This map of Africa, by the English cartographic publisher John Cary, was published in 1805 as part of his New Universal Atlas.

In the early 19th century, European knowledge of the African continent was sparse and patchy. Thanks to various explorers and centuries of trade routes, the coasts had been mapped with relative accuracy for centuries. As far as the interior of the continent was concerned, it was a completely unknown land.

One of the first Europeans to penetrate the interior of Africa was the Scotsman Mungo Park, who travelled between 1795 and 1797 from the Senegambia coast to the Niger River and was the first European to document its course. The notes of his journey were published in 1799 and quickly became an important reference used by cartographers.

This Cary map is an example of this. The layout of the coast of Africa is perfectly in line with centuries of knowledge, but at the same time incorporated novelties inland, such as the speculative layout of the Kong Mountains, which joined the mythical Mountains of the Moon described by Ptolemy. These mountain ranges ran from the coast of Senegambia through the whole of central Africa to the coast of Abyssinia in present-day Eritrea.

The Kong Mountains remained on European cartography for almost a century, when the French explorer Louis Binger confirmed that they did not exist.

Sources

• Africa