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By Root 927 0

in the Altea booth, my eye is immediately drawn to the parts that aren’t quite right, the way you might find yourself awkwardly unable, in conversation, to stop staring at a wart or a scar. Australia is connected to New Guinea and then extends southward to the pole, forming a landmass larger than Asia that the mapmaker called “Terra Australis Incognita.” A broad, imaginary swath through Canada, the so-called Strait of Anian, provides a northerly route from the Atlantic to Asia, the mythical “Northwest Passage” that many Europeans died trying to find.

But to the collector, these aren’t warts. Time has freed antique maps from the shackles of serving as reference objects, so their mistakes are lovingly prized by collectors, the way a printing error can add a zero or two to a stamp’s value. Dealers’ catalogs carefully enumerate these little quirks as major selling points. “California appears an island,” reads Altea’s description of a neighboring New World map.* Or “Australia is connected to Tasmania,” or “the Great Lakes are open-ended to the west.” I’m a little alarmed to find that, if you go by most eighteenth-century French maps, my Seattle home is underwater, part of a vast “Bay of the West” that the Pacific Ocean has apparently carved out of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, British Columbia, and Alberta.

Why pay more for a map that’s wrong? Some of it is sheer novelty value: a map where California is floating in the middle of the Pacific makes a great conversation piece in an L.A. living room. But it’s also a charming memento of human ignorance and imperfection. It reminds us that maps are never completely reliable, should never be mistaken for the actual territory. Once drawn on one map, a fanciful invention like the “Bay of the West” would propagate through decades of later maps like a virus, sometimes appearing long after actual exploration had corrected the original goof. The tiny sickle-shaped island of Mayda first appeared on sixteenth-century maps just southwest of Ireland; as the oceans were more carefully charted, it gradually moved westward, toward Bermuda. Remarkably, it stuck around for four hundred years, making its final appearance on a Rand McNally map of 1906.* The Mountains of Kong, an imaginary range in western Africa, appeared in Goode’s World Atlas as late as 1995!

Jean Janvier included the “Baye de l’Ouest” on his 1782 map of North America. The Pacific Northwest may be wet, but it’s not that wet.

Mayda’s odd westward drift isn’t unusual in the annals of map errata. The crazily awesome stuff on old maps always gets pushed to the edge of the paper as time goes on. The Garden of Eden started out in Asia Minor and kept drifting over the horizon until finally it landed outside the map altogether. The fabled Seven Cities of Gold were originally believed to sit on an island in the North Atlantic,* before being relocated to the American plains and finally winding up in the Southwest. You have to admire the dogged confidence of the mapmaker, never daunted by actual real-world evidence. “Okay, so nobody who goes to Turkey has managed to find Eden where we drew it on the last map. Well, it’s got to be over there somewhere . . . hey, how about Armenia? Are you guys cool with Armenia? All righty, then.” It’s easy to see this process as a metaphor for almighty reason sweeping superstition away from the center of human thought into the dustbin of history—or, if you’re a little more sentimental, for the tragedy of lost dreams and invention. According to that school of thought, Mayda’s final winking out of the North Atlantic in 1906 would be the equivalent of a child’s disillusionment at recognizing Daddy under Santa’s beard or Tinkerbell’s light fading because the audience refuses to applaud. In the case of the Seven Cities of Gold—an ideal ever receding just past the frontier of civilization until it comes to rest in the bleakest, least hospitable bit of the desert—you could even draw a parallel with the endless relocations of native people as Europeans advanced across the globe.

Perhaps these old maps seem to have