Simon Winchester slides off the map

This book begins with Simon Winchester becoming a US citizen two years ago: ‘I swore a solemn oath before a federal judge on the afterdeck of the warship USS Constitution in Boston Harbor.’ On several occasions during the 450-plus pages that follow, I wondered if becoming a US citizen had driven him a bit mad.

Winchester’s aim is to write about the explorers, geologists, cartographers, topographers and entrepreneurs who transformed America from a scattering of far-flung outposts into a cohesive whole. Nothing odd about that — but the way in which he has gone about it certainly is. For reasons that are never entirely clear, Winchester has chosen to divide up his narrative into five categories according to the five classical elements: wood, earth, water, fire and metal. He writes:

It suddenly seemed to me that the five elements could be a logical way of placing into context the basic themes behind the making and joining together of the United States.

The trouble with this idea is that it comes unstuck almost immediately. He kicks off with Jefferson, who became obsessed with sending out an army of cartographers to survey America. So, where’s the wood? Well, it turns out that ‘Thomas Jefferson was a man with a lifelong fascination with trees.’

Stone me, you just might be thinking, that’s a bit tenuous — in which case you’d better hold on tight; there’s plenty more where that came from. In the section on water, Winchester writes, reasonably enough, about canals, but then has to make a desperate lunge to get to the railways.

It is an unassailable physical fact that the invisible and very hot gas known since the 11th century as steam occupies 1,600 times the volume of the water from which it is made.