Page 48 - Ranger Demo

triangles covering the southern two-thirds of the country only; even within this, some observations were provisional or incomplete. It appears that no lower-order work yet existed to provide a suitable framework for topographical mapping.
The few useful surveys available to the commanders initially were of limited extent and did not provide coverage where it was needed. Wellington, explaining his anxiety to push south towards Lisbon after the action at Rolica, only seventeen days after disembarkation, wrote,
I should have pushed the advanced guard as far as the heights of Mafra and should have halted the main body about four or five miles from that place. By this movement, the enemy’s position at Torres Vedras would have been turned, and I should have brought the army into a country of which I had excellent map and topographical accounts, which had been drawn up for the use of the late Sir Charles Stewart; and the battle which it was evident would be fought in a few days would have had for its field a country of which we had knowledge.
When Wellington returned to the Peninsula the following year his principal agent in improving the army’s resources of topographical knowledge was Colonel George Murray, the QMG to his army. Murray, who had attended the Senior Department of the Royal Military College in 1802 and had experience of QMG duties in Ireland, rapidly and effectively created an organisation with a range of duties corresponding to those of the revitalised QMG’s Department in London. Here, however, we are concerned only with the topographical aspects of his work.
Using the officers of his department (whether Permanent Assistants or attached regimental officers serving as Assistant QMGs or Deputy AQMGs), as well as Royal Staff Corps officers he embarked on a programme of sketch mapping covering the areas of actual and potential operations. Murray appears readily to have adapted Jarry’s concept of the combined reconnaissance. On 29 September 1809, he wrote from headquarters
undermentioned officers will proceed without delay to form a skeleton map of that part of the Provinces of Alentejo and Portuguese Estremadura, which is bounded on the North by the River Tagus, and on the South by a Line drawn from the Neighbourhood of the Town of Jerumanha (Herumanha) by Evora and Alcacer do Sal to St Ubes ... The General Map will be drawn at Headquarters from the sketches of the undermentioned officers, and as it will be made upon the scale of four English Miles to an Inch, it will be Expedient that all the Officers employed should work upon that scale ... The Officers to be employed are Capt. Tod, Lt. Stavely, Lt. Freeth (Royal Staff Corps), Lt. Balk, Dy. Asst. Qr Mr General.
Many such orders for simultaneous coordinated work by several officers can be found among his instructions.
Murray prepared at least three sets of standing instructions for officers employed on QMG duties. The most important of these are the Instructions to Officers of the Quarter Master General’s Department issued in November 1810. His officers received or made copies of these manuscript instructions, several of which survive. These Instructions do not give directions as to the methods employed in the mapping (or sketching as this type of cartography was more frequently called) of extended areas; they are, however, specific as to the type of information to be collected and contain an example of a route report and the type of sketch to be made for such linear reconnaissances. These Instructions were of great significance for the QMG’s Department of the British army in subsequent years. They were printed in the Instructions for Officers of the Quarter Master General’s Department issued by the QMG to the Forces (Col. J.W. Gordan) from the Horse Guards in 1814, which were in turn reprinted with revisions in 1854 at the outbreak of the Crimean War.
Murray well understood that the desiderata of completeness and perfection must be subordinated to operational urgency. Elsewhere in the orders to Capt. Tod and others quoted above he wrote,
The Map is intended Chiefly to show the Roads and Rivers and the Towns and principal Villages, but if much delay would not be occasioned by it, the woods may also be inserted.
On another occasion, ordering the completion of a reconnaissance between the Zezero and Villa Franca, he said,
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