
In 1562 Map-Makers Thought America Was Full of Mermaids, Giants, and Dragons - Thevet
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/in-1562-mapmakers-thought-america-was-full-of-mermaids-giants-and-dragons
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cjlars
Commonly referenced in Latin as, "hic sunt dracones," or in English "here are
dragons," is the tendency of historical cartographers to include mythological
beasts and illustrations in uncharted areas of the map. The icons roughly
represent the danger of going into uncharted waters or territories, and also
to share knowledge about areas of which there is knowledge, but not enough to
map. Serpents and dragons represent dangerous seas. Monsters for dangerous at
lands, and so forth. You'll notice that the linked maps correctly identify the
South Pacific as having no land, and North America as a body of unexplored
land extending northward and westward of the mapped area.

The article's title, if it's intended to be taken literally, is mostly off. It
seems that people at the time fell into superstitious, uneducated camps and
educated, skeptical camps -- Then as now it seems. The illustrations would
then work to serve up both imaginary dangers to the superstitious and
knowledgeable best guesses to the skeptical.*

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_be_dragons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_be_dragons)

*This second paragraph comes from my interest in charts and nautical history, but is mostly my own speculation. IANAH.

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icebraining
_Latin America was home at that time to highly resourceful indigenous peoples,
says Alencar Brayner. The Aztecs and the Mayans knew how to work with metals,
cultivate land and farm, and preserve artifacts. But the map doesn’t depict
these people. Instead, Brazilians are drawn as barbaric cannibals in the midst
of butchering and roasting humans._

But the Aztecs and Mayans weren't from Brazil. And the indigenous tribes in
Brazil did practice cannibalism and being semi-nomadic, probably had less
developed farming and metal technology.

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soneca
Yes, Brasil is very far from Aztecs and Mayans, and very isolated too with the
Andes and Amazon.

And there is no evidence that indigineous people around here were só
technologic advanced as them.

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kryptiskt
Did they think that or were they just decorating their maps because blank
spaces are ugly and maps were expensive art objects as well as tools?

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kpil
Most likely they had humour also in 1562.

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kpil
Unrelated, but a friend of mine lives in a house from 1600 or so. The ceiling
is painted with hundreds of funny animals, from normal cats, dogs, pigs,
bears, through exotic lions, tigers, elephants, crocodiles, apes, and topped
with some fantasy dragons and serpents. Many of them doing funny faces and
gestures.

The first time I saw it, I had to walk around and just look for 30 minutes.

I would guess that the paintings may be later than the house, perhaps from the
early 1700:s but it's hard to tell.

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anigbrowl
Much as I love science, I hate that it's drained so much of imagination out of
daily life. 'Magic isn't real, you're just going to be working off
generational debt for most of your life unless you get lucky, and many of the
super-cool animals that we do have are going extinct' is a pretty shitty
realization to have to come to in youth or early adulthood. Technology sort of
fills the gap but can also lead into a trap of consumerism. I thought the
internet was going to lead to some sort of transcendent human awakening and so
on but underestimated the degree to which many people would just use it to
find new ways be mean to others.

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majormajor
How much would people have given for thousands of years to be able to speak
words into the air and have their homes fill with light at any hour of the
day?

Terry Pratchett had it right: magic is far more boring than what we can
actually do, the fascinating details that go into how it works, and the effect
this has on people (and of people on it).

~~~
anigbrowl
I know very well how that works - from basic electricity and
photoluminescence, to having worked for an electricity provider and knowing
about the electrical grid, to knowing enough programming and signal processing
and machine learning concepts to appreciate the process of audio recording,
speech-to-text, networking, and automation to make the light come on.

The details of this are not that fascinating to me; I'm frankly far more
interested to study the economic and political forces that brought such
technology to bear and might (or might not) save the biosphere which we are in
the process of wrecking. It's not like I don't know what science and
technology are good for of what they've achieved.

You know what _fascinates_ me? Magnets. Now that you can 3d print them I'm
considering designing a desktop-size particle accelerator to see what happens
if you put a source of charged particles next to it. I'm also fascinated by
geometry, number theory, and the topology of higher-dimensional manifolds -
basic things that work unreasonably well (apart from the manifolds which I've
only experienced in imagination) and are rather hard to fathom. Why, for
example, does Phi keep showing up in nature, and why do books on it amount to
little more than stamp collecting? What governs the distribution of prime
numbers? These things are far more interesting to me than technological
conveniences.

~~~
Retric
Nobody really understands transistors. We can build them and priding how they
react, but our explanations are all based on other things we don't actually
understand. Granted, this is not a great way of looking at the world as
everything has the same limitation, but it's also completely accurate.

TLDR; We can model and predict things, but that does not mean we understand
them.

~~~
skummetmaelk
>We can build them and priding how they react, but our explanations are all
based on other things we don't actually understand.

You can say this about anything. This is science; making models and evaluating
their predictive power. The models don't have to capture the underlying
"truth", if it even exists.

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sandworm101
It was full of such things. If you were about to set sail on a 1562 craft,
tell me the fundimental difference between a huricane and a sea dragon. Both
smashed your ship leaving none to tell the tale. As for giants, take a look at
the average european bear. Then look at a grizzly. This map expresses real
problems and gives rather practical advice for the time.

Remember too the language issues. This map was for a variety of audiances. A
drawing of a monster is more universal than "ship reported lost here".

~~~
krastanov
I was left with the impression that the main point of those drawings were
aesthetics - fill the empty white space for which we do not have data. (As
opposed to claiming that people in the 1500s believed in any of those
creatures)

~~~
sandworm101
Look at where the monsters are and where things like huricanes are common. A
big empty ocean can also be monsterous as you can get lost.

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vaughngh
_These mermaids are holding what looks like mini-UFOs._

These mermaids are clearly looking into the mirrors that they are holding.

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SEJeff
Maybe it was and they all died of small pox like the rest of the native
americans

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lithos
So many ancient jokes are taken literally as ignorance.

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sharemywin
That's just silly everyone knows that just California...

