4
The Lie of the Land
There can be few more awe-inspiring sights in the world than the Mountains of Kong.
The great mountain range bisects western Africa, its towering, snowcapped peaks first rising from the plains in western Senegal, before sweeping down through Mali and northernmost Guinea. In contrast to the surrounding landscape, the looming summits appear strikingly blue, a stunningly beautiful vista, albeit one that is barren and inhospitable. It’s here that the rivers of the region—most notably the vast, winding Niger—find their origin, the frigid, surging meltwater pouring down from the vertiginous granite peaks in torrents between jagged ridges of quartz. Those rivers not only bring life-giving water to the plains below, they are laden with gold dust eroded from the mountaintops, carrying down with them a cargo that for centuries brought both prodigious wealth and much strife to the people who lived in Kong’s shadow.
Onward the Kong range sweeps for more than a thousand miles, through Burkina Faso, past Ghana and Togo and Benin, and on into Nigeria, the low plains and gently rolling hills of those countries harshly split in two by what one nineteenth-century authority described as “towering masses of granite...upstanding outcrops resembling cathedrals and castellations in ruins; boulders of enormous dimensions; pyramids a thousand feet high, and solitary cones which rise like giant ninepins.”86 From there, it extends farther still, striking out, away from the southward-curving coast, deep into the interior. Eventually, the Mountains of Kong meet that other great mountain range of Africa, the eastern Mountains of the Moon (where the fountains that provide the source of the Nile are found), joining together into a single belt of impassable rock that bifurcates the entire continent, cutting off north from south.
Hmm. Right. Let’s pause there for a second.
It’s possible you may have some questions, at this juncture. Particularly if, let’s say, you live in any of the aforementioned countries, or have visited them, or maybe just if you have a basic knowledge of geography. Those questions may include, but are not limited to, “Eh?” “You what?” and “There aren’t any mountains there, fuck you talking about?”
To which I would simply say this: If there aren’t any mountains there, then why do the Mountains of Kong appear on almost every map of Africa produced in the nineteenth century, and even into the twentieth century? Why are there multiple descriptions of their soaring granite edifices and inhospitable conditions, from European explorers who claim to have been there? Who are you going to believe: a handful of white dudes, or literally the entire population of the region?
I think we all know the answer to that one.
But the underlying question is a valid and fascinating one: Just how exactly did virtually every authority in Europe and America, for over a century, hold on to a steadfast belief in a massive mountain range that (to be perfectly clear) absolutely does not exist? I mean, they’re mountains. There’s not a huge amount of ambiguity in mountains. They’re either there or they’re not.
The answer to that question is still something of a mystery—but it’s one that sheds light on exactly how we get things so wrong, so often.
Because, as this chapter will show, we haven’t just spent history inventing wild falsehoods about events that happened in the world—we’ve done a pretty good job of inventing nonsense about the world itself. From imaginary mountains to wholly fictional countries and wildly improbable tales of far-off lands, the bullshitters of history have cheerfully exploited the fact that, traditionally, it’s been quite hard to go and check when someone tells you about what it’s like on the other side of the world.
Our history of geographical nonsense is, among other things, an example of effort barriers and information vacuums manifesting themselves on a grand scale. For most of humanity’s time on this planet, long-distance travel was slow, hazardous and rare—many people would never travel any significant distance from their place of birth—and we didn’t have the advantage of being able to hop on a plane or send up a satellite to take pictures of stuff from the air.
Given all this, it’s pretty understandable that our conception of the planet on which we live might have been a little hazy. Mapmakers didn’t really have a lot to go on and often had to improvise to fill in the blank spaces (even if the notion that they wrote “here be dragons” in the uncharted areas is, sadly, almost entirely a myth).87
But, even though the lack of information is a legitimate excuse, the ways in which this gap in our knowledge became filled with wild and ridiculous fictions tell us quite a lot about how bullshit spreads.
This much we know about the Mountains of Kong: the whole silly affair all started in 1798, with James Rennell’s “A Map, shewing the Progress of Discovery & Improvement, in the Geography of North Africa.”88 Rennell is the first to plonk a huge mountain range in West Africa and call it the “Mountains of Kong.” And, very quickly after that, everybody else picked up on this completely untrue notion and decided it obviously must be correct. For almost a century after that, most of the major maps of Africa produced in Europe and America featured the Mountains of Kong (over 80 percent, according to the definitive academic study of the mountain range’s appearance and subsequent disappearance),89 and numerous explorers reported back from the region, saying that they’d seen, or even climbed, the mountains, despite them not existing.
The curious thing about this is that Rennell wasn’t just any old hack mapmaker, chucking around rivers and mountains for fun and saying, “That’ll do,” before trotting along to the pub. In fact, he was widely seen as just about the best in the cartography business at the time. One of his key skills was using his knowledge of the principles of geography and geology to make sense of the fragmentary—and often contradictory—reports that would come back from explorers. In fact, this might be what tripped him up.
A detail from James Rennell’s 1798 map, with the Mountains of Kong running across the exact place they aren’t.
This was a time when not many Europeans had made it terribly far into the African continent—it was many decades before the Age of Empire’s mad “scramble for Africa” would kick off—and quite a few of those who did make it had, if we’re honest, very little idea what they were doing.
As a result, many maps from this era just sort of...shrug, when it comes to depicting most of the continent beyond North Africa and a few areas near the coast. Some leave central Africa pretty much empty, others sprinkle it with geographical features largely at random and yet others fill the space by drawing some pretty pictures of elephants.
Rennell’s invention of the Mountains of Kong came because he paid too much attention to a throwaway comment from one of the few explorers to have visited the region, and then he filled in the rest, with unfortunate results. The explorer in question was Mungo Park—the dashing Scot whose diaries Richard Adams Locke would unsuccessfully try to fake, several decades later. At the time, everybody assumed that Park had died on an expedition to find the source of the Niger River, only for him to rock up unexpectedly in 1797, after several years off grid, and be all, “Guess who’s back, bitches?” He hadn’t found the source of the Niger, exactly, but he had at least traced it for several hundred miles along its somewhat eccentric route.
Park’s stories of his journeys were quite the attention grabber, and Rennell was drafted in to provide illustrations for them. And it’s here that the seed was planted, when Park said at one point, “Toward the south-east appeared some very distant mountains, which I had formerly seen from an eminence near Maraboo, where the people informed me that these mountains were situated in a large and powerful kingdom called Kong.”90
Park was very likely telling the truth. He had been somewhere near Bamako in Mali at the time, and there was indeed a powerful kingdom called Kong not too far away (the Kong Empire, which had its capital in the modern-day Ivorian town of, that’s right, Kong). And there are in fact some highland areas in the region that have occasional large rocky hills—“inselbergs,” if you want to get geological—that you could maaaybe, depending on whether you’re particularly flexible with your definition of “mountain,” describe as mountains.
What there definitely isn’t is a vast, impassable mountain range stretching for hundreds of miles. Which, you’ll notice, is not something that Park actually says. He just says there were “some very distant mountains.” It’s not much to go on, and he doesn’t really clarify much beyond that—which, in fairness, you can’t really blame him for, on the grounds that, the day after he spotted the mountains, he was robbed by bandits who stole his horse, stripped him naked and left him in the middle of nowhere in the blazing midday sun. That’s not really the kind of thing that puts you in a mountain-clarifying mood.
But Rennell latched on to Park’s mention of some mountains in the kingdom of Kong and ran with it. He did this simply because it confirmed a pet geographic theory of his: the reason the Niger takes such a confusingly roundabout course through the region is because of the mountainous landscape. The Niger, you see, has rebelled against traditional river behavior, like flowing into the nearest sea, instead deciding to go on a loopy 2,600-mile inland jaunt that takes it right to the edge of the Sahara Desert, before it dramatically pulls a U-turn and heads on down to the Gulf of Guinea. This confused a lot of people for quite a long time. When Rennell made his map, pretty much all that was known about the Niger for sure was that it was very big, it presumably started somewhere, and then it kinda...went somewhere else.
Rennell’s reasoning (which is honestly not that dumb) was that it must have its origins high in a lengthy mountain range that provided a physical barrier, thus directing its course eastward, away from the sea. He wasn’t the first to think this—various huge mountains in the region had been hypothesized and added to maps throughout the 1600s, but had mostly fallen out of mapmaking fashion by the late 1700s.
And so he seized on Park’s words, mixed them in with his theory, and argued, “They prove, by the courses of the great rivers, and from other notices, that a belt of mountains, which extends from west to east, occupies the parallels between ten and eleven degrees of north latitude.”91 Note that he doesn’t go for “suggest” or “imply” or “make me reckon” here; he jumps right to “prove.”
In other words, Rennell put two and two together and made a massive fucking mountain range.
And that would have been that, little more than an obscure footnote in the history of cartographic errors, if it wasn’t for what happened next: everybody else immediately started copying Rennell, because he was a very good mapmaker and nobody wanted to look like the big stupid idiot who didn’t even have the Mountains of Kong on his map.
The duplication of the error began almost immediately, when, in 1802, Aaron Arrowsmith published his new map. Not only did he copy the Mountains of Kong, but he also went one very large step further—he extended the mountain range across half of Africa, where he joined it up with the Mountains of the Moon to create the continent-spanning impasse that was mentioned at the beginning of this chapter (it’s probably worth noting that every part of that rather florid opening description is taken directly from contemporary nineteenth-century descriptions of the imaginary mountains).
Arrowsmith’s work is a fine example of the “sod it—just leave the middle blank” school of African maps; he would probably get credit for admitting the limits of his knowledge, if it wasn’t for the fact that he’d just drawn a great slashing line of imaginary rock across the whole continent, like an editor striking out an author’s unhelpful simile.
Aaron Arrowsmith’s map, with the Mountains of Kong meeting the Mountains of the Moon, and a whole load of fuck-all in the middle of Africa.
Next up was John Cary, perhaps the only cartographer in Britain with a better reputation than Rennell, who also added the Mountains of Kong—and, in doing so, firmly planted the mountain range into the category of “stuff smart people know about.” With both Cary and Rennell on Team Kong, it was virtually guaranteed that everybody else would follow suit. Like Arrowsmith before him, Cary joined up the Kong range with the Mountains of the Moon to create a continent-wide belt of impenetrable rock.
It’s probably worth noting, at this juncture, that the Mountains of the Moon don’t exist either.
These nonexistent mountains have an even longer history than the Mountains of Kong, with references to them as the supposed source of the Nile dating as far back as Ptolemy’s Geographia in AD 150, and being repeated a thousand years later in the work of Arabic scholars such as Muhammad al-Idrisi. Unlike the Mountains of Kong, they’re an almost permanent fixture on early maps of Africa, from the 1510s onward. It was only in the second half of the nineteenth century, when a pair of sickly, bickering Brits called John Hanning Speke and Richard Francis Burton managed to identify Lake Victoria as the true source of the White Nile, that Europeans finally came around to the idea that maybe the Mountains of the Moon didn’t actually exist.92
Throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, most maps of Africa faithfully included the Mountains of Kong and (very often) the Mountains of the Moon. It’s only toward the end of the century that some mapmakers started to get a little mountain-shy and began to wonder if maybe this vast edifice of rock might not be as massive and all-encompassing as common knowledge suggested. But, even then, doubters had to fight against a rather powerful source of evidence: the people who’d been there.
For decades, reports came back from explorers saying that they had seen or even crossed the Mountains of Kong. This one, honestly, is a bit of a puzzle, as they even included some people with generally sound reputations for not being complete flakes—such as Hugh Clapperton, a man of such fortitude that he once survived a grueling journey of 133 days with a traveling companion he hated so much they didn’t speak once during that whole time.
The best explanation is probably also the simplest: these travelers came across some of the hills and inselbergs that dot the uplands of the area and simply assumed that they had survived the fearsome Mountains of Kong, because that’s what was on the map.
An 1849 map of Africa showing the Mountains of Kong and the Mountains of the Moon.
It was a perfect bullshit feedback loop of everybody assuming that everybody else must be right, adjusting their evidence to fit the theory, and then everybody else taking that as further evidence that the theory was correct all along. The explorers imagined the mountains because they were on the map; the mapmakers took the explorers’ words and fed them back into the next generation of maps. And so the fictional mountains endured.
Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the paper that Captain R. F. Burton delivered at a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society on the evening of June 26, 1882.93 Burton was a famed explorer and Orientalist, whom nature had endowed with a prodigious beard, a tongue for languages and a marked fondness for Eastern erotica. In his address to the Society, he stood up to stoutly defend the existence of the Mountains of Kong, which, he noted regretfully in opening, had “almost disappeared from maps” (not quite true—they were still a fixture on many maps produced at this point, even if the length of the range had cautiously retreated from some of the wilder assumptions in early maps). It’s Burton we have to thank for the dramatic description of “towering masses of granite” mentioned earlier.
Burton makes the same key mistakes that Rennell made, just with another eight decades of evidence to misinterpret. He places way too much emphasis on theories about rivers, insisting “that such a chain must exist is proved by the conduct of the Gold Coast streams.” He leans heavily on the reports of explorers like Clapperton and John Duncan (who is said to have “crossed the whole breadth of these Kong Mountains”), even when their actual words leave considerably more wiggle room than he suggests. For example, while Clapperton’s editor added a chapter title that boasts of his journey “over the Kong mountains,” Clapperton never actually uses that name; the actual description he provides mostly talks about “hills.” The few mentions of mountains also give a height for those mountains of “six or seven hundred feet.”94 Which...doesn’t really count as a mountain.
And, most notably, Burton casually dismisses the testimony of “a native guide” whom he’d spoken to himself on a visit to the area, who “knew the Kong village but not the Kong Mountains”—despite the fact that the village of Kong was supposedly located right at the foot of the mountains. Because, sure, why would you pay attention to somebody who actually lives in the area, going, “Oh, yeah, I know that village, but, nope, no idea about the huge mountain range that’s right next to it”?
Burton wasn’t alone in this. As Thomas Bassett and Philip Porter—the academics we have to thank for their study of Kong’s history—note dryly, “There is evidence...that Europeans received first-hand accounts from Africans that the mountains did not exist in certain areas, but this information was usually ignored.”95
In the end, it was left up to a French military officer named Louis-Gustave Binger to debunk the mountains. In 1888, he traveled to the area and was surprised to find “on the horizon, not even a ridge of hills! The Kong mountain chain, which stretches across all the maps, never existed except in the imaginations of a few poorly informed explorers.”96
But, even after Binger dropped his “no mountains” bombshell, the Mountains of Kong enjoyed a lengthy afterlife—appearing in a few maps throughout the 1890s, one in 1905, and even turning up as late as 1928 in the Oxford Advanced Atlas, which clearly wasn’t advanced enough to have updated its West Africa section in forty years. The mountain range may have passed away, but its ghost lived on.
While the nonexistent mountain ranges of Africa may be one of the more dramatic examples of the nonsense we’ve believed about the world around us, they’re far from alone. History is littered with nonexistent lands and fictional places.
One of the longest-standing mythical lands is the “Kingdom of Prester John”—a supposedly utopian and vastly wealthy land, located vaguely in [waves hand airily] “the East.” It was purportedly ruled by a Christian monarch named—that’s right—Prester John. The figure of Prester John had been confined to folklore until, in the twelfth century, a hoax letter claiming to be from Prester John himself (pledging his assistance in the Crusades) began circulating.
Both the author and the purpose of the hoax are sadly lost to the mists of time, but the letter kick-started a persistent and long-running belief in the existence of this sparkling unicorn of an empire. For five centuries, explorers set out to discover this great lost land, mapmakers put it on their maps and real-life figures were said to be descendants of Prester John.
This was despite the fact that nobody was ever entirely clear on where it was supposed to be. Over the course of a few hundred years (as fashions changed and parts of the map became filled in with lands that definitely weren’t it), the supposed location of Prester John’s kingdom went on a globetrotting adventure, starting in Asia, before traveling to various parts of Africa and finally settling somewhere in Ethiopia, conveniently close to the nonexistent Mountains of the Moon. It wasn’t until the seventeenth century that people began to reluctantly accept that it had never existed.
It was the tales sent back from the early European explorers that helped to fill in the holes in maps, but their testimony was often quite a way short of reliable. For example, the land of Patagonia was, according to a description of Magellan’s voyages in 1520, populated by a race of giants. The notion of the Patagonian giants became a mainstay of European explorers’ tales for many years, with descriptions of their height fluctuating over time: the giants were twelve feet tall at one point in the late sixteenth century, which was downgraded to nine feet tall by the eighteenth century.
The reality is that the “giants” were most likely the indigenous Aónikenk people, who are not in fact giants—they’re merely what could be described as “quite tall,” in that they are often around six feet. The idea that these people were “giants” can mostly be put down to the fact that, at the time, most Europeans were short-asses.
It’s not just false claims about what you saw on your travels; sometimes it’s the journey itself that’s fictional. History is littered with people who claimed to have undertaken voyages or treks that they never did. To take one example—purely because it’s on brand for this book—for many years biographers of Benjamin Franklin were fooled by a French author called St. Jean de Crèvecoeur, who claimed to have sailed with Franklin to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1787 to attend the founding ceremony of Franklin College. In reality, neither man was there: de Crèvecoeur simply made it up because he wanted his countrymen to be impressed by his friendship with their favorite American.97
In the annals of unreliable explorers, the business of discovering islands provided the most fruitful territory, as it was extremely easy to claim that you’d found one in the middle of the ocean and it would be very hard for anyone to check. Also, you got to name the island after either yourself or (often) a rich benefactor, which was extremely good for business.
Perhaps the most enthusiastic proponent of fake island discovery was a gentleman named Benjamin Morrell, a nineteenth-century adventurer and profoundly dedicated bullshitter, born in the still-young nation of the USA in 1795. As Edward Brooke-Hitching notes in his excellent book The Phantom Atlas (a compendium of “speculative geography,” which I can heartily recommend if you’re a fan of the things in this chapter), Morrell came to be known as “the biggest liar of the Pacific”98 thanks to the wildly untrue tales of discovery he published in his book A Narrative of Four Voyages. Among his “discoveries” were New South Greenland (which doesn’t exist), Byer’s Island (doesn’t exist, named after a wealthy bloke he wanted to impress) and Morrell’s Island (named after himself, also doesn’t exist). Despite none of them existing, several remained on navigational charts for over a century, which can’t have been terribly helpful for people trying to navigate.
It would be easy to assume that such fictional geography is now a thing of the past—understandable in the context of the lack of information available to those living in the past, but not relevant to us living in the age of satellite photos and Google Maps. Easy, but not necessarily accurate, because many of the misconceptions of the past continue to echo today. Indeed, at least one of them actually found its way onto Google Maps itself: a remote patch of land a few thousand miles from Australia, named Sandy Island, which appeared on maps for well over a century until, in 2012, an Aussie ship happened to sail past where it was supposed to be and confirmed that, not only was there not an island there, but the seabed at no point came within half a mile of the surface. Google, along with other organizations, including the National Geographic Society, hurriedly deleted it from their maps.
The persistence of unreal lands is perhaps not surprising, given that land is something people really, really want. Land gives you a home, yes, but—possibly more important—land can make you very rich. You can see that most clearly, perhaps, in the tale of the nonexistent island of Bermeja, a spurious landmass supposedly in the Mexican Gulf, off the north coast of Yucatán. First appearing on maps in the sixteenth century, it had mostly vanished from charts by the early twentieth century, only to undergo a dramatic revival of fortunes when the Mexican government realized that, if it existed, it would enable them to claim a really, really large patch of the Gulf’s lucrative oil fields as their own.99 For years, Mexican ships hunted fruitlessly for the fictional island—and, while they’ve had to admit finally that there definitely isn’t an island there, to this day there are many who insist that there must have been an island there at some point. Some Mexican legislators even accused the CIA of making the island vanish.
So often, our wrong beliefs about the lands we live on stem from our old friend, motivated reasoning: simply, we want it to be true, because land means wealth and power and—for many individuals—glory. Nowhere is that seen more clearly than in the tale of the battle to be the first explorer to reach the North Pole. Or, rather, to be slightly more precise, the battle to get the credit for first reaching the North Pole.
This battle was launched in the pages of the American press in 1909. On September 7, the New York Times announced triumphantly on its front page, “Peary Discovers the North Pole after Eight Trials in 23 Years,” awarding the victory to Robert E. Peary. That sense of triumphalism was in no way dimmed by the fact that, just five days earlier, the New York Herald’s front page had declared, “The North Pole Is Discovered by Dr. Frederick A. Cook.”
The Herald’s story must have come as a bit of a blow to Peary, who had just returned from his expedition, eagerly anticipating the opportunity to announce his remarkable achievement to the world—only for his former friend and shipmate, Cook, who had been missing (and generally presumed dead) for the past year, to suddenly reappear and claim that he’d actually made it to the Pole in 1908. In the Times article, Peary furiously denounced Cook as a fraud.
The fight for credit played out initially in the court of public opinion, and, to begin with, Dr. Cook seemed to have benefitted from getting his story out first. He was greeted by rapturous crowds when he landed in New York. Newspapers across the country polled their readers on whose claim they believed, and Cook repeatedly came out the overwhelming winner.
But Peary was a savvy PR operator and quickly called in favors in his campaign to have Cook’s claim discredited (he also, it was claimed by the Herald in an effort to protect its scoop, bribed at least one witness). Traveling light on his return journey, Cook had left many of the records of his expedition behind with an acquaintance in Greenland, who promised to deliver them to New York. Unfortunately for Cook, the ship that his friend took on his journey back to New York was none other than Peary’s—who, in a supremely petty move, refused to let him bring any of Cook’s belongings on board.
After getting the news that the evidence he believed would vindicate him was not turning up, Cook began to sink into depression, and, a few months later, left the US for Europe, where he would spend a year in exile, writing a book. The New York Times crowed about the news of his “disappearance,” branding his tale “the Greatest Humbug of History” and “the most astonishing imposture since the human race came on earth.”100
(It’s possible that the New York Times’s decision to unhesitatingly support Peary’s claim might have had something to do with the fact that it had already paid $4,000 for the rights to cover his expedition.)
Backed by a powerful newspaper, the National Geographic Society (who had sponsored Peary’s expedition in the first place) and large parts of the establishment, Peary’s version soon overtook Cook’s and eventually came to be the commonly accepted story. His journey to the Pole was officially recognized by Congress, and, having been a civil engineer for the US Navy, he was promoted in retirement to the position of rear admiral and awarded a pension of thousands of dollars a year.
In the century since, supporters of both Cook and Peary have furiously debated whose claim was legitimate. Was Cook truly a fraud who had tried to deny Peary his rightful triumph, or was Peary a sore loser who pulled strings to unfairly steal the honor of the man who beat him?
The truth, you’ll be delighted to learn, is “none of the above.” In fact, it turns out they were both lying.
Today, the expert consensus is that, in all likelihood, neither man had made it to within a hundred miles of the Pole—and they both fabricated evidence to cover up their failure.
Cook’s claim is the easiest to demolish. For starters, he was already embroiled in a scandal over his honesty—one which Peary cynically, but accurately, latched on to in his PR campaign. His claim to have been the first to scale Denali (North America’s highest mountain, known at the time as Mount McKinley) had been widely called into question. That skepticism only grew after it emerged that Cook had cropped a photograph of his companion triumphantly standing on the “summit,” to remove what was very obviously a much higher peak in the background. Much like you on Instagram editing out the McDonald’s in the corner of your idyllic yoga retreat.
Any remaining doubt about this vanished a year later, in 1910, when another expedition tried retracing Cook’s steps and discovered the peak where the photo had been taken—which turned out to be about twenty miles away and fifteen thousand feet lower than the true summit. (Rather pleasingly, this outcrop is now officially known as “Fake Peak.”)
The ol’ picture-swap trick turned out to be a favorite tactic of Cook’s, as it was subsequently discovered that pictures he had submitted of the “North Pole” were actually old photos he’d taken in Alaska. The diary he offered as evidence of his travels had clearly been written after the fact; his Inuit guides later said that they hadn’t made it to the Pole and an island that he claimed to have discovered en route was subsequently shown to, er, not exist. The final nail in the coffin of Cook’s reputation came in 1923, when—having got out of the exploring game and gone into the oil industry—he was convicted and jailed for mail fraud. Which pretty much guaranteed that he’d go down in history as a dodgy sort.
This left the field wide-open for Peary to be crowned the true discoverer of the Pole. So comprehensively had Cook’s reputation been trashed, and so public had been the feud between them, that Peary seems to have had a pretty easy ride—presumably on the flawed assumption that, if one of them was lying, then the other must be telling the truth. As such, his story came to be widely accepted for most of the twentieth century.
This is a bit odd, because, even at the time, there had been serious doubts about his honesty, and, in retrospect, quite a lot of his behavior should have thrown up red flags. There was his diary, which he presented to Congress as proof—a diary that the congressmen couldn’t help but notice was surprisingly pristine for an item that had supposedly been written daily by someone whose hands were covered in grease, in a hostile environment, where it was impossible to wash. There was also the fact that Peary refused to let anybody else examine his records. And there was the fact that he, too, claimed to have discovered an island en route, which subsequently turned out to not exist.
But the biggest red flags came from the implausibility of his own description of his journey. The thing about the North Pole is that it isn’t on land—it’s covered by sheets of ice, and the thing about sheets of ice is that they drift around quite a lot. There’s also not much in the way of landmarks to navigate by in the vast, empty white expanse. To walk to the Pole, you need to take regular navigational sightings to check both that you haven’t wondered off course, and that the ground beneath your feet hasn’t shifted away from where you expected to be. This is something that Peary certainly could have done—unlike Cook, he was an expert navigator, as were several other members of his party—but, the weird thing is, he didn’t take any sightings at all on the entire trek toward his goal.
And yet, according to his own description of his journey, he had managed to walk nearly five hundred miles across the shifting, landmark-free ice in an arrow-straight line, directly to the Pole. Not only that, but, a week before he supposedly made it to the Pole, he sent most of his party back, including all of the other trained navigators. Which is a bit suspicious, but not as suspicious as how, immediately after they were sent away, the supposed pace of his travels mysteriously doubled to an implausible seventy-one miles a day—a remarkable feat for someone who had lost most of his toes to frostbite on an earlier expedition. (The doctor who had saved his remaining toes was...his future nemesis, Frederick Cook.)
In the end, Peary took one single navigational sighting, after which—according to his traveling companion, Matthew Henson—he returned looking thoroughly miserable, and refused to tell anybody what the result was. But, the next day, he simply declared that they were at the Pole, stuck a strip of the American flag in a tin and buried it under the ice. Then they went home.
While the debate about which of the two rivals was the true polar pioneer would rage for decades afterward, the consensus opinion now is that neither of them made it to the North Pole: Cook never came close, and Peary probably missed his target by somewhere between sixty and one hundred miles. In reality, the first expedition across the ice sheets to reach the Pole didn’t happen until 1968, and even then they did it on snowmobiles.
It’s perhaps worth noting here that Cook and Peary were far from the only Arctic explorers to have historical questions hanging over them: take, for example, our old friend Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the future cataloguer of bathtub hoaxes. In 1913 he led a Canadian expedition to explore for new lands between Alaska and the Pole, only for his ship to become trapped in the ice, in danger of being crushed.
Stefansson promptly announced that he was going ashore to hunt for food; while he was gone the ship was carried away by the ice and eventually sank. Eleven of Stefansson’s crew died before they were rescued, while Stefansson himself continued to cheerfully explore the Arctic on sled for another four years, not seeming terribly concerned about what had happened to his ship or crewmates. At least some of the ship’s survivors later said that they suspected Stefansson had deliberately abandoned them.)
While Cook and Peary both resorted to deceit in order to cover up a failure to achieve their goals, other geographical bullshitters throughout history have done it the other way around: setting themselves up for failure by spinning tall tales, which reality could never hope to match.
That’s what happened to a man named Lewis Lasseter, who, in 1930, led a party into the central Australian desert in search of wealth beyond imagination. They were looking for an enormous “reef” in the middle of the outback, one that was made of gold and would make them all richer than kings.
The obvious point, here, is that there isn’t a nine-mile-long gold reef in the middle of Australia. Lasseter claimed that he’d seen it with his own eyes, having stumbled upon it while lost in the desert in either 1897, 1900 or 1911 (the year varied with the telling). He had then been unable to retrace his steps, the story went, but he’d spent several decades trying to raise the funds to mount an expedition to rediscover it.
It’s still a matter of debate as to whether Lasseter was simply mistaken, actively delusional or an outright scammer. Possibly a little from each column, as is often the way. But, nonetheless, as the Great Depression hit worldwide, his tale convinced a powerful union boss to give him backing on the off chance he was right. So a party of eight explorers set off, well equipped with a plane and some trucks, looking for the gold.
It quickly became apparent to his companions that Lasseter had absolutely no idea where he was going and, furthermore, had clearly never even been in the bush before. The group searched around to no purpose, their trucks got stuck in the sand and their plane crashed, hospitalizing the pilot.
One by one, they came to the conclusion that Lasseter was full of shit and abandoned the expedition—eventually leaving Lasseter with only a dingo shooter called Paul and some camels as his companions. Lasseter soon told Paul that he’d found the reef but refused to say where. After a brief fistfight, Paul left, too, and then finally (according to his diary) Lasseter’s camels ran away from him while he was taking a poo.
Lasseter’s remains, along with the diary, were found in the desert the next year.
Despite the fact that there definitely isn’t a reef of gold in the middle of Australia, numerous further search parties went looking for it in the subsequent decades, and to this day, every few years, somebody new will claim to have discovered the location of Lasseter’s Reef, which, to reiterate, doesn’t exist.
Lasseter may have genuinely believed in his reef; it’s hard to explain why, if it had simply been a scam, he persisted in his search long after everybody else had given up. Like many of those who spun false tales of nonexistent lands, he could simply have been mistaken and then doubled down on his false belief, due to enthusiasm or shame or simple confirmation bias.
In that, he’s hardly alone. Indeed, one of the most incredible tales of geographical nonsense in history belongs to a man who had no excuse at all for the untruth of his claims and yet persistently acted as though they were certainties. But to tell that story, we’ll need to delve into the murky world of con artists, scammers and bunco men, where we’ll meet perhaps the greatest grifter of all time—the man who defrauded a country by inventing a whole other country.