Following her political instincts and interests, Brun viewed the canals as proof of a planetary system beyond national boundaries, embodying collective rather than competitive endeavour.
Brun constructed her globes by overpainting existing terrestrial examples, adapting Lowell’s cartography and Schiaparelli’s nomenclature. The present globe, one of twelve surviving examples, records canal systems in red and blue, with the north pole labelled ‘Nix 1909.’ Its bronze stand bears the motto ‘Free Land. Free Trade. Free Men,’ echoing George’s political ideals, alongside a line from the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’ The result merges astronomy, politics, and theology into a singular object.
Brun presented her globes to leading observatories and figures, including Lowell himself, who praised one as ‘a capital piece of work’. Surviving examples are today preserved at institutions such as the National Maritime Museum (Greenwich), the Whipple Museum (Cambridge), the Vatican Observatory, and the National Museum of Scotland (Garrett, 2021). Their extreme rarity, and Brun’s unusual combination of science and social thought, make them among the most remarkable artefacts of Martian cartography.

Ex Carta

Emmy Ingeborg Brun’s hand-painted globes of Mars adapt Percival Lowell’s ‘canal’ maps into celestial manifestos of utopian cooperation. Her red-and-blue network of waterways translates speculative astronomy into a vision of idealised moral order.

Emmy Ingeborg Brun (1872–1929) was a Danish writer and amateur astronomer, who created manuscript globes of Mars based on Percival Lowell’s influential maps of the planet (1894–1914). Although raised in an ‘intellectual bourgeois household’, she was prevented from studying astronomy at university (Garrett, 2021). Disappointed, she ‘became neurasthenic, went to bed and spent the rest of her life in bed’ from where ‘she manufactured her beautiful globes’ (McCall, Bowden, and Howarth, 2006).

She was particularly interested in the speculations of Percival Lowell (1855–1916), the American astronomer who – based on a partial or wilful misinterpretation of Schiaparelli’s theories – suggested that the dark, straight lines observed on the surface of Mars were in fact literal canals and evidence of intelligent life.

Schiaparelli also speculated about a Martian civilisation, but explicitly as a thought experiment rather than a serious claim. His conjecture was informed by his politics and he pointedly described the possibility of Mars being a ‘paradise for socialists’ working together to thrive in their challenging environment (Garrett, 2021). Lowell, an ‘heir to a cotton fortune and a lifelong opponent of socialism and unions’, shaped his Martian civilisation accordingly as a ‘society where survival had been enabled by development through capitalism’.

By the early twentieth century, Mars had become an almost blank canvas upon which humans could project their political and ideological fantasies, utopias, and dystopias. The 1908 Russian novel Red Star by Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928) revealed Martian society to be a model of technology-driven socialist efficiency. In the US, A Princess of Mars (1911) by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) envisioned a planet riven by inter-species conflict and competition between collectivised and libertarian models of social organisation. As scientific knowledge of Mars progressed, serious speculation on it being an inhabited planet diminished, and science fictional representations came instead to see it as an empty site of possible human colonisation and expansion.

Following her political instincts and interests, Brun viewed the canals as proof of a planetary system beyond national boundaries, embodying collective rather than competitive endeavour.

Brun constructed her globes by overpainting existing terrestrial examples, adapting Lowell’s cartography and Schiaparelli’s nomenclature. The present globe, one of twelve surviving examples, records canal systems in red and blue, with the north pole labelled ‘Nix 1909.’ Its bronze stand bears the motto ‘Free Land. Free Trade. Free Men,’ echoing George’s political ideals, alongside a line from the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’ The result merges astronomy, politics, and theology into a singular object.

Brun presented her globes to leading observatories and figures, including Lowell himself, who praised one as ‘a capital piece of work’. Surviving examples are today preserved at institutions such as the National Maritime Museum (Greenwich), the Whipple Museum (Cambridge), the Vatican Observatory, and the National Museum of Scotland (Garrett, 2021). Their extreme rarity, and Brun’s unusual combination of science and social thought, make them among the most remarkable artefacts of Martian cartography.

Mars after Percival Lowell