Dodgy Cartographers

 

I believed modern maps to be highly accurate, what with satellites and everything, and surely cartographers are precise and meticulous people, but in reality our maps are full of deliberate mistakes, distortions, jokes, errors, lies, vandalism and flights of fancy.

Firstly, maps are fundamentally doomed to be wrong because there is no single perspective from which to view the Earth - our social and political biases just keep on shining through.  Sixteenth century Europeans were happiest with a world view that inflated their countries to centre position at the top of the world, while the 1623 Chinese-Globe, made for the Emperor, exaggerated the size of China and positioned it in the middle of the world surrounded by small, off-shore islands. 

These days climate scientists are looking closely at Arctic maps but when Geradus Mercator tried to map the Arctic he basically made it up. The Septentrionalium Terrarium (published 1606) includes magnet stones, giant whirlpools and other farfetched guesses. We know very well that the Mercator projection of the world is completely distorted but hey ho, we still use it anyway.



For millennia humans have consulted maps, and identified human and physical features, to let us know where an exact location is and how to get there.  But sometimes “there” doesn’t exist.  The Mountains of Kong, a non-existent mountain range, used to stretch across the entire continent of Africa.  The range was “discovered” by Mungo Park in 1798.  Various 19th century explorers included the mountain range on maps that they produced after exploring the area! It is believed that the Mountains of Kong were shown on 40 maps between 1798 and 1898 when Louis Gustave Binger revealed the whole thing to be fake.  They even appeared in the index of Goode’s World Atlas in 1995.  Oops.  The real-life Kong Hills are a band of high-ish ground with summits no more than 700 feet above the level of the surrounding country.

Captain Cook incorrectly charted the fictitious Sandy Island, New Caledonia in 1774.   It was only removed from hydrographic charts in 1974 but gained attention in 2012 when an Australian research ship “undiscovered” it again.  It was hastily removed from many maps including those of the National Geographic Society and Google Maps but it still reappears, from time to time, on new maps copied from older ones.

There is a suggestion that Google Earth included Sandy Island as a "trap street" equivalent.   Trap streets are fictional or distorted streets (eg Oxygen Street in Edinburgh), or other features, deliberately added to a map by a cartographer to catch or trap anyone copying their work.  The Geographers’ A-Z Map Company have claimed that there are about one hundred trap streets included in the London A-Z Street atlas.  In Alexandria Drafting Co. v. Amsterdam (1997) it was ruled that “the existence, or non-existence, of a road is a non-copyrightable fact.”  Even so, in 2001, the AA paid the Ordnance Survey a £20 million settlement after it was caught plagiarising maps to produce travel guides. 

Swiss cartographers have a reputation for topographical precision (it’s probably important in a country with so many mountains) but for decades Swiss cartographers have been hiding illustrations in the country’s official maps.  Maps of remote regions have included a man’s face, a naked woman (she remained hidden for almost 60 years), a hiker, a fish, and a marmot.  These are not mistakes, these are illustrations inserted by mischievous mapmakers at Swisstopo.  Apparently most of the cartographers have timed their drawings to coincide with their retirement! 



Since I started researching this blog the internet has been spying on me.  It thinks I would like “The Phantom Atlas” by Edward Brooke-Hitching.  It is probably right!

Jeanie 09/11/20

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