swamplands over the Port Hills around the Avon River. And “Lyttelton” it was labelled, lithographed and distributed for the world to see. One can imagine some frantic efforts to recall and reprint the map to ensure that Christchurch reclaimed its rightful name.

Trams were a major traffic problem in Christchurch between the two world wars, and at the Bank Comer leading to Cathedral Square congestion was notorious. In 1930 or thereabouts an unknown planner, self styled “An Old Colonist” published a street map of the Inner city headed “Clear the Bottleneck.” His proposal was to take all trams out of Cathedral Square and re-route them to flow in a clockwise closed pattern along

Oxford Terrace, Armagh, Manchester and Lichfield Streets, linking up all the existing lines to the suburbs. The trams were fully superseded by buses in the fifties and it is ironic that Cathedral Square is now primarily a bus terminal. In 1947 when the Railways and the steamer express were still

viable parts of our lives, R.S.D. Harman, a well known Christchurch architect drew up a perspective map of a “Processional Way to Civic Centre.” The Processional Way ran from a new Christchurch Railway Station along a widened Madras Street through Latimer Square which was ex-

tended north to the Avon River and which provided a site for a new magnificent imperial style town hall. The intersection of Ferry Road with the Processional Way was designed as a circular round-about with a tall column topped by a statue of an unspecified dignitary

at the centre. Time obliterates mistakes and dreams and it is only in the laden archives of the museum that our memory quickens.

—Brian Lovell-Smith