Lockdown, Victoria, 2020.  The fortieth degree of north latitude, 1763 to 1767.

In 2020 during one of the intermittent lockdowns in Victoria, I decide to curate my online music library. There is, I discover, a big gap in my collection – a Dire Straits shaped gap and to fill it I download the Best of Dire Straits album. It starts playing Sailing to Philadelphia, a song I’m not familiar with. The opening chords are gentle and melodic. Certainly not rock, not Walk of Life nor Sultans of Swing but unmistakably from the fingers of the musical genius that is Mark Knopfler.

 I am Jeremiah Dixon, I am a Geordie boy.

I am intrigued with the lyrics sung by the distinctive gravelly vocals of Knopfler. Who is this Jeremiah Dixon? Although he grew up in Newcastle I don’t think Knopfler is singing about himself.

And then the sweet sweet voice of James Taylor comes in.

 He calls me Charlie Mason, a stargazer am I.

The song turns into a duet – a dialogue between the two men: Jeremiah Dixon and Charles Mason. As the song unfolds, the penny drops. Of course! They are singing about the infamous Mason Dixon line in America.

 … Sailing to Philadelphia to draw the line. The Mason-Dixon Line.

Something so quintessentially bound up with American history, especially the Civil War and the divide between north and south, I assume is a home-grown geographical fixture. I need to know more.

This is what I find out.

Back in the 1600s, when America was a colony of Great Britain, King Charles II was a bit free with granting bits of land here and there to the colonists. Existing maps were very inaccurate and this led to a serious dispute and intermittent warfare over the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania. Eventually a settlement was reached and it was decided that a survey should be done to mark the newly agreed boundary.

Enter Jeremiah Dixon and Charles Mason.

Born in 1733, Jeremiah Dixon was a Quaker from a mining family in County Durham.

 A glass of wine with you, sir, and the ladies I’ll enjoy
Jeremiah was a wild lad and was expelled from the Quakers for drinking and keeping loose company. But he showed a talent early on for maths and surveying, went to London and joined the Royal Society (the prestigious society for men of science).

Charles Mason, a baker’s son, was born in 1728 in Gloucestershire. He became an astronomer and his early career was spent at the Royal Greenwich Observatory. Like Dixon, he also joined the Royal Society

 They’d cut me out for baking bread,
But I had other dreams instead
This baker’s boy from the west country,
Would join the Royal Society

Their task in the colony was a formidable one. Starting in 1765, it would take them almost five years, with a team of men lugging their equipment across hundreds of miles of wilderness, cutting swathes of access paths through thick forests, battling not surprisingly indigenous nations, wild animals and impenetrable vegetation to mark the exact position of the border.

A Geordie and a baker’s boy,
In the forests of the Iroquois

They used instruments to calculate their path by the stars and limestone markers were placed at every mile and marked with a P for Pennsylvania on one side and M for Maryland on the other.

After such a (literarily) trail-blazing achievement, both men went on to die in virtual obscurity. Perhaps if the Mason Dixon line hadn’t become the symbol of demarcation between the North and South after the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861 it may have also been lost in the mists of history.

So thank you Mark Knopfler for writing and performing this anthem to two British men who deserve to be celebrated in their country of birth and remembered as scientists, explorers, astronomers, surveyors and incredibly brave men who created the most famous boundary in the world.

Sailing to Philadelphia, to draw the line
The Mason-Dixon Line

 

  Stereo Story # 796

 More about the Mason-Dixon Line, via Enyclopaedia Brittanica.

 

 Ann has fond memories of lying on the floor between two huge Pioneer stereo speakers in the 1980s listening to Mark Knopfler’s solo guitar on Telegraph Road. The speakers are long-gone but she can almost get the same experience from her iPhone. Almost.

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Ann Banham retired from the corporate world where she wrote corporate-type material (website content, brochures, newsletters etc). She found her tribe in U3A Williamstown and enrolled in a creative writing class. She is now happily exploring the creative side of her brain with short stories, non-fiction pieces and the occasional stab at poetry.