Old maps, more than any other artefact, (0) BETRAY the anxieties of the age that produced them. Where the surveyor's knowledge thin, the cartographer reached for embellishment: sea-monsters crowded the margins and speculative coastlines themselves into shapes more pleasing to the royal eye than true to any shore. To read such a map today is to witness a curious sleight of hand, in which ignorance has been into ornament. The scholar who examines them must therefore a certain scepticism, treating each flourish as a confession rather than a decoration. Yet for all their inaccuracies, these documents preserve something the modern satellite cannot: the felt of the unknown, the conviction that beyond the last reliable meridian the world became strange. Contemporary atlases have away this mystery with merciless precision, leaving no of terra incognita on which the imagination might gain purchase. Something has been gained, of course, but something equally real has been in the trade.