No Longer on the Map - Raymond H. Ramsay

No Longer on the Map falls somewhere in between Lost Islands and The Undiscovered Islands. Less focused on only locations that were believed confirmed by recent nautical sightings than the former, considerably more detailed than the latter. Combined, this makes it a far more enjoyable and readable book than either.

Ramsay is more than willing to discuss islands described in myths and ancient tales, such as Saint Brendan's Island, or Freisland, but he still delves into the cartographic history of those places. Where did people think they were, and how did this change over time? What were they using as a basis, if that can be determined? One thing that comes up periodically is that one of the maps or writers whose work Ramsay describes apparently alludes to a source they were using which has since been lost. So Ramsay can't exactly trace the lineage of that line of thinking. 

Which isn't much of a surprise when we're talking about maps that were drawn in the 1300s, but I feel like it's not necessarily something I see come up in the other history books I read. Probably because they aren't covering stuff nearly as old.

All this gives Ramsay the opportunity to pull from a wide variety of sources, as he tries to determine what place might have been the origin of a given fabled land. Or in some cases, what place people decided worked as a stand-in for the fabled land. This involves not only looking for geographic locations which might match some of the described terrain, but also delving into the meanings of the names they were given and how these could have started out meaning one thing in their original language, and were subsequently altered when a nonnative speaker tried to translate it. I'm not much of a linguist, but it's fun to watch him go through what people might have been thinking or trying to convey.

Ramsay also doesn't limit himself to islands, as the book starts with the Spanish scouring South America for El Dorado, touches on the search for a vast, unknown southern continent the Greeks and Romans believed must exist, because they knew the world extended much farther than simply the places they had reached, and it seemed impossible there could be nothing but open water everywhere else. It would be too asymmetrical, so there must be land in all the different quadrants. OK, maybe not the soundest reasoning, but not terrible as a starting point. 

Probably best of all from my perspective is this book opens up a lot of things I hadn't really been aware of, but now might want to learn more about. Irish monks forming monasteries on Greenland before the Norse got there. European fishermen being aware of the existence of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland as a great place to fish, long before Columbus ever set sail. Again, it probably makes sense they would, given it's pretty accepted the Norse reached North America centuries earlier, but it was always presented in the history classes I took like the Norse settled there, got wiped out or died, and everyone just kind of forgot about it.

'For some curious reason, the name Quivira, officially established with reference to an inland plains region more than 1,000 miles away, was transferred to this incongruous Pacific coast, and why this should have happened is now impossible to say. The first mention of this mythical Quivira is found in a history of the American explorations published in 1552 by Francisco Lopez de Gomara, who is now generally regarded as a most accomplished liar.'