Bishop's 1842 Map of Mammoth Cave
In 1839, Dr. John Croghan of Louisville bought the Mammoth Cave Estate, including Bishop and its other slaves from their previous owner, Franklin Gorin. Croghan briefly ran an ill-fated tuberculosis hospital in the cave, the vapors of which he believed would cure his patients. A widespread epidemic of the period, tuberculosis would ultimately claim the lives of both Bishop and Croghan.
In 1842, Bishop was sent to Croghan's estate (Locust Grove, in Louisville) for two weeks to draw a map, from memory, of the cave system (see Mammoth Cave). The map was published in 1844 by Morton and Griswold as a pull-out insert in Alexander Clark Bullitt’s Rambles in Mammoth Cave in the Year 1844 by a Visiter (Morton and Griswold, 1845.) Unusually for a slave, Bishop was given full credit for his work. The Bishop map remained in use for over forty years.
Stephen's map is quite impressive, showing some 16 km of cave passages, half of which were discovered by the cartographer, Bishop. While the map does not represent a modern accurate instrumental survey, Bishop took some pains to indicate relative passage dimension and length, with cross shading to show water (as modern cave cartographers do.) The topology, if not the scale and orientation, of the map is accurate, that is, the indications of junction layouts correspond to reality in a way that some later celebrated maps do not. Beyond this, the Bishop map is the first to truly suggest, at a glance, the majestic scale of Mammoth Cave, especially its extraordinary degree of connectivity. In 160 years, Bishop's map has not lost the ability to inspire interest in both its subject and its source.
Incredibly, in 1972, when modern explorers discovered a connection between the Flint Ridge Cave system to the northeast and Mammoth Cave, they were astonished to discover that the Mammoth Cave end of the connection was actually indicated as a passage lead on Bishop's map. (It is seen as a long thin line branching off from the eastern end of the Echo River complex.) The construction in 1905 of a dam on the Green River in the interim caused the passage to be flooded (and therefore inaccessibly hidden by murky water) most of the time after the dam's completion, and the passage was rediscovered backwards, from its remote end, by cavers entering the Flint Ridge Cave System. Although he never knew its significance, Bishop had unwittingly shown the key to connecting two major components of the longest cave in the world, 130 years before the connection was made.
Read more about this topic: Stephen Bishop (cave Explorer)
Famous quotes containing the words bishop, map, mammoth and/or cave:
“Apparently they have reached their destination.
It would be hard to say what brought them there,
commerce or contemplation.”
—Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979)
“Unless, governor, teacher inspector, visitor,
This map becomes their window and these windows
That open on their lives like crouching tombs
Break, O break open,”
—Stephen Spender (1909–1995)
“Do you know I believe that [William Jennings] Bryan will force his nomination on the Democrats again. I believe he will either do this by advocating Prohibition, or else he will run on a Prohibition platform independent of the Democrats. But you will see that the year before the election he will organize a mammoth lecture tour and will make Prohibition the leading note of every address.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“Do you know how poetry started? I always think that it started when a cave boy came running back to the cave, through the tall grass, shouting as he ran, “Wolf, wolf,” and there was no wolf. His baboon-like parents, great sticklers for the truth, gave him a hiding, no doubt, but poetry had been born—the tall story had been born in the tall grass.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)