We're exploring… Lost Maps.
Welcome to The Red Queen’s Map Room, where geography misbehaves and memory is always a little suspect. From phantom islands to misplaced empires, this session invites you to step into a room full of maps that no longer (or never did) point to real places. Some are curiosities. Others are clues.
This session invites you to:
– Discover how maps can vanish, distort, or deceive
– Explore the strange histories behind forgotten cartographies
– Follow one irresistible detour into the realm of mythical lands and missing atlases
"Which way you ought to go depends on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”
Maps are not just tools. They are stories, drawn, printed, and sometimes invented. A lost map might be one that no longer exists, one that never did, or one whose secrets were misunderstood.
What is a lost map?
– A misfiled or destroyed chart
– A forgery passed off as fact
– A depiction of imagined lands or unconfirmed territories
– A map that tells a version of history no longer believed
Why do lost maps matter?
They challenge our sense of place and time. They reveal how cultures once saw the world, or wanted to. And sometimes, they remind us that wrong maps often led to very real consequences.
Note: J. B. Harley’s influential essay Maps, Knowledge, and Power appears as a chapter in the edited volume The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments, edited by Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cambridge University Press, 1988). In this chapter (pp. 277–312), Harley challenges the traditional view of maps as neutral or purely scientific representations. Instead, he argues that maps are deeply embedded in systems of power and ideology—they reflect and reinforce the interests of those who create them.
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Tucked between two atlases, the librarian found a map labeled “The Mountains of Kong.” But no such mountains exist.
In the 19th century, the Mountains of Kong appeared on dozens of maps of Africa. Explorers, trusting earlier accounts, continued to draw them.
The origin of the myth was a blend of secondhand reports, misreadings, and the authoritative flair of early explorers like Mungo Park and cartographers such as James Rennell. Once drawn, the mountain range was copied from map to map, passed from printer to scholar to expedition. It became not just a feature of geography but a fixture of belief.
No one had truly seen these mountains. Yet they were given names, elevations, extensions, rivers even sprang from them. It wasn’t until the late 1880s that the Mountains of Kong began to vanish from maps. But by then, they had already shaped colonial ambitions, trade routes, and imaginations.
Lost maps like this one aren’t just curiosities. They’re echoes of belief, reputation, and replication. Once something is on a map, it can be stubbornly hard to erase.
The librarian, of course, shelved the atlas with care, tilted ever so slightly, as if the Mountains of Kong might roll off the page in protest. Not all fictions are discarded. Some are kept because they remind us how delightfully sure we were of things that never existed.
No one dared question them until someone did! And even then, the cartographers hesitated, half-expecting to hear, “Off with their heads!”
Now the atlas sits quietly, sandwiched between more obedient geography. A relic of cartographic imagination, royal delusion, and the curious talent for drawing things into existence.
It whispers to passersby: Just because it’s printed doesn’t mean it’s true.