Where the Ink Runs Out

Halvard Nyström
Field Correspondent, The Drowned Coast

Fieldnotes — a map archive, midwinter

The phrase is older than the age of sail, though it is the sail that made it famous. Ptolemy used it in his Geography for the stretches of Africa and Asia his sources could not reach — not empty land, exactly, but land beyond the edge of report. When the great mapmakers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries picked the term up again, they gave it a second life: terra incognita, unknown land, stamped across the undiscovered south, the unmapped interior, the coastline that trailed off into white paper and speculation.

I have spent enough hours over old charts to know that a cartographer rarely leaves a gap looking like a gap. The blank was a kind of shame to be dressed. So the margins filled with lions for Africa, with elephants and unicorns for lands no European had walked, with sea serpents coiling through the latitude lines of oceans no ship had properly crossed. On the Lenox Globe, made in the first years of the sixteenth century, a line of Latin runs along the coast of East Asia: hic sunt dracones — here are dragons. It is one of the only times the phrase survives in that exact form, and it has done more work in the popular imagination than perhaps any other five words in the history of mapping.

The dragons were not always meant literally, though sailors who set out past the known coastlines seem to have taken the warning as seriously as the compass bearing beside it. Terra Australis Incognita, the great hypothesised southern continent, haunted European map rooms for two centuries before anyone confirmed what, if anything, lay there. Navigators drew its coastline in dotted, provisional lines, adjusting the guess with each voyage that failed to find it, each voyage that returned with new rumour instead of certainty. A civilisation was reasoned into existence to balance the land mass of the north — the old idea that the world, like a scale, needed weight on both sides to stand upright. That the reasoning was wrong did not stop it appearing, confidently inked, on chart after chart.

What strikes me, reading these documents now, is how much of the unknown world was populated before it was seen. The blank space was never allowed to remain blank for long. Sea monsters filled the ocean gaps not because sailors necessarily believed a kraken waited there, but because an empty ocean on a chart felt like a lie, or worse, an admission. Horror vacui, the old draughtsmen called it — the fear of the empty space — and it produced some of the strangest, most beautiful marginalia in the history of the printed page: whales the size of islands, sirens combing their hair on rocks that may or may not exist, kings enthroned on continents no ship had confirmed.

The furthest edges of these charts belong, I think, to the same family of belief as the fairy ring at the wood's border or the cairn at the top of the pass — markers less of fact than of threshold. Terra incognita was never quite a place. It was the line at which a civilisation's knowledge gave out and its imagination began to answer for it, filling the silence with dragons because dragons were easier to chart than nothing at all.

I keep coming back to the blank corners of these old maps, not for the monsters drawn there, but for the honesty underneath the decoration — an admission, however dressed up, that the world was larger than anyone's report of it. It is a good thing, I think, to be reminded now and then how much of the map is still, in its way, unfinished.

Halvard Nyström is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Drowned Coast. The sea north and everything it has taken: wrecks, drowned parishes, bells said to still be audible under water. He approaches each account as a question about tide and sediment first and a ghost story second, without ever quite dismissing the second.