The biggest mistakes in mapmaking history - Kayla Wolf
On a tiny copper globe created
in the early 1500s,
the coast of Southeast Asia is marked
with a message
that has since become iconic:
Here be dragons.
Though the words themselves
were actually quite rare,
the sentiment was common among
medieval European mapmakers,
who often scrawled dragons
and sea monsters over terra incognita—
blank spots on the map.
For thousands of years, people all over
the world had made both functional maps—
showing trade routes, settlements,
topography, water sources,
the shapes of coastlines,
or written directions—
and what are known as cosmographies,
illustrating the Earth
and its position in the cosmos,
often including constellations, gods,
and mythic locations.
From the Middle Ages
through the mid-17th century,
cartographers in Eurasia and North Africa
produced a slew of new world maps
with features from both these traditions.
Often commissioned by rulers
and other powerful people,
these maps were meant to depict
the world’s geography,
but not necessarily to be
useful for navigation.
And given their maker’s incomplete
knowledge of the world,
they were really hypotheses—
some of which have been
glaringly disproven.
In medieval Europe, the new vogue began
with what were known as mappae mundi.
Many of these veered closer
to cosmographies,
featuring the Garden of Eden
or mythical dragons.
They all followed the same format,
showing the world's land as one mass
divided roughly into the shape of a T
and surrounded by a ring of ocean.
Islamic mapmakers also created
world maps in this format,
emphasizing geographic details
over fantastical elements.
One of the earliest and most accurate such
maps was created by Ibn Hawqal,
whose own travels informed
his mapmaking.
In 1154, the King of Sicily commissioned
Islamic mapmaker Al-Idrisi
to create the “Tabula Rogeriana,”
also known as “A Guide to Pleasant
Journeys into Faraway Lands.”
This book of maps included a world map
based on Idrisi’s own travel
and interviews with other traders
and travelers.
He correctly depicted the world
as a flattened sphere,
but thought Europe, Asia, and North Africa
wrapped all the way around it.
The “Da Ming Hunyi Tu” was created
in China in 1389
on a piece of silk big enough
to fill an entire room.
Though the mapmakers had
never been to Africa,
they attempted to depict the continent
based on the accounts of the traders
who’d been there.
Surprisingly, this gave them enough
information to create
a correctly shaped portrayal
of sub-Saharan Africa.
Beginning in the 15th century,
European cartographers began to expand
the scope of their world maps as their
explorers traveled the world—
but not without missteps.
In 1507, the German cartographer
Martin Waldseemuller mapped the Americas—
as a thin sliver of land
where the east coast would be.
Spanish cartographers took a stab
at the western side of the Americas
based on accounts from an expedition
to the Baja Peninsula.
Unfortunately, the explorers’ impressions
of the land led them astray:
for over 100 years after, Spanish maps
depicted the “Island of California”
detached from the rest of the continent.
The Flemish cartographer
Gerardus Mercator,
best known for his world map,
also created a map
of the never-before-seen North Pole
that was published in 1595.
Mercator speculated that the North Pole
prominently featured
the “Rupes Nigra,” a giant magnetic rock
surrounded by a whirlpool
that explained why all compasses
point north.
Even as Europeans built towards
a complete picture of the Earth,
they didn’t entirely let go of the idea
of blank spots filled with mythic beasts.
As late as 1657, English scholar
Peter Heylin lumped Australia together
with Utopia and Fairyland.
But with the exception of the North Pole,
these so-called terra incognita
weren’t really unknown—
at least not to the people
who lived there.
There weren’t really dragons
anywhere on Earth,
but there were people and cultures—
many of them eradicated by those
who put their lands on world maps.
