Fantasy And Misunderstanding

The map inscribed with the legend ‘Here Be Dragons’, yet there is no such thing.

Dorothy L. Sayers coined the phrase for her detective story ‘The Dragon’s Mouth’, and invented the map too. It was said to be in a Ptolemy, edited by Sebastian Munster of Basle in the sixteenth century, symbolizing the ‘Marvels of the East’. These were usually depicted on medieval maps as a fringe of monstrous beings decorating the continent of Africa. For many centuries such fantasies and misconceptions haunted the world map and enthralled European armchair travellers.

Cartographic errors also played a role in plans for exploration and discovery. When the Geography of Claudius Ptolemy, written in about AD 150, was revived in Europe in the fifteenth century, the work was regarded as a model of scientific method and was revised in the light of contemporary knowledge.  One major error, however, was not corrected but exaggerated – Ptolemy’s world map showing the continent of Eurasia. The Chinese discoveries of Marco Polo, the thirteenth century Venetian traveller, now had to be added to Ptolemy’s eastern Asia.

As a result of this and other corrections, Christopher Columbus calculated that the distance from the Canary Islands westward to Cipango (Japan) was 2400 miles (3860 km), whereas the true distance in 28 degrees North was 10,600 miles (17,060 km). His figures plotted on a modern map put Japan in the Virgin Islands of the West Indies and Cathay (China) on the west coast of Mexico.

As European discoveries advanced, the New World of America became the home of some of the fantasies which had abounded in the continents of Africa and Asia. Myths were not abandoned but transplanted. In South America the Spaniards’ quest for gold was fed by tales of a kingdom of ‘El Dorado’, meaning the ‘gilded one’.

Sir Walter Raleigh sailed in 1595 to discover for England this El Dorado, believed to lie somewhere between the Amazon and the Orinoco rivers. He returned with a report of the ‘large and beautiful empire of Guiana’ and drew a map of it showing the large lake of Manoa and, at its western end, the city of Manoa, called by the Spaniards El Dorado. Raleigh also described tribes with their heads in their breasts, the anthropophagi, and Amazonian warrior women. These were duly depicted when Jodocus Hondius made an engraved version of Raleigh’s map for publication in Amsterdam in 1599.

In Gulliver’s Travels, which was first published in 1726; Jonathan Swift satirized the geographical errors which had become established features of maps. Thus, in 1703, Gulliver discovers the bulbous peninsula of Brobdingnag on the coast of California, which for many years had been shown on maps as an island rather than the peninsula that it really is. Yet these fictions were regarded as reality in their time and provided the bases for very real historical events.

If Columbus had known the truth, he would not have set sail in 1492 to discover the western passage from Europe to Asia. If Raleigh had known the truth he would not have undertaken the last, disastrous voyage to South America in search of the gold of El Dorado that led to his execution on Tower Hill in 1618.

Cartographic fantasies often have a grain of truth in them, but even when they have lacked it, they merit more than modern ridicule.