The Cartographer Who Burned His Maps

In 1947, a retired cartographer named Edwin Hargreaves sat in his cluttered study in Bath, England, surrounded by forty years of hand-drawn maps. He had charted rivers in Burma, sketched coastlines along the Adriatic, and plotted mountain passes through the Swiss Alps. Every map was meticulous, beautiful, and — by his own admission — ultimately incomplete. There was always another ridge he had missed, another tributary unnamed.…