You’re no geography expert, but you probably have a basic idea of where nations and continents are positioned on a globe, right? But it wasn’t that long ago when people who drew maps only had the vaguest idea of what our planet actually looks like. European and American maps from before the 1800s only sort of resemble Earth. Sure, some of the larger blobs look okay… Europe usually looks Europe-y, and Africa has a somewhat reliable shape. Asia is… well, mostly there. It tends to fade away as you go eastward.
But there’s something consistently missing from these old-timey maps: Oregon. Our particular patch of geography, along with Washington, British Columbia, Alaska, and everything else in the Pacific Northwest was one of the most consistently misrepresented parts of atlases before the 1800s. Instead of where Oregon should be, mapmakers made their best guesses, adding a bunch of fantasy stuff, along with the occasional imaginary waterway and non-existent path to China. Here’s what a lot of dead guys with sextants (wrongly) assumed was going on in the Pacific Northwest.
Before the West Coast was accurately rendered, it wasn’t portrayed as a coast at all. Instead, many maps abruptly ended somewhere in what we now call the Midwestern prairies. Sometimes the area known as Oregon, Washington, and California was floating just west of the rest of North America as a Greenland-sized island that was almost a continent of its own. And on other maps, we were actually under water, drowning in a great inland sea.
