The Phantom Atlas

Edward Brooke-Hitching

‘From invisible mountain ranges to vast spectral seas... this unique atlas presents the greatest cartographic “phantoms” ever to haunt the maps of history.’ So say the remarkably evocative jacket notes of this book, which collects some of the more outlandish maps from exploration history – sea monsters, imaginary islands, Terra

Incognita et al – and puts them together along with the stories of how they came to be. This is an absolutely stunning work. But remarkably in a volume stuffed luxuriantly with the kind of maps that suck you in to their stories in the most visual sense, what marks this out is the quality of the writing. It‘s hard to fathom a more difficult (or more satisfying) research task than discovering why long-dead explorers and cartographers interpreted mysterious landscapes the way they did, particularly when – as the title suggests – many turned out to be incorrect. But the opulently named BrookeHitching (himself the son of an antiquarian book dealer) enthralls with a myriad of tales from the days when the maps literally ran out before the horizon and dragons were thought to dwell in wait. From the strange story of Croker‘s ghost mountains, the bizarre creatures of the

Nuremberg Chronicle map, the mystery of the 'missing island' of Hy Brasil and the legend of the frozen north land of Thule, this collection truly impresses. What a mysterious, fearand hearsay-driven place the world must have been, making the bravery of the adventurers who went to find answers even more audacious. And now, here‘s a simply remarkable book to take you right back there.