Maps used to have blank spots. California used to be drawn as an island. The Mercator projection makes Greenland look fat. One of the biggest and strangest cartographic errors of all time, though, has to be the Mountains of Kong, a nonexistent continent-spanning mountain range that Europeans kept putting on African maps all the way until the late 1800s.

Related Links:

Read the entirety of Jonathan Swift’s On Poetry: A Rhapsody

A Google Map of Mungo Park’s African travels.

James Rennel’s map showing the Mountains of Kong.

“From the Best Authorities: The Mountains of Kong in West Africa” by Thomas J. Bassett and Philip W. Porter