Serendip in maps

Lazing in the shade on a searing stretch of beach on the south coast of Sri Lanka, enjoying the first pages of Michael Ondaatje’s “Running In the Family,” memories of his return here to his ancestral place, memories especially of his father.

Something makes me pause. I look up, south, out to sea, and start wondering (the heat perhaps) how near Antarctica might be, its icy fiords and bergs, which in fact, even at six degrees above the Equator, are still half a hemisphere of open sea away. I return to the page, then read with such pleasure this passage – touching my fascination with old maps, their romance, their promises, their stories of power, the excuse they can give to imagine the world differently – called “Tabula Asiae.”

“On my brother’s wall in Toronto are the false maps. Old portraits of Ceylon. The result of sightings, glances from trading vessels, the theories of sextant. The shapes differ so much they seem to be translations by Ptolemy, Mercator, François Valentyn, Mortier, and Heydt – growing from mythic shapes into eventual accuracy. Amoeba, then stout rectangle, and then the island as we know it now, a pendant off the ear of India. Around it, a blue-combed ocean busy with dolphin and seahorse, cherub and compass. Ceylon floats on the Indian Ocean and holds its naïve mountains, drawings of cassowary and boar that leap without perspective across imagined ‘desertum’ and plains.

“At the edge of the maps the scrolled mantling depicts ferocious slipper-footed elephants, a white queen offering a necklace to natives who carry tusks and a conch, a Moorish king who stands amidst the power of books and armour. On the south-west corner of some charts are satyrs, hoof deep in foam, listening to the sound of the island, their tails writhing in the waves.

“The maps reveal rumours of topography, the routes for invasion and trade, and the dark mad mind of travellers’ appears throughout Arab and Chinese and medieval records. The island seduced all of Europe. The Portuguese. The Dutch. The English. And so its name changed, as well as its shape, -- Serendip, Ratnapida (“island of gems””), Taprobane, Zeloan, Zeilan, Seyllan, Ceilon, and Ceylon – the wife of many marriages, courted by invaders who stepped ashore and claimed everything with the power of their sword or bible or language.

“This pendant, once its shape stood still, became a mirror. It pretended to reflect each European power till newer ships arrived and spilled their nationalities, some of whom stayed and inter-married – my own ancestors arriving in 1600, a doctor who cured the residing governor’s daughter with a strange herb and was rewarded with land, a foreign wife, and a new name which was a Dutch spelling of his own. Ondaatje. A parody of the ruling language. And when his Dutch wife died, marrying a Sinhalese woman, having nine children, and remaining. Here. At the centre of the rumour. At this point on the map.”