FAULT - Maphead - page 27

Friends thought that the Netherlands was where Peter Pan lived, and Bart Simpson was
once surprised to discover the large Southern Hemisphere country of “Rand McNally” on
his sister Lisa's globe.
Snickering at the cartographically cloddish dates back centuries. You'd think that, in
the more provincial 1600s, everyone would have been a little hazy on geography, but that
didn't prevent the French educator Denis Martineau du Plessis from filling the preface of
his 1700 book Nouvelle Géographie with Joey Tribbiani-worthy stories of map woe. He
recounts a (probably apocryphal) tale of the English ambassador to Rome in 1343, who
caughtwindofthefactthatthepopehadgivenawaythe“fortunateislands”(theCanaryIs-
lands were then called the “Islas Fortunatas”) to the Count de Clermont. Assuming that the
world's only truly fortunate islands were the British Isles, the outraged ambassador rushed
back to London to tell the king that some French count was taking over England! Mak-
ing fun of the English was a popular French pastime, then as now, but du Plessis takes
some shots at his own countrymen as well, citing French authorities who wondered which
river the Pont Euxine crossed (“Pont Euxine” was an ancient name for the Black Sea, not
a bridge) and assumed that Moors came from Morea (another name for Peloponnesia, in
Greece). *
Jokes like these never would have been comic tropes if there weren't some truth behind
them, of course. Real government officials, and not just apocryphal Renaissance-era am-
bassadors, make geographical gaffes all the time. In his autobiography, Henry Kissinger
told the story of the prime minister of Mauritius's goodwill visit to Washington in 1970.
Somehow the confused State Department had briefed the president to meet not with the
leader of Mauritius, a tiny tropical island in the Indian Ocean, but of Mauritania, a vast
Saharan nation that had recently cut off diplomatic relations with the United States. This
improbable I Love Lucy setup led to the comic hijinks you might expect: President Richard
Nixon led off the discussion by suggesting that the prime minister of a valued American
ally restore diplomatic relations with the United States! That way, he said, he could offer
American expertise with dry farming. The flummoxed Mauritian, hailing as he did from a
lush jungle nation, had little interest in desert farming, so he tried to change the subject,
asking Nixon about a space tracking station the United States operated in his country. The
bewildered Nixon scrawled something down on a yellow legal pad and handed it to Kis-
singer. The note read, “Why the hell do we have a space tracking station in a country with
which we don't have diplomatic relations?”
During the 2008 presidential race, both campaigns dealt with elementary school-level
geography blunders that could have come from the pen of any sitcom hack. At a rally in
Beaverton, Oregon, Barack Obama told the crowd, “ Over the last fifteen months, we've
traveled to every corner of the United States. I've now been in fifty-seven states. Just one
left to go.” (He was apparently channeling the Friends episode in which Joey crowns him-