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For Hundreds of Years, People Thought California Was an Island
22.02.2024 - 00:13 / atlasobscura.com
In 1971, Glen McLaughlin came across a strange map in a London map shop. Americæ Nova Descriptio, produced by Anne Seile (1) in 1663, showed California as a big, carrot-shaped island, floating off the coast of North America.
McLaughlin, a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, bought the map and hung it on a wall at home. It turned into a popular talking point with visitors, and California-as-an-island became McLaughlin’s decades-long obsession.
Over the next 40 years, he collected more than 700 maps, charts, and other cartographic objects on the topic, building up a visual library of what is one of history’s most persistent cartographic fallacies.
Perhaps that persistence and McLaughlin’s obsession spring from the same source. Even though California geographically isn’t an island, it does tend to feel like a place separate from the “mainland.”
Indeed, in more ways than one, California is a one-off. Some metrics are obvious. It’s so vast and varied that it could easily be a country on its own, let alone an island. California is the largest state by population (40 million) and GDP ($3 trillion, 15% of the U.S. total). It’s home to both the highest and lowest points in the contiguous United States: Mount Whitney (14,505 feet; 4,421 meters) and Badwater Basin in Death Valley (-282 feet, -86 meters).
But the Golden State is special in a more intangible way as well. It’s where America’s westward expansion met its ultimate physical barrier: Manifest Destiny, say hi to Pacific Ocean. Both the 1849 Gold Rush and the birth of Hollywood, half a century later, merely confirmed the image of California in the popular mind as the final destination of the American Dream—there to flourish or wilt.
It’s fitting that a state so synonymous with storytelling should have started out as an invention itself. California is the only state that was named after a fictional place. Bound up with its name was the misconception that California was an island—and so it would remain on many maps, until as late as 1865.
In 1533, a mutineer from Hernan Cortez’ expedition into Mexico landed on a peninsula so elongated that he mistook it for an island. He named it after a fictional island in Las Sergas de Esplandian (‘The Deeds of Esplandian’), a romantic novel then popular in Spain. It says that:
“[O]n the right hand of the Indies there is an island called California very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise; and it is peopled by black women, without any man among them, for they live in the manner of the Amazons.”
The women were gorgeous, brave, and strong, and their weapons were all made of gold—the only metal available on the island.
Though the name “California” can be traced to a specific novel, its etymology remains disputed.
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