Hilariously Wrong Historic Maps

Today’s maps are far from perfect. But, still, it’s safe to say we’ve come a very long way.

Over the centuries, some cartographers have gotten the world so wrong it’s downright comical — like, for instance, believing Earth was shaped like a roulette table and California was its own island. 

Grab your compass (we mean the one in your smartphone, of course), and let’s set sail to explore mapmaking’s biggest blunders, lies and mysteries.

Professor Orlando Ferguson wanted to disprove a newly popular theory that the earth was shaped like a globe. In the process, he showed the world looking like a giant roulette table. He also threw in some angels, a fireball and a self-portrait for good measure. Then he gave it a howler of a name: “Square and Stationary Earth.”

Spoiler alert: It is neither of these things.  

A year after Columbus sailed the ocean blue, Hartmann Schedel created “The Nuremberg Chronicle,” an illustrated history of the world going all the way back to biblical times. 

In an accompanying map, he taught society about the types of people who existed in distant parts of the world. These included a six-armed man, a dog-headed man and, of course, a cyclops. There’s also a bunch of faces in the border, blowing what we can only imagine is more hot air. 

According to Irish lore, Saint Brenden was a 6th-century monk who sailed the Atlantic while fending off dangerous demons and sea creatures. In one of the most famous stories, he lands on an island that turns out to be a whale and heroically dives off the creature before it carries him away. Hey, we didn’t write this stuff. 

Brenden was so revered that an island was named after him. It remained a mainstay on maps through the 17th century, despite never existing.

The image here shows Brendan in a golden robe, kicking it near his made-up isle. 

Over the years, Californians have joked about wanting to break away from the United States and form an independent country. But did you know that the Golden State was once depicted as an actual island?

In the early 1500s, Spanish author Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo described a “mythical island of California” is his adventure-romance novel, “Las Sergas de Esplandián.” Inspired by the book, explorers such as Hernán Cortés and Francisco de Ulloa investigated this new territory. 

Though they pointed out California was actually a peninsula, Europeans denied their claims and continued to show the state as an island on over 700 maps for the next two centuries. The map shown here was made by Johannes Vingboons circa 1650.