Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio.

Welcome back to the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians.

Thank you, as always so much for tuning in.

Let's hear it for the man, the myth, the legend, the map maker, super producer, mister Max Williams.

Gobble gabble, He's the map, He's the map, He's the map, He's the map.

On Sue us Nick Jr.

Ah Nick, everything's going fine.

Now.

That's mister Noel Brown right there.

Uh and that's uh uh.

They called me Bullen in this part of the world.

Guys, before we get into our history of ridiculous maps yesteryear, I think we owe it to our fellow listeners to talk about a snight kerfuffle.

We had a lot of us were tuning into Ridiculous History recently and saw a description of Doc Holiday as a deadly dentist, only to hear a pretty in depth exploration of the ridiculous history of dog food.

The classic bait and switch the RHBNS.

So we love this, by the way, because guys, we got some We got some hilarious and supportive comments from our fellow ridiculous historians who were weirdly and no offense.

Anybody weirdly super on board with that bait and switch you described.

I was gonna say, bemused.

Bemused is a great word.

I'm glad you think so.

It again is a great word, and I think it's appropriate here.

I certainly was, And you know, it would be not that far out of character for the show to just like start with one idea and then pivot to something completely different.

And if I could just jump in here, as as the man who runs the RSS feed, it is very easy to switch an M and a B.

That is what happened.

No joke in my internal system, the M and the B in November got flipped, which jumped the wrong episode to the top of my queue of uploading things.

So it was upspreadsheet kerfuffle.

But I liked the idea of we did that intentionally, so let's go with it.

Yes, let's just continue the mystery.

Hey guys, I have a bit of a pitch.

Sure, I'm surprised we haven't seen it.

Maybe I've missed it, But what do you think about a Jigsaw esque serial killer with the with the message called the Cartographer who like takes people's skin and turns them into historical maps.

I didn't know you reapped my blog.

No Ah, man, it was too good to be No, it's original.

It's great.

As you can tell, we're always pitching.

We're always trying to think ahead, you know, we're pitching, closing, drinking coffee, always be cartographing, which is a word we just churchified.

Today's episode is the first in an ongoing series about maps.

Now, Noel, you know I collect and obsess over maps.

Have you?

Are you a map guy?

I have a map of Skyrim that our buddy Matt Frederick gives to both of us.

It is currently in a holding space while I figure out a new place to put it because I had to do a little moving around to some art pieces.

But it was hanging in my guest room for some time.

No, but have we not done an episode about funky maps?

Surely it's come up, man, I love that this.

Yeah, okay, so maybe we could you know, retroactively, Grandfather goes into this ongoing series, but for our purposes today, we can call this part.

Well, yeah, you don't.

Cast your memory back fellow human beings.

Back in the days where most people lived and died about thirty miles from where they were born.

Like in that area, you don't know much about the world around you.

Someone comes up to you and says, hey, the world is round, and you're like burn the witch.

Or they say hey, the world is flat and you're like, that's a platform I can stand on.

Or they say the world shaped like a casadilla and you're like, what the time means?

Wrong here?

Case the dias aren't.

Nothing yet but also delicious in advance.

Yeah, and the issue is that making maps is very difficult.

It it's easier now than ever, but we have to acknowledge that all of the photographers of old, let me amend that most of the cartographers of old were doing the best they could with the technology and the information they had.

They were doing their level best, you know, yeah, because it's almost like, I mean, now we've got all this satellite imagery and things that can take a much larger overview scanning, you know, bodies of water and land, masses, et cetera.

But back in those days, if you didn't if you hadn't actually traversed the thing that you were mapping, you really were guessing.

And even if you had traversed it, to fit it all into the jigsaw, puzzle that is, all of the surrounding land masses and have things like borders and all of these other ephemeral concepts.

I mean, there's gonna be there's gonna be some misses.

Yeah, you know what I mean.

That's why we call it the drawing board.

That's why we call science and learning a conversation.

So with that in mind, we being a supportive crew of absolute bozos, we want to talk about times cartographers bozoed up their maps, specifically the island of California.

I'm sorry, what the island of California.

This comes to us from old world auctions.

This is probably one of the most familiar famous cartographic mistakes.

Oh, and we should say cartography is the study of and creation of maps.

Oh sorry, yeah, we very the lead there.

Our apologies.

Yeah, I'm sorry.

I'm still hung up on this idea of California being an island.

Whose idea was that?

Right?

Take us to the manager, we say, calling Gavin Newsom.

This is if you look at the map, it is a vaguely carrot or rocket shaped mass and it's detached from the western coast of North America.

So if you look at this map from back in the day, it appears that California is not part of the contiguous United States.

Instead, it looks like it's a little floating boy out there on the left.

Can we also just name off the insane map that this comes from, Oh the let's see Henricus Hondius as the name of the cartographer, and the work or the piece is entitled Nova totius tarum orbis geographica ac hydrophica tabula.

I'm assuming the act is meant to be pronounced, but I'm not one hundred percent sure.

It may well be like a you know, a hyphen.

Or something like that, like our pal Joe Mikelhanney Mick al Hanny is yeah, okay, well, apologies Joe if we're mispronouncing the name, as our pal is saying here.

Joe points out that before California was established as an actual place to the Europeans, it was a fantasy invented by the guy who named the map, Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo.

He's a Castilian, and.

Can I just say the latin esque sounding name that I mentioned earlier is just one of numerous versions of this thing that exists.

It's not like the og but I just had to rattle down right.

Yeah, that's the thing.

So the idea or the name, the concept of California was invented before Europeans and discovered the actual place called California today.

Back in fifteen ten, our Buddy Montovo, he published a sort of like a spin off or an addition to chronicles that have been written earlier.

And in his description he he just waxes on like he waxes on, waxes off.

He goes ham on this idea of an island paradise to the right hand of the endies that was populated only by and there's a quote from him, Amazonian black women who are protected by the mythological creatures the Griffins, and they have a bunch of.

Gold Griffin's being the what is it like a lion?

It's like a lion eagle.

That's right, talent and flighted.

Yeah, here we have to mention a previous episode we create way back in twenty eighteen.

That's right, the episode that I think I was referencing, or at least working towards referencing, California was named for a fictional island ruled by a black Amazon queen.

I think there are a couple others that fit this series as well, but that one was definitely on my mind.

So Montvalo's story or Montalvo's story, excuse me, began to circulate and really took on a life of its own.

And so the Spanish explorers in New Spain were very familiar with what had become kind of a type of lore and this sort of notion of this promised land, you know, the island of California.

Yeah, they took it as a matter of fact.

It's kind of like if you were an astronaut and all you knew about the moon was science fiction, you would say, oh, of course, this is the stuff from the story earlier.

And so our buddy, or many people, particularly Hernan Cortes, they carry over these ideas, this informative, inspirational fiction, and eventually one of Cortes's two ships, the Conception, is taken over by mutiny and it is steered to a site that's kind of near present day Lapause.

This means that crew is the first European ship to land in what we call Baja California.

Yes, Cortes the killer of Neil Young fame, of course, but before he had an opportunity to write up a you know, an account of this discovery or really survey the area for map making purposes.

Yeminez was killed by the locals.

Yeah.

Yeah, the guy we're referencing here for tune im Andez is the leader of the mutiny and he brings the he rocks up with this awesome weather Warren boat at this point, and he is murdered.

Not everybody aboard is murdered.

There are surviving crew members and they make it back to their version of you know what they call civilization, and they say, oh wow, there's this crazy island way out to the left of the map.

And this catches the attention of vernand Cortes.

He starts exploring the Baja California region in May of fifteen thirty five.

And at this point, no, we have to we have to note I almost said we have to map.

We have to note that if you look at this part of the coast of North America, there is a long peninsular thing.

That's right.

So if you don't have enough information, it might look like an island to you.

That's right.

And I really did.

It occurred to me when I think of like a peninsula.

I guess I always think about Florida, for example, the hole, the way it juts out for Italy or the sea or Italy, of course, and I could see how with a limited view, a limited scope of what was going on along the coast here, that one could, you know, make that mistake.

And yeah, we're not here to like criticize the people of the past, because to your point, Ben, you know, sometimes we are.

But they did their best with the information that they had.

Yeah, Suar Guy Cortes and crew.

They travel about two hundred miles up both the Gulf and the Pacific coast, and they're originating from Cabo San Lucas.

At this point, your buddy Hernand says, oh geez, okay, cheese and crackers.

This land is an island.

Nothing I have seen so far from the boat, with the information I have, could make the story I read earlier sound incorrect.

So this is an island.

We're gonna call it California because I'm well read and I remember that from the story I read earlier.

Right.

Yeah, Well, the funny thing is, even in this day and age, with that aforementioned lack of information, the island myth was, you know, the was debunked pretty quickly, if not nearly instantly.

In the following years, a couple of a handful of years after Cortes's journey up the coast, his lieutenant Francisco de Aloa, along with Hernando de Alarcon and Melschar Diaz, took a little bit more of a meticulous look at the survey and decided that it was, in fact a peninsula like I was mentioning earlier, which seems to me to be a more obvious mistake than island, because it's also not a peninsula, right.

Well, California has a peninsular feature.

That's the issue.

And as we're saying, three different people Diaz Alacon, they all confirm that this is not an island.

But the game of telephone begins and so the fact gets lost.

There are all these rumors going around in a very slow information age, so you hear something from someone who knows someone and now you think it's a fact.

What they call the Gulf of California, the rumors go, is actually a straight st r a t connected to the Strait of Onion.

But there is one guy credited with popularizing this belief, the belief, the legend, the absolutely juicy story but factually inaccurate lore that California is an island.

He is a friar.

His name Antonio de Lasentio.

Oh and he, by the way, did not speak from authority.

That's right, asension was not educated.

He had little to no experience.

But what he lacked an education experience, he made up for in raw imagination.

He was a member of an orderer like I guess I'm a monastic order, the Barefoot Carmelite, where he served as assistant cosmographer in sixteen oh two during an expedition led by Sebastian Vizkindo.

His mission was to establish a site for Spanish trade from the Philippines along the route from the Philippines, in order to kind of, you know, take stock and re up on supplies, and also to take shelter in the unfortunate event of an attack from the British privateers that we know so well.

Yeah, and let's baus here and think about how ambitious this expansion scheme is.

These ships are not very quick.

They're going across the Pacific from the Philippines to this island of California, and then they're also navigating their way around the world.

That's pretty impressive.

Our barefoot carmelite here sends you on he is, he's there, And as you said, Noel, sixteen twos.

So we have to remember that he's referencing stuff that was discovered back in the fifteen forties by the span Can I say spaniards on this show.

I don't think I think spaniards is the correct phrase.

Yeah, all right, let's keep all of this in as long as you don't say dirty Spaniards.

Yeah, those sex driven Spaniards or something like.

That, swarthy spaniards.

We're keeping it all in.

So we're keeping it all in.

And look, the timing is important.

So, like Noel was saying, sixteen oh two, this expedition by this kind of In this you can find a journal that is written at the time and it's published several years after the end of the mission.

In this you will see the argument that the Gulf of California goes on to communicate with the Ocean of the North by the strait of on the island.

So Ascension has no first hand evidence about California being an islands, but he is not gonna let the facts get in the way of a very good story.

And we have a quote from it.

Yeah, let's call this a quick summation of that story.

Sincion wrote, I hold it to be very certain and proven that the whole Kingdom of California, it's a kingdom now discovered on this voyage is the largest islands known or which has been discovered up to the present day.

Ben Is this all in the service of a bit of self aggrandizement, perhaps of the of the explorer himself, and also, you know, the crown.

You know, I think about that a lot, Noel, because it's kind of like, to put it in modern context, it's kind of like how a friend comes back from a trip abroad and becomes momentarily insufferable, and you know, and so now this guy's like, oh, I went out, you know what I mean, what have you done to other barefoot carmelites.

Well, I saw the Kingdom of California and it's the biggest island ever.

So that's my trip one hundred percent.

Doesn't it also just sound like a little bit like a big fishtail, you know, like this is certain and proven, the whole of the Kingdom of California discovered on this voyage.

My thing, the largest island.

No man that has or ever will be discovered.

Yeah, he doesn't saying that he does stay up to the present day.

But it just I don't know.

It's got a certain rhetorical panache to it.

Maybe the smacks of like, he does he really believe this or is he just talking a big game.

It's a bit self aggrandizing, uh diplomatically put and it is wild conjecture.

However, it captures the public imagination, and starting in sixteen twenty two, so decades and decades after everybody said California is not an island, it starts to appear as an island on maps.

You can find well over two hundred fifty examples of maps from the time period and shortly after it that appear to depict California as an island.

Starting as we said back in sixteen twenty two, I.

Think that's the one I referenced with the really long Latin novo What is it nova novo totius trorum terrarum orbis sounds like a Harry Potter spell geographica ac or ac hydrographica tabula a classic.

I've been watching the Harry Potter movies recently for the first time ever, not as bad as I thought, kind of entertaining.

So also, like Harry Potter Gills on the Brain, how far are you into it?

I am on the The Deathly Hallows Part two.

I know you're gonna love it.

Man good, I'm not joking.

Man, I poo pooed them for years, and I actually think the movies get better.

Actually they get much as the story gets more adult.

But obviously JK.

Rowling not a great person, No, not a favorite.

And this is why we decided to make an episode about our favorite maps that are incorrect.

Starting with this, the game of telephone begins.

All right, it's sixteen twenty two.

There's a guy who publishes a map.

In sixteen twenty two.

We know Pacific maritime trade is already a thing.

So if you go as far as the early nineteenth century in Japan, you will see maps that argue California is an island, like all the way up to eighteen sixty five, well after California has become a state in the United States of America.

Like everybody who lives there knows it's not an island, but everybody has heard from someone who is heard from someone who has it on a good authority that this place is an island, so the maps don't agree with the facts on the ground.

So part of the problem here was that the area in question was incredibly difficult to explore by either land or sea, which, as we mentioned at the top, is a key part of making maps correctly.

Explorers in the region would often face really really harsh conditions, nasty weather, you know, running short on supplies, starvation, and of course disease.

And this was a tall order because I mean there was a lot of hardship being faced for not a lot of return.

Yeah, that's the issue.

They were selling a pretty wild pitch, right, And it turns out gold is not just falling in your hand rolling off a hill.

It is still the real world and there are real problems.

And there's one guy we want to introduce into the stage now.

He's our protagonist for this episode, Max If we could get a drum roll, that's right, folks, the Jesuit missionary explorer and cartographer Lusimio Guino or causing for a cloth.

All right, everybody, case sit down.

Our guy, Keino is the dude or the European dude who definitively proves that California has a peninsula.

It is not an island.

And get this, folks, for the first like well more than one hundred years after he proves this, everybody is like, ah, shut up, you Jesuit, sit down, It might be an island.

So this fellow arrived in Bahai in sixteen eighty one believing that California as a whole was a peninsula.

This is what many folks in this guy generation were taught there in Ingle stopt But soon after he got to Mexico he saw with his own eyes something that indicated to him that it was in fact an island.

He went back and forth right and then what did he see?

His laughter.

He had a conversation with a very charismatic guy, like the slap Chop guy or something.

Maybe so yes, yes, the showtime.

Yeah.

And so the thing is, our buddy Keno sticks around the area, and the more he sees of the region, the more he starts to say, I don't know, doesn't look like an island to me.

And because he is a Jesuit, he is deeply disciplined.

He is of a religious school of thought that does not eschee science.

So you have to learn the facts, is what he's thinking as a jesuit.

So from sixteen ninety eight all the way up to seventeen oh one, he keeps building this case that California is indeed a peninsula.

And we have a quote from him in this regard.

Yes we do, and I am going to give you that quote.

I have discovered, he says, with minute certainty and evidence, got another big game talker with mariners, compass and astrolabe in my hands, that California is not an island but a peninsula or an isthmus, which is a favorite geographical word of mine.

And that in thirty two degrees of latitude there is a passage by land to California, and that only two about that point comes ahead of the Sea of California.

All right, So after this guy says this, the European world still doesn't want to admit it.

If you go to the big time publishers and map makers of the day, folks like Herman mal Moll, you'll see that they just dismiss it.

This guy, who is by the way, incorrect in this quote.

In seventeen eleven, he says, I've had my office mariners who have sailed around it, meaning the island of California, which cannot be accurate because California is not an island, and the colleagues, like his fellow Jesuits of Quino, they shrugged off his findings too.

Eventually, some other Jesuits follow up on his work.

One of these guys, Juan de Ugarte, travels up the Gulf of California as far as he can make it in seventeen twenty one, and then another Jesuit named Fernando consag he surveys the gulf completely in seventeen forty six.

This is all before the United States is a thing.

Now it becomes like a culture war, as weird as it is to say, King Ferdinand the seventh issues a royal decree to shut everybody up in seventeen forty seven.

Quiet, quiet you, and he said, look officially, as the king with God given authority, California is not an island.

So everybody you know, sit down, knock it off with all your yammer and get in line my kingly perspective.

So this guy, the King Ferdinand, he is on the right side of history in only this respect.

And the problem is people are still making maps and most of photography at this point in time, so far as we know is one person seeing a map and then copying that and making their own tweaks.

And speaking of the game of telephone, I mean telephone is almost like too advanced of analogy here, because it was like word of mouth and things had to spread, you know, through written correspondence, and it would take a long time for the incorrect information to get filtered out.

There is no real time response and like retractions, I mean you'd have like maybe you'd have isolated areas that like wouldn't even get the memo for many years, right exactly.

You know, And that's why I think you nailed it.

The legend of a thing will often out sell the u truth of the thing, right, That's the way to put it.

So, this concept of California as an island is long gone.

You can travel there now, Maxnoll and yours truly have often go on to California, and we love it.

We have a studio out in La We have a ton of friends all throughout that state.

However, now the idea of California as an island, since it was so widely published, now it is a fascinating thing for map collectors and fellow cartography nerds.

Yeah, it's like misprinted currency.

Like a lot of times, those kind of things are the holy grail for collectors, right, So that would make sense that this would definitely be highly collectible.

And W.

Michael Maths, who is a cartography historian, agrees.

He refers to this depiction of California as possibly the most attractive phenomenon in the history of cartography, due entirely to its bizarreness, its connection with the romantic nature of exploration.

And I think what it represents just in terms of like how outlandish speculation could thrive in this point in history.

The perie Rees map has entered the chats, but we have your back, Mike.

W.

Mike, if we may be familiar, this calls back to this idea of outlandish speculation, take it as truth as long as enough people are repeated it.

And maybe it's due to the fantastical writings of early European interloopers, California still has this mythical air about it to this day.

If you look at it, like if we exercise empathy and we imagine we're back in the fifteen hundreds or the sixteen hundred, and we see every single map of this part of the world showing California as an island.

Then it's not a bridge too far to think that.

Hey, maybe that's true.

And this is the beginning of a long journey because we've talked about maps on stuff they don't want you to know.

We've talked about maps.

When we were lost in the National Radio Quiet Zone.

We desperately talked about maps on that road trips.

Yeah, we desperately.

We were desperately seeking maps to load on our phones, but we couldn't.

Luckily, I think our buddy Scott had like an old school Garman that did give us a little bit of relief in that case.

It just goes to show you know, we rely on these little devices in our hands quite a.

Lot, and we also know that there are more maps in the future.

Sure, big, big things to you, fellow Ridiculous historians for tuning in.

Big thanks to our super producer and research associate for this episode, mister Max Williams, who else, Noel?

Who else?

Who else?

Well, Alex Williams who composed our theme, Chris Frasciotis and he's Jeff goes here in spirit Ualathu Strickland the quiztor.

Hey j mohammas Jacobs the Puzzler.

Now, I'm gonna let you slide on that nice thank you to the Quist.

You know he knows what he did.

He does know what he did.

It's true, just like you say, any sort of insists upon himself, but we insist upon him as well.

And we can't wait for you to insist upon your local podcast platform of.

Please can't quit the quistor man, you can't quit the Quist.

And if you find yourself on ye old internets, please feel free to give us a little rating, give us a little five star review if you feel in generous.

I don't know how much people charge for stars these days, but we sure would appreciate it.

Now we've got our super producer Max popping in on the chat to make some remarks.

I imagine, gobble gobble.

This is Thanksgiving episodes that I was gonna keep saying.

Gobble gobble, and and with you as and with you as well, folks.

Thanks for tuning in.

Yes, we'll see you next time, folks in Happy yeah, happy holiday season.

Tough you.

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