TIL that in 1650 the island of California was drawn on maps for over 100 years, and I found the proof in a library basement | Antique Map Puzzlers

Jamie Kim · 2026-09-17T19:05:04.237546+00:00

I volunteer at the map room in our downtown library twice a month, mostly refiling stuff nobody asks for. Last Saturday I was going through a box marked 'misc European, pre-1800' and pulled out a small atlas page from around 1650. It showed California as a big island floating off the west coast with a clean gap of water between it and the mainland. I always figured that was just a one time mistake somebody made, but I looked it up that night and this idea stuck on printed maps for more than a century. Explorers kept sailing past it and writing home that it was attached to the continent, and mapmakers just kept copying each other anyway. There is something weirdly comforting about that, like even the professionals were just borrowing from whoever drew it last. I showed it to the head librarian and she said we have two more pages in the collection from later dates, so now I want to see if the coastline shifts bit by bit as they fix it. Does anyone here know which mapmaker finally killed the island idea for good?

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TIL that in 1650 the island of California was drawn on maps for over 100 years, and I found the proof in a library basement | Antique Map Puzzlers - The Community Guide