ELEVATION - Maphead - page 62

it stuck around for four hundred years, making its final appearance on a Rand McNally
map of 1906. * The Mountains of Kong , an imaginary range in western Africa, appeared in
Goode's World Atlas as late as 1995!
Jean Janvier included the “Baye de l'Ouest” on his 1782 map of North America. The Pa-
cific Northwest may be wet, but it's not that wet.
Mayda's odd westward drift isn't unusual in the annals of map errata. The crazily awe-
some stuff on old maps always gets pushed to the edge of the paper as time goes on. The
Garden of Eden started out in Asia Minor and kept drifting over the horizon until finally
it landed outside the map altogether. The fabled Seven Cities of Gold were originally be-
lieved to sit on an island in the North Atlantic, * before being relocated to the American
plains and finally winding up in the Southwest. You have to admire the dogged confiden-
ce of the mapmaker, never daunted by actual real-world evidence. “Okay, so nobody who
goestoTurkeyhasmanagedtofindEdenwherewedrewitonthelastmap.Well,it'sgotto
be over there somewhere . . . hey, how about Armenia? Are you guys cool with Armenia?
All righty, then.” It's easy to see this process as a metaphor for almighty reason sweep-
ing superstition away from the center of human thought into the dustbin of history—or, if
you're a little more sentimental, for the tragedy of lost dreams and invention. According
to that school of thought, Mayda's final winking out of the North Atlantic in 1906 would
be the equivalent of a child's disillusionment at recognizing Daddy under Santa's beard or
Tinkerbell's light fading because the audience refuses to applaud. In the case of the Seven
Cities of Gold—an ideal ever receding just past the frontier of civilization until it comes to