Measuring America. Andro Linklater

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СКАЧАТЬ fatal. We at length got to the bottom, not much better, there being a large water course with banks extremely steep that obliged us to cross at places almost [vertical]. After great despair, we at length got to camp about 10 o’clock, hardly anyone without broken [bones] or other misfortune.’

      Ten days later the line cut across a swamp: ‘Wednesday, October 15th … The swamp is full of rocks and cavities covered over with a kind of moss [to] considerable depth. The laurel and ivy are so woven together that without cutting it is impossible to force through. In what danger must we be, all places being obscured by a cloak of moss! Such thickets of laurel to struggle through, whose branches are composed of iron! Our horses and ourselves fell into clefts and cavities without seeing the danger before we [fell].’

      When they finally got out of the swamp, Lewis wrote in heartfelt relief, ‘Never was any poor creatures in such a condition as we! Nor ever was a criminal more glad of having escaped from prison as we were to Get Rid of those Accursed Laurels! From the Beginning of Time, when we entered this swamp, I did not see a [dry] place big enough for a man to lie nor a horse to stand.’

      By comparison Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon had only the occasional attack by hostile Indians to fear when they were hired in 1763 by the proprietors of Pennsylvania and Maryland to sort out the disputed boundary between the two provinces. There were grades of expertise in surveying, and the equipment provided the best guide. Everyone carried a 16½-foot rod, or Edmund Gunter’s invaluable chain, but for professionals a circumferentor, which by the eighteenth century had developed into a theodolite or transit with cross-hairs in the lens of the telescope, and built-in compass and plumb-line, was also necessary. The experts brought along a quadrant or sextant as well for making sun-sights to check their position; in addition to all that, Mason and Dixon had with them a zenith sector built by John Bird, London’s foremost instrument-maker. This was a telescope almost six feet long, exactly calibrated and pointing vertically, beneath which they lay flat on their backs to take sightings on particular stars as they passed precisely overhead. Star-charts showing the positions of those stars at different dates and latitudes then enabled them to calculate their latitude with great precision. At the crude end of surveying, anyone able to see straight and multiply and divide could do it, but those at the top end had the scientific exactness and mathematical talent of astronomers.

      Taking star-sights with the zenith sector, and sun-sights with the quadrant, cutting a long swathe or ‘visto’ through the forest for back-sights and fore-sights with the theodolite, and measuring each yard with brass-tipped rods carried in special boxes and calibrated to a five-yard brass standard constructed by the Royal Society of London, Mason and Dixon spent five years on surveying 244 miles at a cost of £3500. To the Calverts of Maryland and the Penns of Pennsylvania, it was worth paying that massive bill to have the extent of their property established beyond doubt. They would have been gratified to learn that the far cheaper line between North and South Carolina was not agreed for another eighty years.

      Establishing the exact boundaries of a colony or plantation could be deferred until the population had grown large enough to reach the borders, but from the start every proprietor needed to decide how land inside those boundaries should be measured and settled. There were two models to choose from. In Virginia, the thousand-acre tobacco plantations, and the fifty-or hundred-acre farms granted to each colonist who had paid his own passage, had to be surveyed and registered, but the actual choice of land and of its shape – usually the bottom land along a navigable river with some nearby woodland to provide building material – was left to the landowner.

      The early planters developed a crude way of gauging their acreage. Each property was reckoned to run back for a mile from the riverbank. Using the old English measurement of a rod, they simply measured out a length of twenty-five rods along the riverbank, making a straight line which ignored the river’s bends. This produced a seemingly awkward distance of 137 yards, one foot and six inches – but multiplied by the 1760-yard depth of the farm, it gave a total of 242,000 square yards, or precisely fifty acres. A hundred-acre farm was fifty rods broad, while a shareholder entitled to five hundred or a thousand acres measured out 250 or five hundred rods. This was frontier maths, and it became second nature to anyone who wanted to own land.

      These first farms and plantations were more or less square, but later arrivals fitted in around them, producing crazy patterns of settlement. To define the boundaries of their property they blazed trees or scratched boulders or raised mounds, and described their holdings in terms of these markers. This was the old English practice of using ‘metes and bounds’ to define the extent of an estate. Thus a surveyor’s notes might describe a line as running from the river, ‘thence S[outh] 36 [degrees] E[ast] 132 rods to a white oak blazed, thence S 40 W 11 poles to two barren oaks’. Because trees were often destroyed by fire and boulders washed away by floods, boundary disputes filled the courts. It was easier to move on and occupy fresh land far from other claims. ‘People live so far apart,’ the German immigrant Gottlieb Mittelberger complained in 1756, ‘that many have to walk a quarter or a half-hour just to reach their nearest neighbour.’

      A different method of surveying evolved in New England, because the climate and soil were harder, and the first colonists arrived as religious groups. It placed the emphasis on communal rather than individual exploitation, and the land was usually granted in rectangular blocks, six or ten miles square, to an association or church which then allocated it to individuals. On 14 May 1636, for example, William Pynchon, Jeheu Burr and half a dozen others were given permission to create a new settlement at Agawam just west of the Connecticut river. The land was to be divided between forty and fifty families, each of which was to have enough property for a house together with some farmland, and parts of a ‘hassocky marsh’ and nearby woodland. The precise width of each house lot was laid down: ‘Northward lys the lott of Thomas Woodford beinge twelve [rods] broade and all the marish before it to ye uplande. Next the lott of Thomas Woodford lys the lott of Thomas Ufford beinge fourteene rod broade and all the marish before it to ye uplande. Next the lott of Thomas Ufford lyes the lott of Henry Smith beinge twenty rod in bredth and all the marish before it, and to run up in the upland on the other side to make up his upland lott ten acres.’

      No gaps were left between one individual holding and the next, and one township and the next. The northern settlers might not be able to choose the precise parcel they wanted, but they enjoyed one advantage over the southern planters. In the south, the last remnant of feudalism required landowners to pay the proprietor or colonial government an annual ‘quit-rent’ of up to two shillings (about fifty cents) an acre, to be quit of the obligations and services they would otherwise owe as vassals. Failure to comply would result in a notice ordering the owner ‘to pay your arrears of Quit-Rents and Reliefs and to make your Oath of Fealty’ or be fined. In New England, the complication of levying the quit-rent through the church or town soon led to it being abandoned, which meant that freeholders in a New England town effectively owned their farms in fee simple – free of all feudal dues and obligations. They had other social duties – to pay the minister’s salary, and attend the church or meeting-house – but their land was undeniably property.

      Looking at the two ways of measuring out the land, later proprietors automatically opted for the New England model. The square township, which in New England was known simply as a town, seemed to the aristocratic Carolina proprietors to be ‘the chiefe thing that has given New England soe much advantage [in size of population] over Virginia’. They also believed, mistakenly, that this system would give them more control over the colonists. Accordingly their 1665 constitution decreed that all the lowland area, the Tidewater, should be pre-surveyed by a surveyor-general and divided into squares and rectangles ‘by lines running East and West, North and South’. From these blocks they proposed to build an American aristocracy, with ordinary immigrants receiving a headright of one hundred acres, and paying quit-rent on them, and above them proprietors, lords of the manor and lesser nobles whose rank depended on the size of their landholding. To ensure compliance, the proprietors instituted a complex system which required the settler to obtain a land warrant from the governor, followed by a survey from the surveyor-general, before the land could be allocated СКАЧАТЬ