Alex Burghart

Atlas shrugs

Three new atlases of strange, improbable places show that, even with GPS, islands have a weird habit of appearing and disappearing

In his Forward Prize-winning collection of 2014, A Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, Kei Miller’s hero describes his craft thus: ‘My job is to imagine the widening/ of the unfamiliar and also/ the widening ache of it;/ to anticipate the ironic/ question: how did we find/ ourselves here.’ This bringing of the unfamiliar into scope looms large in three new collections of cartographic curiosities which tell us about places that never were, places we’ve never been and places we will never go to.

Edward Brooke-Hitching’s beautifully illustrated The Phantom Atlas presents the stories of over 50 locations that unwarrantedly found their way on to maps. In many cases these ‘places’ were the fault of misrecording and misreporting, the progeny of the weary confusion of those far from home. Having fixed themselves in one map, they were replicated and disseminated until such time as they were — like learned theorems — disproved. What is most remarkable is the sheer length of time for which some errors persisted. It might be expected that Edwardian explorers sent telegraphs proclaiming the anti-discovery of islands charted centuries earlier. It is, however, a little brain-boggling that the island of Bermeja (supposedly off the north coast of the Yucatán peninsula) was only finally eliminated from maps in 2009.

Brooke-Hitching’s book is, in part, an excursion into the minds of men imagining an as yet uncharted world — one in which Australia might have a large central sea — or reporting the confused rumours of earlier travellers. The medieval Icelandic Book of Settlements, the Landnámabók, recounted how a tenth-century explorer, Ari Marsson, had a ship which was driven by a tempest to a place near Vinland, which he called Greater Ireland. Stories of this island spread and somehow caused it to appear in the works of the 12th-century Arab geographer, Muhammad al-Idrisi.

Among Brooke-Hitching’s subjects is a detailed dive into the world of the Nuremberg Chronicle Map.

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