10 Really Amazing Maps

I was recently asked about what, for me, are the most enigmatic maps in history. It’s hard to choose, there are hundreds of examples, and usually the same ones are always mentioned: the map of Piri Reis, or the Vinland map, or very old jewels such as the Tabula Peutingeriana. The question made me think about this, but as the subject of the “enigmatic maps” is very worn out, I have thought about something a little different. Here are my 10 favorite maps out of all the ones I’ve written about in the last 15 years. It’s a subjective selection, of course, but what I’m sure of is that these chosen maps are really amazing. Here we go…

#1: Map drawn by John Cary in 1805 for Cary’s New Universal Atlas (Princeton University Library). What stands out on this map is something that shouldn’t be there. A large mountain range runs through central Africa, from west to east. It does not exist in the real world and yet it was drawn on many maps in the 18th and 19th centuries. Known as the Mountains of Kong , they are one of the most famous mapping errors, along with the Mountains of the Moon, imaginary mountains where the River Nile was supposed to be born.

#2: In the variegated world of cartographic projections there are all kinds of strange proposals. One of my favourites is Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion projection, which is becoming more and more popular. But my favorite is Athelstan Frederick Spilhaus’s proposal to create a projection that shows the whole oceans as a continuum. The oceanic waters form a unit that tends to be forgotten in conventional maps, so Spilhaus created this projection to show how all the water masses of the oceans are connected (Maps of the Whole World Ocean. Athelstan F. Spilhaus. Geographical Review. Vol. 32, №3. Jul. 1942, pp. 431–435).

#3: Map of California drawn around 1650 and conserved in the Library of Congress of the United States. It is well known, a cartographic error that appeared described in many maps of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Along with California depicted as an island, many maps imagine a large inland ocean in the American continent, occupying what is now much of the United States and southern Canada.

#4: Another fascinating mapping error. This is a colored version of a 19th century map showing a sea occupying large areas of the Australian hinterland. This inland sea, connected to the Indian Ocean by an imposing river, was imagined by Thomas J. Maslen in 1828. (State Library of New South Wales).

#5: It is not the first known map of marine currents, but it is one of the most visually curious of the time. It is a representation of ocean currents created in 1685 by the German Eberhard Werner Happel.