Mapping the Holy Land by Haim Goren

Mapping the Holy Land by Haim Goren

Author:Haim Goren
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Keywords: Holy Land / cartography / historical geography / history of Palestine
Publisher: I.B.Tauris
Published: 2017-06-06T16:00:00+00:00


Competition and Reputation

Both van de Velde and Robinson/Smith ultimately aimed at founding Protestant Biblical Geography on fieldwork, but did so from different perspectives – the university theologian Robinson from the scholarly angle and the trained military cartographer van de Velde with a distinct evangelical world view. In this, they were competitors who did not shy away from obtaining each other’s results for their own purpose and discrediting the other’s reputation. Robinson’s letters to Eli Smith from 1852, the year of van de Velde’s survey and their second trip to the Holy Land, tell of repeated encounters that were not without friction. Apart from meeting twice, it seems they also travelled back to Trieste on the same ship, a fact that van de Velde never mentioned. On the ship, van de Velde had apparently asked Robinson to borrow Eli Smith’s notes, purporting that Smith had consented. Robinson later regretted sharing the information and worried that van de Velde was going to profit from it. In the account of their joint excursion to Pella, Robinson also felt that van de Velde had not duly credited them.235

Van de Velde in turn claimed that he had found Smith’s compass to deviate by three or four degrees in certain areas, which made the resulting maps flawed. He even quoted a letter he had seen at Heinrich Berghaus’s in Potsdam that confirmed the instrument’s deficiencies.236

Yet the other side was not idle neither. In September 1855, the engraver Hermann Eberhardt, whose studio was in Eisenach, wrote to Perthes about a surprise visit:

Yesterday I had the pleasure of seeing Dr Kiepert at my studio. I barely had time to hide the Palestine drawings from his keen eye and did not manage to shove the proofs into the folder either. He was very sorry that I sent you all the drawings yesterday and he raised my hopes of seeing him here again later this year. He mentioned some of his plans to me and if you are interested, I will be happy to share them when I visit Gotha.

Dr Kiepert was so kind to indicate a number of corrections to the map: Chalsis must be Chalcis and Abyla Lysanias must be Lysaniae. If you agree, I will implement them immediately.237

This leads us back to August Petermann’s remark to his employer that van de Velde’s map would be a ‘renewal’ of Robinson’s. We can in fact see that van de Velde used as much information as he could for his map and had managed, not least through Heinrich Berghaus, to obtain field notes and other material from his competitors. As this seems to have happened in a somewhat unauthorised manner (but not worse than Kiepert sneaking into the engraver’s studio and peeking at the map the former was working on), these sources were not prominently mentioned in the memoir.238 After all, Robinson and Smith had published their research extensively, so that it sufficed to name their publications as sources. The same letter by Petermann also expressed the publisher’s side of



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