So Geographers in Afric maps With Savage-Pictures fiill their Gaps; And o’er uninhabitable Downs Place Elephants for want of Towns
Sub-titled The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps, the introduction to Edward Brooke- Hitching’s The Phantom Atlas opens with a quote from Swift.
It moves immediately into the story of the crew of the Justo Sierra, who searched the Gulf of Mexico in vain for Bermeja, an island of some 30 square miles that had been first charted in the 1540s.