Maps & Diagrams

I welcome enquiries from authors or publishers who wish to add a lot of illumination to their publications for relatively little cost. Fees according to the size and complexity of the illustrations required. Contact me at ursusorca@mac.com

I create grayscale maps and diagrams for my own books because they save thousands of words of tedious description, while adding nothing to printing costs. In Razor’s Edge, rather than describing how British forces advanced across East Falkland in 1982, I created two maps that were printed opposite each other – the first to to identify topographical features and the second to show the paths taken across it by the leading British units.

Presentation of the complicated aero-naval battle of San Carlos, the moment when it could all have gone wrong for the British, was also clarified by a map showing the topographical features that sheltered the Landing Force, explaining better than words why the brave Argentine pilots concentrated on the warships in Falkland Sound.

Sometimes maps can be used to guide battlefield tourists as well, as in this map created for Richard Holmes’s 2008 edition of Fatal Avenue, which also captured how many crucial World War I battles fought by the Commonwealth armies took place in the relatively small rectangle defined by the path of the British Expeditionary Force retreat in 1914 from Mons to the Marne. The first and last Commonwealth soldiers to die during World War I are both buried in Saint-Symphorien cemetery, just outside Mons.

Nobody should attempt to describe a campaign, still less a battle, without walking the terrain. In some cases, background research will reveal that the ground has altered substantially since the events described, which make all maps based on modern contours deeply misleading. My eureka moment in this field was on the San Jacinto peninsula, where Texas won its independence from Mexico in 1836. The earliest topographical map, made by the US Geographical Survey in 1916, showed that all previous maps, based on modern contours, were wildly wrong. Extraction of ground water by nearby petrochemical plants have caused the entire peninsula to sink fifteen feet, while crucial features have been filled in by spoil from the dredging of the Houston Ship Canal. I made before and after maps to illustrate the importance of historical topography.

Finally, during my research into the iconic battle of Lepanto for Crescent and Cross, I found that the Greek shoreline off which the battle was fought had been radically altered by extensive deposition from the Ahelóos river, which has filled in the channels and islands around which the Holy League fleet manoeuvered in 1571. As a result my map was the first accurate depiction.