Monsters and Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Surekha Davies writes about on how monsters on maps led to her first book and then, in her second, to a consideration of why monsters exist as a category.

By taking images of monstrous peoples on maps seriously I broke both molds. For traditionalists, engravings of headless men in Guiana or giants in Patagonia were what they called “myth,” “fantasy,” or “mere decoration”: cartographers supposedly added monsters to make their maps more appealing to buyers, or because they feared empty space. The “maps as politics” brigade offered a third explanation: monsters on European maps from the age of exploration were propaganda crafted to justify colonialism. For both factions, there was supposedly nothing more to say. I begged to differ.