Marooned I gaze, marooned I climb,
Pouring seas to bottomless Time
Whose vaporous chasm will not float
Knotted raft or hollowed boat:
Horizon's brink
Should stretch, I think,
With height, and I, with strides immense,
Climb easily into continents.
(Allen Curnow, Fantasy on a Hillside)
Before the age of discovery, maps weren’t just literal depictions of the earth. They were also replete with lessons in history, morality, and geography. The known world mixed with its biblical genealogy, with speculative lands and faded myths on its periphery.
A map of Africa might depict the figure of Prester John, a mythological King said to rule over a Christian nation bordered on all sides by Pagans. This was a distant historical memory of the Ethiopians, but it was also a retelling and reassurance of a Christian story about the purpose and eventual outcome of the universe, namely that the recrudescent faithful will one day triumph against their religious enemies.
As journeys abroad brought Europeans into sustained contact with the rest of the world, a map’s technical precision superseded any other literary or artistic functions. Blank spaces were filled in. Mistakes were erased. The dream-like border-realms were pushed further and further back into the receding Terra Incognita, until they disappeared altogether.
Beyond the hypnagogic conflation of myth with reality, made-up places could just as easily have been the result of cartographers taking pub-talk at face values. Maybe an adventurer, keen for riches and glory, was drumming up support for another expedition to some real or imagined El Dorado, the reputed city of gold located somewhere in the jungles of America.
Otherwise, they might be errors in transcription, either a mistake in the copying of a map by hand, or two names for the same place being misunderstood as two separate places. Once the doppelganger had been put to paper, the fact of being on a map would give its existence a false authority. It might be uncritically copied by another mapmaker, who draws it in a slightly different position, at which point it takes on its own existence. This is one possible explanation for Grocland, a probable double-up of Greenland later conflated with one of the many islands in Arctic Canada.
From the 1800s onwards most of the places that turned out not to exist were nautical mirages mistaken for land. When a layer of warm air rests over a layer of cold air, the light travelling through them is sometimes refracted. This phenomenon, known as the Fata Morgana, distorts the appearance of faraway boats or icebergs, which might seem to be masses of land. This is probably what happened in the case of Dougherty Island.
For understandable reasons, most of the information in this book draws upon European discoveries and accounts. Brooke-Hitching does make mention of the medieval Arab and Asian chronicles—themselves a wealth of cartological gold—and I would have liked to have seen more about them. As it stands, The Phantom Atlas is a fun little book about a fascinating topic. You can spend a whole day just poring over its old, gorgeous maps.