Best Of: The Map Men On Missing Islands And The Meaning Of Mistakes

0:07Last year, Americans spent more than 300 billion minutes on navigation apps such as Waze or Google Maps. The GPS systems in our pockets have come a long way from the first known map, carved into a mammoth tusk 30 ,000 or so years ago. But even with satellites tracking us and the ever-changing Earth from the skies, digital maps aren't fact. Errors show up, a continuation of a phenomenon as old as maps themselves. That's the focus of a new book by comedians and YouTube's Mapmen, Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper Jones. Their series has more than a million subscribers and explores the weird and wonderful corners of cartography.

0:46Many years ago, being an explorer was the best job in the world. The perks were obvious. Months at sea, far from loved ones, with a good chance you might starve to death. But these days, there's no such thing as an explorer. And what do you want to be when you grow up? An explorer! Well, you can't, because of Google Earth. Satellite technology was the death of discovery, as new aerial images could be used to perfectly map every inch of terror— Hang on, what was that? What was what? Go back a bit. But it's just ocean. There, that black smudge. Huh. Something in the sea has been censored. Oh, my mistake.

1:15This is the pre-2012 Google Map. In the up-to-date one, it's just empty ocean. Wait, that's an even bigger mystery. The Phantom Island of Sandy Island appeared on Google Maps until 2012, when Australian scientists sailed to its supposed location and found only open ocean. Mistakes on maps were sometimes intentional, sometimes not, but every single one tells a bigger story. How and why did it get there? What does it reveal about the creator of the map and the world around them? We get into it after the break. I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A Podcast. Stay with us. We've got a lot to get to.

1:56Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones join us now from Leeds, England. Their new book is called This Way Up, When Maps Go Wrong and Why It Matters. Hi, Jay. Hi, Mark. Welcome to the program. Hi, Jen. Hello there. Thank you very much for having us on. So, Jay, I want to dig more into that first example. Tell us more about so-called Phantom Islands and how at least one managed to remain on trusted maps until the 2010s. So Phantom Islands go back hundreds of years. So back when cartography was a lot more guesswork than it is now, it was very common to see an island that wasn't there. And the reasons for this, sometimes it was because the explorer thought they were somewhere else when they saw the island, or sometimes they knew exactly where they were, but they saw a thing that wasn't an island and thought it was.

2:37The fascinating case about Sandy Island is that it was discovered, well, discovered is the wrong word because it wasn't really there, but it was found by Captain Cook. And amazingly, it stayed on maps until as recently as 2012. It just goes to show how you can't trust even the most modern and most digital of maps. Well, you're both comedians, but researching and talking about maps has become the focus of your work. And you're not the only ones who are really into this topic. We got this message from Scout in Ann Arbor, Michigan. My family has had this schoolhouse-like map where there's been multiple kinds and you can pull them down.

3:10I have very vivid memories of it being in the hallway. It's got the United States, the world, and Alaska, which were from Nevada, so I'm not sure how it was there. But I have vivid memories of my cousins pointing to Iraq and telling me about the Iraq War when I was like five and really didn't understand what was happening. But that map is now in my and my husband's hallway. And we recently just found a municipal map of the city of Ann Arbor that was almost the exact same size. And we were able to add to the role. I love maps and it's becoming really one of my most treasured items that I have. Scout, thanks for that message.

3:45Mark, what's at the core of your fascination with maps? Well, I really, that story really resonates with me because I think I got into maps at a very young age. I actually grew up the first five, six years of my life. I've lived in Australia and then I moved over to the UK. But my parents kept this enormous laminate map of Australia when we moved over. And I just used to spend all my time pining for a hot country and looking at it and being like, that's where I used to live. I want to go back there. And it's probably started my love affair with with maps and the perspective that they give you.

4:18But I think making our YouTube series Map Men, you know, I suppose on the face of it, it sounds quite niche, you know, videos about maps and the stories of cartography. But what we have discovered doing it is there's quite a lot of people out there who really love maps. And I think part of that is that they have obviously a practical function and a utility. So everybody has used them, probably studied how to use them a little bit at school and that sort of thing. But also they have this rich aesthetic quality. they make you want to put it up on your wall to, you know, if you see one on a wall, wherever, you know, whatever kind of building you might be in a home, you're drawn to it.

4:55You want to go over and study it. You want to see what it's showing you, what it's telling you, you know, what's behind it. And it does just give you that extraordinary perspective. So yeah, we found we're not alone. And there's plenty of other map geeks and map nerds out there like us, which is lovely. Jay, what about you? When did you fall in love with maps and cartography? very similar story when i was a teenager i genuinely used to leaf through uh the london a to z the atlas of london that everyone had in the glove box of their car for entertainment and i think there's something about the fact that nowadays almost everyone uh navigates by using a gps it means that maps have now become something that you don't look at when you're lost and annoyed you look at maps more now than ever for fun there's something that is almost it's almost like we've gone full circle and maps have now become decorative, which of course is what their original function was for thousands of years before we had accurate satellite technology.

5:46They were just something that kings used to put on the wall so that they could see what they were king of. I'm wondering whether you all find a sense of mystery in map. I'm remembering being a girl. We would take these family road trips and drive from like Michigan to Florida. And my dad used paper maps because we didn't have GPS back then. And watching him read the map and chart out our pathway south, it was so mysterious to me. It just looked like a collection of lines and squiggles, but he could make sense of it. Mark, what kind of mystery have you found in the world of maps? Well, they just, they make you want to go to all the places that suddenly are revealed to you.

6:27I think it's that they're real, they're real. The key to their success is that they give you this extraordinary perspective that you just cannot get any other way. You know, most of the time we're looking something between about eight feet in front of us. And if we're lucky, we've got a good view, maybe 10 kilometers. And then you go up in like an aeroplane, right? And you get this extraordinary view and it sort of blows your mind the first time you ever do that, if you're lucky enough to do that. And maps are the shortcut to that. You just get this zoomed out, small scale perspective of space that you obviously never get when we're just looking across a horizontal plane in our day-to-day lives.

7:02And that is just such a special thing. It makes you sort of feel at once very, very small and very, very powerful somehow. Well, your book isn't just about mistakes on maps. It's also about controversy. So let's zoom in on the Shetland Islands. Now, this is an archipelago north of Scotland. And on maps of the UK, they were often shown in a little box to the side, similar to how you might see Hawaii or Alaska on a map of the U.S. But the Shetland mapping requirement passed into law in 2018, and it changed that. Mark, what is that law and why did it pass? Yeah, well, so that's right. So the Shetland Islands are a very long way away from the mainland of Scotland.

7:42And the Shetlanders were getting pretty sick of the fact that on every map of the United Kingdom, it was very rare to show the Shetlanders in their true geographical location all the way across that sea instead cartographers probably quite understandably were keen on pulling them down a little bit nearer the mainland and putting them in a little inset box just like you describe just to make the whole because otherwise you have to zoom out on the map and everything else that you wanted to show on it becomes a little bit smaller but Shetlanders were becoming so sick of this as you say there was a Scottish mapping requirement put into law in 2018 which essentially said that all maps of Scotland produced by the Scottish Parliament and government and state needed to show Shetland in their true location.

8:29So that was a little win there for the Shetlanders. But, you know, it did kick off a little storm in the cartography world because you had other people stepping in saying, no, we need to put it in a box. Sometimes there are important reasons why we do so. But you can also understand why maybe they had a little bit of an axe to grind with that one. Now, your YouTube series, Mapman, it covers all corners of the cartography world, but your new book focuses on when maps go wrong. Jay, what draws you to these moments of confusion or controversy? I think it's because when people look at maps, they assume that they are representations of the world as it truthfully is.

9:03And therefore, when there's a mistake on a map, it makes it all the more fascinating. And in the same way that if you put a typo on something, people can't wait to tell you online that you've made a mistake. If you put a mistake on a map, it creates so much buzz. People love to tell you when a map is wrong. So Mark and I set about the challenge of finding the best examples from around the world and from across history of map mistakes, such as that time Ikea opened their first new store in New Zealand, and then just one month earlier published a great big decorative colorful map to go on the wall with New Zealand missing.

9:35So we thought, what's the story there? Is it possible they did it on purpose for publicity? So we explored that story and plenty more in the book. Well, we heard from Donald in Las Vegas, Nevada, who says, for an excellent treatment of the misuse of cartography for political ends, I recommend the book How to Lie with Maps. While there have been great strides in addressing issues, we still have misleading distortions, such as the African continent being shown much smaller than it is. While in Australia, I was amused at maps showing a world projection with Australia at its centre. How did the two of you go about researching when maps go wrong, Mark?

10:12Well, the first thing we did is we read How to Lie with Maps. It's a brilliant book by an American geographer called Mark Monmonier, and I think the first two pages feature two quotes from that book, including not only is it easy to lie with maps, it is essential, which is an often quoted line now in cartography books, but it's a brilliant line. You just, you cannot make a map without lying. So how we said about it, I mean, you know, we had to do a lot of reading. Obviously we wanted to put a lot of research into it. We wanted to find facts that would feel surprising and new. But in keeping with the stuff we make on YouTube, we also wanted to have some quite quirky details in there, some things that felt like they may be, maybe they're not the most important thing in the world, but they will want you to go, no way.

10:58And so, yeah, a lot of reading. I mean, we divided it up. Jay and I wrote different chapters. We sort of took stories that grabbed each of us, talked about how we would approach them and the kind of story they would reveal. And then we went away and did that work individually, I guess. And then we sort of marked each other's homework, dived in, sort of added bits, crossed bits out and slowly pulled the thing together. And yeah, it's been so much fun. Yeah, Jay? I think the most fun thing was that it's the kind of research that involves staring at maps all day. Jay, we talked about Phantom Islands, but how about mountains?

11:30Mountains of Kong are a fictional mountain range that appeared on European maps throughout the 1800s. How did that era persist for so long? Yeah, for nearly 100 years, almost every map of Africa produced by Europeans showed this mountain range. And the bizarre thing was that, well, it first appeared because one of the very early European explorers that went to West Africa, a Scottish guy called Mungo Park, he kept a very extensive diary. And he published it when he got home. And it said in there towards the end, I gained from the summit a view of some fantastic mountains. And it then fell to an English cartographer called James Reynolds to look at his diary and then turn it into a map.

12:10So he was following his story along and he was drawing in cities and some hills and some features. And then he guessed, for no particularly good reason that anybody can figure out, that Mungo Park must have been looking at not just a mountain, but a mountain range. So he drew this absurdly long hypothetical mountain range that stretched all the way from the coast of West Africa to the coast of East Africa. And what we know is that when he first put it on his map, he meant to show this mountain range as hypothetical. Like, I think this might be here. But then all it takes is one cartographer to copy that map and to draw the mountains in a slightly bolder pen.

12:50And suddenly you've got, you know, they might as well be real. The Mountains of Kong became just as much a fact as the Sahara Desert or the Mediterranean Sea. And the weird thing is they didn't just affect maps of Africa. They actually affected how people explored the continents itself. There were explorers that went a ridiculously unnecessary long way around when they were trying to get to the southern half of the continent because they thought there was going to be a mountain range there. And it took until right at the end of the 19th century for someone to finally turn up and undiscover the Mountains of Kong.

13:22What does that reveal to you about Europe and Africa during the 19th century? It reveals that Europe had this awful attitude where they assumed that the map itself was the place itself. And there's no clearer visual metaphor for how Europeans treated Africans those hundreds of years ago than, you know, a visual representation of the fact that they clearly had not been to the place. And they still, they used this mountain range as a border when they were carving it up for themselves.

14:20Sarah emailed, without using critical thinking or common sense, but even when maps are on paper, people tend to believe them. They think they are correct, like in the case of the Mountains of Kong. So, Mark, why do you think we trust maps so wholeheartedly? It's such a good question. I think maps have been very, very sneaky as being these tools that people just trust as giving us objective facts about the world. I think a lot of us now quite clued into the idea that, you know, that different media have different biases, different sources have different biases, that statistics can be manipulated and used in different ways, right?

14:59But there's something about maps where people look at them and just go, oh, that's how it is then. And don't choose to sort of really concentrate on the fact that, no, that was produced by somebody. It was produced by them for a reason. And they wanted to get something across. So they had to make choices and editorial decisions on the map, what colours they used, what lines they drew, what they included, what they omitted. And yet, just like you say, we will look at it and go, oh, well, that's probably fact. That's exactly how it is. So they're really sneaky tools, which makes them sort of, obviously both brilliant in a way, but incredibly dangerous on the other hand.

15:37In the wrong hands and not properly deconstructed, they are tools of manipulation, essentially. Jay? And I think it's a combination of that and the way they're used. Because if you have a paper map, you have to think for a moment before you use it. But if you're using a GPS where it shows you as just a blue dot in the middle of the page and the map rotates around you, and also in many cases, you might be busy driving your car, so you can't concentrate too much. So it doesn't just help the navigation, it is the navigation. And it actually takes over your brain. So is it any wonder that people sort of switch off the common sense part of their brain and, you know, blindly follow wherever the sat-nav tells them to go?

16:16Let's take a quick pause here. We'll be back with more of the conversation and more. Let's take a quick pause here. We'll be back with more of the conversation and more from you in just a moment.

16:31Let's get back to our discussion with this message we got from James in Ohio, who says, on digital maps, you can drop a pin on a location you want to mark. People might not realize we used to put actual pins on maps. My father was a rural minister and liked to visualize where all of the church members lived. He took poster-sized topographical maps of several counties and pieced them together on his office wall. He put pins in the map to mark the homes of all the church members. James, I love that my husband and I have a big canvas map of the world framed, and there's a pen color for me and a pen color for him and then pen colors for the two of us.

17:08So it's where we've each been individually, where we've gone together, and then another set of pens for where we want to go at some point together. So we love that, James, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us at 1a at wamu.org. We got this from Ward in Charlottesville, Virginia. Just thought you might mention that errors are sometimes intentionally created in published maps as a defense against copyright infringement. If you copy the map, you copy the mistake, thereby incriminating yourself. As a former charter bus driver, I've personally and unfortunately encountered several of these errors.

17:43Let the map users beware. Now, Jay, you might know the term paper towns from the John Green book of the same name. It became a movie in 2015. What is a paper town? A paper town is a fake town that is, like you said, it's been included on a map for the purpose of copy protection. and most of these go undetected. So paper towns or any kind of copyright trap, sometimes it's not a whole town, it could just be a street name might be spelt wrong or a contour of a mountain might be bent slightly the wrong way because anything that could be copied reveals a mistake. Most of them, by their very nature, they're impossible to find and it's very difficult to make a list of all of them.

18:21But there's one particular one, the one that gets mentioned in John Green's Paper Towns that became incredibly famous. It defeated its own purpose. The fictional town of Aglo accidentally became a real place. And that's in New York. So the story is, yeah, in New York State, the story was that the original map from 1925 put a fake town called Aglo in the middle of nowhere on a dirt track. And it did it just to copyright protect itself. But then some years later, people wanted to build a shop on the site. And when they had a look on the map to see where they were, they realized, oh, this is a town.

18:56It's called Aglo. So let's call it the Aglo General Store. And by building the store, it turned Aglo into a real place. And that meant that when Aglo turned up on another map some years later, the case was thrown out of court because, of course, you can't prove a copyright trap if it's a real street. So they set a trap that they fell in themselves, unfortunately. Well, the question of where borders are drawn and who decides lies at the center of so many of today's biggest conflicts. Mark, how does your work on maps and the politics behind those maps shape the way you understand current events?

19:31Well, it's as you say, when we're looking at a map, you have to be, and particularly when it's a map of a conflict. So it's an area that's going to be incredibly contested. It might be very live. It might be a very messy situation. You've got to think about who is producing that map and why they're producing that map. Because, of course, there are, in a conflict, things are in flux by definition. There is, you know, there's potentially a reestablishing of a borderline going on. And so what you will get usually and what you get in some of the major conflicts in the world at the moment is you get a conflict within a conflict.

20:03You get these map wars, if you like, where you have both sides who will show the same area of territory, but very differently. And that might be about how they draw a border. might be that on one map it might look very solid on another it might be dotted on another it might not be there at all um it might be um the choice of colors that they use if you think about the ukraine russia conflict at the moment for instance a lot of the maps that are produced in the west of that conflict will show russia and russia's incursions into ukrainian territory in red and part of that decision might be about raising alarm making it look as if it's something that is dangerous, something to be afraid of.

20:48And of course, it also taps into that sort of older red peril, the old communist threat from the, you know, the 60s, 70s and the Cold War. So there are all these decisions that are going into these maps that will support one side or another. And so, but it's not only in the making of maps, it's in the choice of maps that you might show from history. So again, in the sort of Ukraine-Russia conflict at the moment, you have Vladimir Putin, who very publicly will show an 18th, I think actually was a 17th century map of the Russian Empire to prove that Russia owns this territory and that there is, in inverted commas, no such thing as Ukraine.

21:30And I think in that case, unfortunately for Vladimir Putin, he hadn't realised that the map that he was proudly displaying did actually have the word Ukraine written on it in very small letters. But nonetheless, these sorts of decisions, You know, what moment in history you pick for where the borders should or shouldn't be. And of course, if you're making a map today, what symbols you use, what colors you use, where you draw a boundary and whether you include a boundary at all. There's so many things that go into that. And you just have to be really aware of that, I think, when you're consuming news or whatever it might be.

21:59Well, every map reflects a certain point of view, be it political, cultural or emotional even. We got this from Paul who emailed, maps can be used to quietly push political agendas. I am an academic reviewer in the biological sciences and once reviewed a paper containing a map of a study area in northern China. The map included an unnecessary inset showing the disputed Spratly Islands with the Chinese boundary clearly surrounding it. The authors were obviously trying to make a not-so-subtle political statement. I'm curious to hear from both of you, and I'll start with you, Jay. there's the way we interpret maps as we're reading them or the way we need to think about the context around any given map.

22:40But what do you think maps reveal about the person or society that made it? On a very simple level, what a map reveals, if it's done properly, is who the map was made for. So it's tempting to say that if it's a simple street map that shows accurate where the streets and buildings are, there's nothing political about that. But of course, even that map has made decisions. If you showed a map of exactly the same area, but birds, you wouldn't have to name the streets and you wouldn't have to show things like where you're not allowed to turn left. You'd show where the trees are and how far apart they are.

23:10And a simple thought like that makes you realise that every single map in the world has, even if it's a simple one, an agenda. What about you, Mark? Yeah, I think I just agree with what Jay said. I think that's it. Maps do reveal a lot about the society that's producing them. You know, whether it's wartime or peacetime or what sort of thing it is. But obviously there are so many different types of map and uses for map that it really just depends what type of thing you're producing and why as to what that's saying about that particular person. Mike in Minnesota emailed us, I'm teaching my grandchildren to use BPS, brain positioning system.

23:49Exclusive use of GPS to navigate is a lost opportunity to think and problem solve for yourself. But I'm wondering about how the way we use GPS as opposed to maps, maybe how you think it reshapes the way we place ourselves in society and culture. So one of you mentioned that when you're using GPS, you are the central point, right? And you are the central point moving through the map. When you are using a paper map, you have the whole map there. You are not the central point. You're trying to get to the place you're going. So do you think that maybe sort of shifts the way we think about our place in the world, Mark?

24:30Yeah, completely. I think that's a huge and quite subtle difference that has happened in relatively recent years. That you used to use a map. I mean, even the first digital maps, when they didn't have such good geolocating services on them, you would look at the map and you would have to figure out where you were. And that takes a certain amount of skill. You have to observe around you. You have to then relay what is around you into the symbol form on the map. You have to, and it gives you a bit of a sense of direction, especially if you're using that map then to travel somewhere, because you have to figure out which way that is.