Old maps where Florida is a straight line, why does this keep showing up?

I was flipping through a 1780 atlas at a library sale last Saturday and saw Florida drawn as a perfect rectangle. Then I found the same mistake on a 1795 map someone posted here last week. It makes me wonder if cartographers just copied each other's errors for decades without checking the coastline. Does anyone know when mapmakers finally fixed that shape for good?

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emmafisher22d ago

Bought a 1700s map of the Caribbean at a flea market a few years back. Same issue, Cuba was drawn way too fat and Florida looked like a door. Turns out those early surveyors worked from older charts, not new measurements. They trusted each other way too much. It took actual ships mapping the Gulf coast in the early 1800s to fix the shape for good. Even then, some publishers kept using the old plates for another 20 years to save money.