#5: The Caprivi Strip

Many countries in the world have odd bits sticking out here and there, but perhaps one of the strangest is Namibia's Caprivi Strip, jutting out from the country's far northeast like an arm trying to dribble Botswana like a basketball.

Africa became one big European land grab in the late 19th century, and Namibia was no exception. While Britain claimed Walvis Bay - an excellent deep-water port, one of the few on southern Africa's Atlantic coast - in 1878, Germany proclaimed a protectorate over the whole area in the mid-1880s, building on missionary settlements begun in the 1840s and a piece of land ceded to a German trading firm in 1883.

German South-West Africa must have been a foreboding place for the colonists. Even by the standards of a continent that includes the world's largest desert, Namibia is exceptionally dry. It contains parts of two of the world's most foreboding desert landscapes, the Namib and the Kalahari. The country has around 300 sunny days every year, which is not necessarily a boon for agriculture. The only two major rivers that would have run through the colony were the Orange and the Okavango - and those were just along the edges, to say nothing of the fact that the Okavango doesn't actually flow into the ocean.

Map of Namibia, with the Caprivi Strip at the top right.

With all this in mind, it's not surprising that the Germans wanted better access to water resources, and the northeast of the protectorate was the place to go looking for them. The best bet - so they thought, anyway - was the Zambezi River, which rises in northwest Zambia, flows down through Angola, back into Zambia, and then forms much of the Zambia-Zimbabwe border before passing through Mozambique and into the Indian Ocean. In the 1880s, the Zambezi also touched on the British protectorate of Bechuanaland (modern Botswana) before reaching Zimbabwe. The Germans aimed to change that.

The British had been involved with the island of Zanzibar, off the coast of modern-day Tanzania, since the 1850s. But in 1885, the Germans showed up with a number of gunships and threatened the sultan of Zanzibar to give them his inland territory or else. The British and Germans subsequently worked out an arrangement in which each would get a sphere of influence on the mainland. Still, the Germans had their dry territory on the other side of the continent. So at a conference in Berlin in 1890, they agreed to drop their claim to Zanzibar in exchange for Heligoland, a group of small islands in the North Sea then controlled by Britain, and access to the Zambezi River from the west, which came in the form of the Caprivi Strip.

The course of the Zambezi, from NW Zambia near the middle top of the image, around past the Caprivi Strip and Zimbabwe and out through Mozambique.

The Germans were hopeful that the Zambezi would provide a way to connect their west coast territories with those on the east coast - despite dropping pretensions to Zanzibar, they still controlled much of mainland Tanganyika (now Tanzania). Unfortunately for Germany, the Caprivi Strip only reaches as far as the upper course of the Zambezi, and in its lower reaches at that. The Caprivi Strip extends more than 250 miles from the main portion of Namibia to reach its objective, but only about 40 miles from the Caprivi Strip's termination point comes one major obstacle that rendered navigation of the Zambezi from the Caprivi Strip to the Indian Ocean completely impossible: Mosi-oa-Tunya, better known to most of the world as Victoria Falls.

In truth, the Zambezi as a whole is ill-suited for long navigation due to rapids and sandbars, even with Victoria Falls removed from the equation. But with the Smoke that Thunders standing almost directly in their way, the Germans had no hope of linking up with the east coast; only some local navigation north into Zambia and Angola was possible. Nevertheless, the Caprivi Strip remained part of German South-West Africa, and it stayed with the territory as it became South-West Africa (under South African administration after World War I) and finally Namibia upon its 1990 independence from South Africa.

Victoria Falls. Oh, it's pretty, but just you try getting a steamship over it.

In its own way, the Caprivi Strip stands as one of the strangest-looking monuments to the European powers' cavalier attitude towards Africa - existing geography and tribal boundaries were no match for lines drawn on a map to satisfy sometimes shortsighted territorial aspirations.

Non-linked references:

Caprivi Strip history and general information from:

http://www.namibian.org/travel/namibia/caprivi.htm

http://www.namibia-travel.net/northnamibia/caprivi.htm

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/94246/Caprivi-Strip

General Namibian history from:

http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/world/A0859860.html

Namibian rainfall data from:

http://www.uyaphi.com/namibia/weather.htm

Information on the Zambezi River from:

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/655540/Zambezi-River

http://encyclopedia.farlex.com/Zambezi+valley

Information on Anglo-German relations in East Africa from:

http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=ad52

Images from:

http://go.hrw.com/atlas/norm_map/namibia.gif

http://worldradio.ch/wrs/bm~pix/zambezi~s600x600.jpg

http://www.platinumglobaldestinations.com/South_Africa_2009/assets/victoria_falls.jpg

#4: The Kaliningrad Oblast

Perhaps the most famous exclave in the world, one of the more interesting things about Kaliningrad - née Königsberg - is that it's actually a two-time exclave.

Königsberg (perhaps most famous as the inspiration for a namesake math problem involving the city's bridges) was part of the state of Prussia by the mid-1500s and remained part of it up through the unification of Germany under Otto von Bismarck in 1871. Following Germany's defeat in World War I, however, the Germans were forced to cede West Prussia to Poland, in particular the "Polish Corridor," a strip of land that gave Poland access to the Baltic Sea near the port of Danzig (which was designated a "free city" belonging neither to Germany nor Poland). The Polish Corridor cut East Prussia off from the remainder of Germany, rendering it - and its key city, Königsberg - an exclave.

The German Empire at the time of the first World War. Königsberg is located just northeast of Danzig across that small inlet of the Baltic Sea known as the Gulf of Danzig.

Because Danzig was home to a large German population, being cut off from the rest of the country by Poland was not popular in Danzig, nor in the rest of Germany; in general, public resentment over the settlement of peace following World War I (and the way in which it hammered Germany in spite of the fact that they had not started the war [but were basically the only Central Power left to hammer]) helped lead to the rise of the Nazis and thus to World War II. A month after invading Poland on September 1, 1939, Germany annexed back the territory it had lost to the Poles two decades earlier, and Königsberg was no longer an exclave.

World War II-era map of the "collapse" of Poland, showing Germany's reoccupation of Polish territory around the former East Prussian exclave.

Of course, this didn't last. The Nazis were defeated and Germany was partitioned among the victors. While most of the Allies had no intention of permanently occupying Germany, however, the Soviet Union did. German territory east of the Oder and Neisse Rivers was largely handed over to Poland at the Potsdam Conference, but one particular bit of territory went the USSR's way:

The Conference examined a proposal by the Soviet Government to the effect that pending the final determination of territorial questions at the peace settlement, the section of the western frontier of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics which is adjacent to the Baltic Sea should pass from a point on the eastern shore of the Bay of Danzig to the east, north of Braunsberg-Goldap, to the meeting point of the frontiers of Lithuania, the Polish Republic and East Prussia.

The Conference has agreed in principle to the proposal of the Soviet Government concerning the ultimate transfer to the Soviet Union of the City of Koenigsberg and the area adjacent to it as described above subject to expert examination of the actual frontier.

Just why the Soviets were so hot for Königsberg - which they renamed Kaliningrad in the late 1940s - is a bit vague; Stalin declared it important to Soviet interests, so presumably they just wanted another major Baltic port. This was no problem until the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991; previously, one could drive through Soviet territory uninterrupted from Moscow to Kaliningrad. But with Lithuania, Latvia and Belarus becoming independent, suddenly Kaliningrad was two countries away by ground in any direction! At a distance of more than 200 miles from the nearest Russian frontier, the Kaliningrad Oblast today is one of the world's farther-flung exclaves.

Google map of Kaliningrad today, two countries away from the nation to which it belongs.

Long a heavily German area, Kaliningrad today is populated almost entirely by "emigrated" Russians (the Germans were deported after World War II) and possesses a sizable military presence. Likely this is because, as the westernmost oblast in the Russian Federation, it's considered a good vantage point from which to keep tabs on NATO.

Non-linked references:
Map of Germany and Europe 1914 from http://www.fsmitha.com/h2/map01eu.htm
"Polish Collapse" map from http://history.sandiego.edu/cdr2/WW2Pics/51867big.jpg

#3: The Northwest Angle

Minnesota's northern border with Canada begins where the Pigeon River empties into Lake Superior, at almost exactly 48ºN latitude. It meanders through a series of lakes and rivers until reaching the Rainy River at International Falls; from there it traces the Rainy back up to Lake of the Woods. On the far western side of Lake of the Woods, Minnesota's land finally hits the 49th parallel, and the border levels off and runs due west from there, to the North Dakota border (and on to the Pacific). That all sounds like you'd expect it to - except that's not the whole story.

The Northwest Angle of Minnesota, the only part of the lower 48 states north of 49ºN latitude.

As you can see from the Google satellite map above, the border doesn't trace the Minnesota coast. Nor does it go to 49ºN within the lake and then cut across. Instead, it continues north and slightly west, wrapping around the piece of land known as the Northwest Angle before slicing back down on the same straight line that divides Manitoba and Ontario; when it reaches 49ºN latitude again, only then does it head due west.

The Angle is enough of an anomaly that many maps of Minnesota made in the years before its 1858 statehood didn't show it. Even after 1858, the maps weren't always current. This is embarrassing from a cartographic standpoint because the Angle had been officially U.S. territory since 1818, when an Anglo-American treaty cleared up a lingering problem created by errors in geography assumed by the 1783 Treaty of Paris - the one that ended the Revolutionary War.

This 1864 map by Johnson and Ward shows Minnesota's border never rising above the 49th parallel, even though Minnesota had been a state for six years by this point and had its northern boundary set for 46 years.

The Treaty of Paris, in setting peace between Britain and the newly-formed United States of America, had to set boundaries. The problem was that in 1783, no one was entirely sure where those boundaries were going to end up. The west coast of North America had been lightly explored; most of the interior was largely unknown. So when it came around to writing Article 2 of the treaty, defining the border between American and British territory, the diplomats for the two sides basically just guessed. (More accurately, they used the Mitchell Map, a mid-18th century document which itself either guessed or was just severely mistaken about the geography of the northwest.)

...thence through Lake Superior northward of the Isles Royal and Phelipeaux to the Long Lake; thence through the middle of said Long Lake and the water communication between it and the Lake of the Woods, to the said Lake of the Woods; thence through the said lake to the most northwesternmost point thereof, and from thence on a due west course to the river Mississippi; thence by a line to be drawn along the middle of the said river Mississippi until it shall intersect the northernmost part of the thirty-first degree of north latitude...

It goes on like that, in both directions. The problem should be obvious to any student of geography; the treaty provided for a line from the northwest point of Lake of the Woods west to the Mississippi, but the Mississippi doesn't go anywhere near that far north, terminating at Lake Itasca well over a degree of latitude south of Lake of the Woods. (It doesn't go that far west either; Lake Itasca is slightly east of Lake of the Woods' northwesternmost point.)

For a while this wasn't a huge deal; aside from fur trappers, who was spending much time in that part of America anyway? But with American and British relations on a knife edge after the War of 1812, firmer boundaries were needed. The Anglo-American Convention of 1818 provided them by writing over the error; the U.S. was still given the "northwesternmost point" of Lake of the Woods part of the 1783 treaty, but the 1818 convention sent the line due south to the 49th parallel as soon as the water ran out. Even in 1818, though, full surveys weren't available, and it doesn't seem anyone realized that a tiny piece of land would belong to the United States despite being on the other side of the lake.

This 1867 map by G.W. Colton was one of the first to include the Angle within U.S. borders.

The problem is the way Lake of the Woods is shaped; while the northwest corner appears at first glance to be within Buffalo Bay (visible in the satellite map above as the protrusion of water within Canadian territory just southwest of the Angle), a little piece of water that wraps around the Angle defines the actual northwest corner, rendering the Angle part of Minnesota by the 1818 treaty. (Oddly, the U.S. and Canada signed a 1925 treaty that was intended to more fully define the borders between the nations, but it makes no mention of the land in the Northwest Angle. Presumably Canada just wasn't interested in fighting over it.)

Some Angle residents talked secession in the late 90s when a dispute over differences in American and Canadian laws regarding fishing on the lake came to a head. A Minnesota congressman even introduced a resolution that would have allowed the Angle to become part of Manitoba should its residents vote for it, but the Red Lake Indians, whose reservation includes most of the Angle's land, were against it (and offended that they hadn't been consulted before the resolution was put forward). As of today, the Angle is still American, in spite of the fact that the fishing laws don't seem to have changed.

Like most remote exclaves, the Angle is sparsely populated; figures vary a bit, but the general consensus is that only about 150 people live in the Angle full-time. As the northernmost piece of the 48 states, it's hard to get to, an isolated piece of an already fairly isolated area (the entire Lake of the Woods county, most of which is south of the lake, has a population of just around 4,000). But its unique geographic circumstances make it a compelling outlier for anyone interested in the whys and wherefores of maps and borders.

Non-linked references:
Historical maps of Minnesota from http://alabamamaps.ua.edu/historicalmaps/us_states/minnesota/index.html

#2: Kilcohook Coordination Area

I grew up in New Jersey and have spent my entire life being fascinated by maps, so one of the strangest bits of geopolitical marking I've ever seen was also one of the first I noticed. That's because it appears on the New Jersey map - a strange little nub northwest of Salem that sticks out into the Delaware River estuary. This nub, marked on my 2009 road atlas as the "Kilcohook Coordination Area" but known to Google Maps as "Killcohook National Refuge," just happens to belong to the state of Delaware.

Google Maps view of "Killcohook National Refuge," with the dashed line demarcating its separation from New Jersey on the river's east bank and alliance with Delaware to the west.

So how to explain this oddity? In 1732, Lord Baltimore met with representatives of William Penn's family to set the border between Pennsylvania and colonies below it. What is now Delaware's northern boundary was determined by a 12-mile radius extending outward from the New Castle courthouse.

Such a radius also technically gave Delaware claims to land on the New Jersey side of the river. These claims were never seriously pursued, but Delaware did maintain a claim over the entire river; while usually water boundaries fall down the middle of the body of water in question, the original 1682 land grant to William Penn included the entirety of the river up to the New Jersey shoreline. (The grant was cited in a recent Supreme Court decision that allowed Delaware to block industrial development on the New Jersey side.)

Of course, none of this would have anything to do with Kilcohook were it not for the Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps was involved in dredging the lower Delaware River in the first part of the 20th century, and the massive amounts of silt and mud that resulted had to be put somewhere. They ended up on the New Jersey side of the river - but because Delaware laid claim to the entire river up to the low tide line on the New Jersey side, they also laid claim to any land generated by the Corps on the river's side of the old low tide line. Kilcohook was the result.

This 1777 map of the area shows no Delaware territory on the New Jersey side. A map of Delaware from the early 19th century also shows no territory across the river.

In 1934, the government declared the area a National Wildlife Refuge; however, the status was revoked in 1998 because the land was too much of a dump for the Corps and not enough of a refuge for wildlife, explaining why current maps call that bit of land a "coordination area."

You can actually visit Kilcohook; while the area is technically supposed to be off-limits, it seems not to be guarded and hikers and bikers can easily enter (though car traffic cannot). Of course, it's not exactly Point Roberts; a reporter for a local ABC station visited Kilcohook and described it as looking "like one big construction site, without the wood, cement and bricks." New Jersey sure doesn't need any more construction sites. Enjoy, Delaware!

Non-linked references:
Information about the courthouse radius from http://www.nps.gov/history/nhl/designations/samples/de/NCCO.pdf, pages 8 and 9
1777 New Jersey map from http://mapmaker.rutgers.edu/MAPS.html
Mention of the Corps of Engineers and the dredging of the river at http://www.wdel.com/blog/?postid=1277
Killcohook NWR info and "construction site" quote from http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=news/local&id=4874172

#1: Point Roberts, Washington

In 1846, the United States and Britain finally settled their long-standing dispute over the Oregon Country with the signing of the Oregon Treaty. The treaty's first article was its most important:

From the point of the forty-ninth parallel of north latitude, where the boundary laid down in existing treaties and conventions between the United States and Great Britain terminates, the line of boundary between the territories of the United States and those of her Britannic Majesty shall be continued westward along the said forty-ninth parallel of north latitude to the middle of the channel which separates the continent from Vancouver's Island, and thence southerly through the middle of the said channel, and of Fuca's Straits, to the Pacific Ocean: Provided, however, That the navigation of the whole of the said channel and straits, south of the forty-ninth parallel of north latitude, remain free and open to both parties.

An earlier treaty had already extended the division between the US and Canada as far west as the Rockies along the 49th parallel; the Oregon Treaty simply finished the job, extending it all the way to the ocean. Crucially for Britain, Vancouver Island (which dips well over a half degree of latitude south of 49ºN) was exempted from the line, maintaining their control over the full island (and particularly the port of Victoria).

Most likely the treaty was drawn up by bureaucrats thousands of miles away, because it didn't take into account a tiny spit of land located east of the ocean boundary but south of 49ºN latitude: Point Roberts.

Google Maps satellite image showing Point Roberts.

The closest the U.S. mainland gets to Point Roberts is several miles away across Boundary Bay. Driving to the U.S. takes 40 minutes and requires two border crossings, according to the Point Roberts Chamber of Commerce web site, and that's just to get to the nearest pharmacy. Need a hospital? Insurance isn't going to pay for a Canadian visit, so you're stuck driving to Bellingham, 70 minutes away.

Only about 1,300 people live in Point Roberts, but according to an article in Canadian paper The Province, "in summer the population swells to about 4,500 and the majority of residents are vacationing Canadians." Point Roberts seems in many ways to be at least as Canadian as it is American - many of even the full-time residents are retired Canadians, it's only within the past two decades that the Point got a U.S. area code (using Vancouver's before that), and some Canadian businesses find it expedient to maintain American mailing addresses at Point Roberts' post office.

Google Maps satellite image of the border crossing, with Point Roberts below and Canada above.

Like many geopolitically isolated areas, Point Roberts once talked of joining the region to which it was more closely attached, but it never happened, and today it's still a secluded piece of America that just happens to be better attended by Canadian vacationers.

A political map showing Point Roberts in relation to Vancouver Island.