My 1870 map of Africa showed a giant lake that never existed

A buddy swore the 'Lake of Kong' was just a mythical cartographer mistake from old explorers. I spent 2 hours last night cross-referencing it with satellite data and he was dead right. Anyone else find imaginary geography on century-old maps?

2 comments

2 Comments

skylerg171mo ago

Honestly, yeah, I found this old 1850s map of the Pacific Northwest that showed a whole mountain range where there's basically just flat farmland now. Ngl, I spent a solid afternoon comparing it to modern topo maps and it was wild how wrong the old stuff was. Some cartographer just drew in a bunch of peaks that never existed, probably based on some explorer's drunken notes. Tbh, it makes you wonder how many other 'discoveries' were total fiction back then. The Lake of Kong thing sounds exactly like the kind of fake geography that got passed around for decades.

oliver5231mo ago

Bro I've made the exact same mistake but with a 1720 map of SE Asia that showed this massive island chain called "Phantom Islands" off Vietnam. Spent a whole evening convincing myself my ancestors found some lost archipelago, then realized it was just a cartographer's fever dream from misheard sailor stories. My wife still brings it up whenever I talk about "historical discoveries." Peak old map energy right there.