By Brennan Nick

Once upon a time when the Spanish were first exploring the Americas, there were tales of “an island called California very close to the side of the Earthly Paradise” that was inhabited entirely only by black women with no men. They were great warriors with golden weapons for “there is no other metal on the island other than gold.” These quotations come from Las Sergas de Esplandian, a Spanish novel published in 1510 by Garcia Ordonez de Montalvo.

It was this story that drove Hernan Cortes a few decades later to send an expedition to California led by his cousin, Diego de Bercerra. He landed on the southern tip of Baja California and saw water on all sides. Now, thinking they had found the fabled island, Cortes sent further expeditions. Shortly after, explorer Francisco de Ulloa followed the coastline northward until he reached the Colorado River, discovering that Baja California was, in fact, a peninsula, not an island. On maps, California enjoyed the privilege of being drawn as part of the mainland for sixty years after the first map in 1562 represented California as connected.

Then something happened. In 1622, on the title page of a Dutch map book, California was drawn as separate from the mainland. This reinvention of the status of California can be traced to the journal of an obscure friar who described California as being a separate island. He then included maps that he himself made and sent them to Spain to be examined and potentially published. The Spanish wouldn’t have found these maps credible due to their prior knowledge of the area. However, the ship these maps were being transported on was hijacked and the bad maps were taken seriously by the Dutch who proceeded to publish them as their own.

This mistake was reproduced for decades. Many well-known cartographers of the time, mainly in Northern Europe, had better access to Dutch maps rather than Spanish maps and gave the incorrect maps more credence than the correct ones. This misconception even penetrated into Spanish cartographers as they saw what their northern counterparts were doing. 249 maps showed California as an island from the time of this first Dutch map until 1747 when the King of Spain finally made a formal decree stating “California is not an island” (that’s word for word by the way) after someone bothered to actually remap the area of California (Esplandian). Ever since then, all the maps have shown California once again as part of the mainland–except for a single Japanese map made in 1865.

Editor: Charles Schnell–Formerly of Blog Class