An occasional showcase for quirky and unusual cartographic pieces
An occasional showcase for quirky and unusual cartographic pieces
The upper panel depicts Abraham Ortelius gesturing towards the Lake while Hoefnagle, his friend and travelling companion, is sketching it.
The lower panel shows a group of men doing something unpleasant to a dog in the aptly named "Grotto de li cani".
They are in fact conducting crude experiments into the properties of carbon dioxide. The grotto was a natural source of carbon dioxide due to the volcanic actions of nearby Vesuvius. The name of the grotto proves that the use of dogs as subjects long pre-dated Ortelius and Hoefnagle's visit while the text below shows the custom continued at least well into the 19th Century.
The Grotto del Cane
"Nero's Baths, the ruins of Baiae, the Temple of Serapis; Cumae, where the Cumaen Sybil interpreted the oracles, the Lake Agnano, with its ancient submerged city still visible far down in its depths -- these and a hundred other points of interest we examined with critical imbecility, but the Grotto of the Dog claimed our chief attention, because we had heard and read so much about it. Every body has written about the Grotto del Cane and its poisonous vapors, from Pliny down to Smith, and every tourist has held a dog over its floor by the legs to test the capabilities of the place. The dog dies in a minute and a half--a chicken instantly. As a general thing, strangers who crawl in there to sleep do not get up until they are called. And then they don't either. The stranger that ventures to sleep there takes a permanent contract. I longed to see this grotto. I resolved to take a dog and hold him myself; suffocate him a little, and time him; suffocate him some more and then finish him. We reached the grotto at about three in the afternoon, and proceeded at once to make the experiments. But now, an important difficulty presented itself. We had no dog."
Mark Twain "The Innocents Abroad", 1869
While this passage makes it clear what the figures on the right of the lower panel are doing, it takes Charles Kingsley to explain the actions on the men on the left. He cites the Grotto del Cane in the course of lengthy lecture on the life threatening dangers of children sleeping with their heads under the bed-clothes and for women to wear stays!
"You are inflicting on yourselves the torments of the poor dog, who is kept at the Grotto del Cane, near Naples, to be stupefied, for the amusement of visitors, by the carbonic acid gas of the Grotto, and brought to life again by being dragged into the fresh air."
Charles Kingsley, "The Two Breaths", A Lecture on Sanitation and the Effects of Carbonic Acid Gas delivered at Winchester, May 31, 1869