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The old maps I buy always get the Great Lakes wrong - what gives?
I picked up a 1720 map of New France last week and Lake Michigan is drawn like a perfect circle, is this a common error or did some cartographer just guess?
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uma_mitchell8317d ago
Oh man, that perfectly round Lake Michigan is a classic case of "I heard there's a big lake somewhere over there." @jade_hunt48 is spot on, those old mapmakers were basically playing telephone with fur trader stories and then just drew whatever looked neat. Your mileage may vary, but I bet that cartographer was just tired and said "good enough, it's a circle, moving on.
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jade_hunt4817d ago
Oh man, you found a perfect circle lake? Thats not just cartographers being lazy, its actually a mix of them working from secondhand reports and trying to fill in blank space. A lot of those early mapmakers had to guess based on vague fur trader stories, so they drew things like neat little circles or blobs instead of real shapes. Lake Michigan being round was pretty common because the explorers who mapped it first just saw a big curved shoreline and called it a day.
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