Here Be White Bears or Here be the Dragons ?
Hakai Magazine
▻https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/here-be-white-bears
While dragons and other mythical beasts marked the charts of early mariners, Renaissance maps were illustrated with images—part fantasy and part fact—of polar bears.
by Michael Engelhard
Published May 30, 2017
In the repertoire of Renaissance cartographers, fierce mythical beasts—from sea serpents to manticores—represented dangers of unknown worlds. Rather than “here be dragons,” one early terrestrial map of the Arctic warned that hic sunt ursi albi—here are white bears. Rarely seen and poorly understood, the pale predators signified the Arctic’s challenges to the world.
As men ventured into the Arctic, they returned home with stories of this mysterious creature. Bolstered by the invention of the letterpress, interpretations of the white bear began to appear in print. Painstakingly compiled from hearsay, travelogues, and existing charts, these first images often contained substantial errors, which were then copied. Mapmakers sometimes let their imagination run rampant. Abhorring a vacuum and trying to boost sales, they populated empty spaces on their sheets with creatures that were part fancy, part sailors’ yarns. In an early version of the party game telephone, mistakes were compounded with exaggerations ever more outlandish.