I kept insisting old maps with 'California as an island' were fake

Some guy on this sub told me the 1625 map of California being an island was a real mistake cartographers made. I argued with him for an hour saying it was a modern joke map. Turns out he was right, explorers really thought it was separate from North America for decades. Has anyone else been humbled by a wrong map they thought was obviously fake?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_nina1mo ago

The old Piri Reis map got me good once... thought it was some internet hoax showing Antarctica without ice, but nope, it's a real 16th century thing that people still argue about. What finally helped was just looking at how mapmaking worked back then with explorers sharing rumors and bad measurements. Once I checked the sources instead of my gut feeling, it all made more sense. Now I try to look up at least one real historical source before calling something fake.

spencer1991mo ago

The Mercator projection thing got me too. Turns out the whole "ancient map shows Antarctica" claim is just people not understanding how compass bearings and portolan charts work. I spent an afternoon reading about how Ottoman sailors compiled those maps from captured Portuguese charts and Greek manuscripts. Once you see the original sources it's pretty obvious the southern landmass is just South America stretched out by bad math.