The Map Myths Blog

When Gerardus Mercator published his world map in 1569 using a radical new projection, he included a new archipelago in the Arctic, just north of the Norwegian mainland and south of the ‘land of pygmies’.

The scene that greeted Russian fishermen inside two wooden ships they had discovered along the coast of the Kola Peninsula in 1555 was wholly unexpected: the entire crew were dead, but seemingly preserved in an eerie, suspended animation.

In 1564, if you wanted to know what Africa looked like, Giacomo Gastaldi's 8-sheet masterpiece was your best bet.

Draw a line on a map, and humanity will inevitably find a way to make it complicated.

If you eat this whale, then expect to die immediately.

It was the Caribbean’s most persistent phantom.

One bored pensioner's vision for the unexplored interior of Australia - a country he'd never actually visited - doomed numerous expeditions during the 19th century.

For over 125 years, the elusive Sannikov Land foiled explorers, directed the funding of the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences, and eventually morphed into a cinematic epic.

During the search for a phantom land near Greenland that could settle the debate over who really first reached the North Pole, one man never returned from the ice.

Imagine a mountain range so elusive that for nearly two thousand years, half the world thought it was a fairy tale.

This is a story of how one piece of flawed journalism published in London snowballed a myth that defined the geography of northwest America on over 200 historic maps.

On a building in Bremen, Germany, a large carving of two sailors meeting a Native American can be found.

Within the collective imagination of the sixteenth century, enormous man-eating monsters commanded the oceans.

When the discovery of the Vinland Map was announced to the world in 1965, it was presented as a genuine 15th-century mappa mundi, a world map that contained a truly sensational detail: a landmass southwest of Greenland, clearly labelled “Vinlanda Insula”.

The captivating dream of El Dorado, a mythical city of gold somewhere in the jungles of South America, ignited the imaginations and greed of European explorers for centuries.

For centuries, Africa’s third-longest waterway appeared on European maps flowing in directions counter to reality.

Despite the 20th-century trajectory towards ever-greater precision, mapping mistakes continue to endure through to the present day.

The US Polaris Expedition was beset by dissent, sabotage, and even accusations of murder of its leader.

Geographical facts intertwine with centuries-old myths in Mercator's 1595 map of the Arctic.

Two hundred years ago, an American captain reported phantom islands and coastlines that confused maps for decades.

Buried within an ancient Chinese text lies the tale of an epic voyage in the 5th century AD.