Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is from the book On the Map: A Mind-expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks by Simon Garfield.

We are now sure—because we have seen it on maps—that California is firmly attached to Oregon, Arizona and Nevada. Even south of San Diego, when it eventually becomes the Mexican state of Baja California, it is firmly hitched to the mainland. But in 1622, something untoward happened. After eighty-one years officially attached to a huge landmass, California drifted free. It wasn't a radical act of political will, nor a single mistake (a slip of an engraver, perhaps), but a sustained act of cartographic misjudgment. Stranger still, the error continued to appear on maps long after navigators had tried to sail entirely around it and—with what must have been a sense of utter bafflement—failed.

The name California first appeared on a map in 1541. It was drawn as part of Mexico by Domingo del Castillo—a pilot on an expedition by Hernando de Alarcon—and it is shown as a peninsula and labeled. Its first appearance on a printed map occurred in 1562, when the Spanish pilot and instrument maker Diego Gutierrez again wrote its name at the tip of a peninsula, a very minor detail on a busy and very beautiful engraving of the New World. The map, the largest then made of the region at 107 x 104 cm, may have been engraved after Gutierrez's death by Hieronymus Cock, an artist who clearly took great delight in imaginative trappings: huge ships and legends populate its seas, with Poseidon driving horses on a seaworthy chariot, and a huge gorilla-type creature breaking the waves while it dines on a fish.

California subsequently appeared attached to the mainland for sixty years. And then off it floated into the Pacific, where it remained a cartographic island for more than two centuries.

Its first known insular appearance occurred in 1622, on an inset on a title page of a Spanish volume entitled Historia General. Two years later it was drifting free, bounded by the Mar Vermeio and Mar Del Zur on a Dutch map by Abraham Goos. But it received its most prominent currency on a London map of 1625 entitled "The North Part of America." This accompanied an article about the search for the Northwest Passage by the mathematician Henry Briggs. He supplemented the great untracked northerly spaces toward the Arctic with text describing the wonders of his map. "Conteyning Newfoundland, new Eng/land, Virginia, Florida, New Spaine... and upon ye West the large and goodly lland/ of California." On the eastern seaboard both Plymouth and Cape Cod are placed in Massachusetts, but not yet Boston.

The misconception persisted for decades. It was the seventeenth century's forerunner to a mistake on Wikipedia—doomed to be repeated in a thousand school essays until a bright spark noticed it and dared to make amends. Compiling a paper for the California Map Society in 1995, Glen Mclaughlin and Nancy H. Mayo catalogued 249 separate maps (not including world maps) which cast the Golden State adrift. Their names carry bold assertions, with no wiggle room: "A New and Most Exact map of America" claimed one, while another promised "America drawn from the latest and best Observations." Between 1650 and 1657, the French historian Nicolas Sanson published several maps that showed California as an island, and their translations into Dutch and German ensured that they superseded Briggs as the most influential mythmakers for half a century. But they also promoted newer, truer discoveries, including the first cartographic depiction of all five Great Lakes.

Even when new maps were published showing California attached to the mainland, the island kept on appearing. In the end, though, it was killed off by a royal decree issue ed by Ferdinand VII of Spain in 1747, which denied the possibility of this Northwest Passage with the reasonably clear statement: "California is not an Island." Yet news traveled slowly. California appeared as an island on a map made in Japan as late as 1865.

And how did it all begin? The cartographical point zero has been tracked to a Carmelite friar named Antonio de la Acension who sailed with Sebastian Vizcaino along the West Coast in 1602-3 and kept a journal. Two decades later he is believed to have mapped his trip on paper, which featured California as an island nation. The map was sent to Spain, but the ship on which it traveled was captured by the Dutch, and it ended its journey in Amsterdam. In 1622, Henry Briggs wrote of seeing this map of California in London. And shortly afterward, the map drawn from the one "taken by Hollanders" was set in copper and began its journey through the world.

"Pocket Map: California as an Island", copyright @2013 by Simon Garfield, from ON THE MAP: A MIND EXPANDING EXPLORATION OF THE WAY THE WORLD LOOKS by Simon Garfield. Used by permission of Gotham Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.