As long as humans have used maps to visualize known places, we've had to deal with the areas that were still clouded by mystery. A cartographer would have to do something about the corners where information was lacking either because nobody connected to their own people had ever yet been there, or because it was too dangerous to go there and return.
Thinking about old fashioned maps brings to mind imagery of real and mythical animals, giants, and, maybe most significantly, dragons, who inhabited the obscure corners accompanied by notes and speculations wrapped in floral ornamentation. Truthfully, we can't really generalize that all maps used to look that way before all continents were known to all others, and before modern technology brought all our borders and shorelines into sharp and clear exactitude. But the evolution of humans' knowledge of our world has effectively eliminated that certain element vagueness, and sometimes mystery, that were necessarily involved in the cartography of antiquity.
Those monsters in the corners were often there just for decoration, but other times they really did demarcate the unknown and formidable, or refer to unfamiliar creatures that voyagers reported seeing there. Variations of the now-familiar expression "here be dragons," sometimes perhaps in other languages or referring some other beast, would indicate that some obscure threat or even a real group of potentially dangerous animals was understood to exist in a particular area.
Maps have always been intended by various means to address the question, "What's over here?" And since for a long time every civilization on earth still had its geographical blind spots, and no GPS, the map might present the tentative and partial answer in the form of a little note and a picture - a whirlpool, a lion, a fish, a serpent - and like the maps of any time period, that fanciful and incomplete representation is a perfectly good answer because it represents the extent of the information available, which is all a map can ever do. It's about reporting what we don't know, just as much as we report what we do know.
Faced with the challenge of visualizing the unknown, drawing a dragon is a better method than, say, just leaving a blank white space, which doesn't just say nothing; it says "Nothing." And no, there isn't nothing there, nothing would be inaccurate. We may not know what's there, but there is almost definitely no hole in the world. Nevertheless, perhaps more common than admitting ignorance was an alternative that many cartographers of antiquity were surely guilty of: namely, fudging it.
Places that were known but vaguely, which hadn't been surveyed sufficiently by the civilization authoring a given map, could be represented to show their rough shape, size, and location, and although they might look wrong and strange they would be there nonetheless, labeled with their contemporary names. But when there would be little to no information about an area, there was still the option of drawing in a place whose presence is rumored at best, totally speculative at worst. Using the same artistic approach for that as has been used for the most definitive regions, without differentiating, lends unmerited confidence to a fictional reality. That's at least as bad as leaving a big white spot that indicated nothing at all.
Employing what we can call the "here be dragons" approach (whether they actually drew a dragon, or something else) is a way of visualizing the unknown, owning the fact that there is a gap in the information rather than speculating the existence or nonexistence of a continent, or of a mountain or sea.
Strictly speaking, maybe it would be better, more precise cartography to draw an outline of the blind spot, and make a note that doesn't suppose the existence of monsters just because the place is unfamiliar. And maybe that's more reasonable, but it's not necessarily the most accurate if they understood monsters to be a possibility, say if someone had come back from there having seen kangaroos and giant lizards. Is it inaccurate to describe a strange land with animals unlike anything you've ever seen, by saying that there might be dragons there? If hurricanes and strong currents make navigation very dangerous, why not draw huge waves and whirlpools? That's more informative than just painting it blue and saying, "well, we know there's a whole lot of water here... here be water."
Beyond simply owning the fact that nobody in their corner of humanity has a precise knowledge of what exists in a certain portion of the world, a cartographer who takes the "here be dragons" approach is actually doing the delightfully human work of illustrating it as an intriguing, probably dangerous, definitely under-explored place. It's a way of including the intimidating obscurity of an as yet unknown place as a layer of information. If not taken so literally as to inspire fear, or taken so far as to promote xenophobia, the annotation of a map with notes and pictures about fantastical possibilities rooted in real details, can be understood as a map symbol comparable to any other in a legend: where others might indicate landmarks, passes, or mountains, a strange beast stands in for the frontier of knowledge. The place that is not only unknown, but desired to be known.
It may be fanciful but, again, it represents the extent of the data available. Experiential information can appropriately be layered in with more experiential design techniques. Dubious reports about big lizards can count as data, and their obvious insufficiency as data makes it a place that someone should try to go -- go and see if it's true, and what else is there. The dragons in the corners of the page are a poetic way of saying, "I don't know, and maybe I don't want to know! But actually I definitely want to know."
But let's stop and consider how things played out. The surface geography of the world is pretty thoroughly known now and it's worth noting that humanity didn't actually find dragons, or cursed whirlpools. We did find lions, but just, regular ones that nap all day, no wings or fire breath. We also found big lizards, and places that experience major weather events that make sea travel more dangerous. But most significantly, we found each other, and unfortunately, that was often terrible news for one group or another when they were 'discovered' by a group whose intention was to conquer and exploit them. It's a wonderful thing for humanity that we know where all the continents are now, and technology has given us a big view that has made the world smaller, sweeping the dragons out from the corners of our maps. But it's important to remember that examples of incomplete cartography that attempted in various ways to visualize the unknown, don't represent one group's successful explorations, but rather many people groups' increasing contact with one another -- for better or worse.
There was no single protagonist in the story of how various groups of people came into fuller contact. It's easy to forget that nobody was, strictly speaking, "discovered" by anyone else; they already knew where they themselves were. And what was a "here be dragons" place to a European person was nothing of the sort to someone else out there who called that place home, knew everything about the geography for miles around them, and had maybe never heard of Europe. The same was true of anyone, anywhere, for a long time, and that's what people needed maps for -- to show what was known and unknown, and what we sought to know.
But now that we've all found each other, and we didn't find any dragons, what have we learned? Maybe that the dragons were never there in the places they were drawn, and that dragons never existed. Somehow that doesn't seem right. Again, maybe the most reasonable, but not the most accurate conclusion. Because although we discovered what was in those places, why so many ships never made it back from there, what those creatures really were that were seen over here, and although we don't need to draw dragons anymore, what did those dragons ever represent but our best guesses, the edge of our knowledge which we wanted to chase down? So what if they weren't literal dragons, because if dragons were imaginary all along, then they are as real as they ever were, and they are exactly what they were all along. They are the formidable unknown.
As our ships got better, as human knowledge increased, we simply chased the dragons to the bottom of the sea. Now they live in the places too deep for us to go. As we climbed up into the skies on planes, went up and mounted the moon, and threw unmanned satellites deep into the sky, they went up hid themselves among the stars. Now they're curled up in the galaxies that are too many lifetimes away for us to visit. They live in all the depths, above and below, that lie out of our reach, which human curiosity absolutely refuses to relent of grasping at. Maybe we are something so insatiably curious, that the dragons are afraid of us. So they hide everywhere that makes our stomachs sink from the incomprehensible vastness of the void before us, and strikes wonder into our hearts at our own existence, and at the knowledge that even something so deep and dark is not big enough to swallow us completely -- the formidable unknown has always and will always compel us to try and ride the dragons, to both avoid it in terror and go despite the danger, to find what seems to be beyond knowledge.
Vaccines for incurable diseases, and solutions for mass deprivation of food and shelter, and the healing of centuries-old societal wounds, are also dragons that humanity either actively avoids or faces head-on. To be sure, the average person is too afraid, but it's an extremely and exclusively human compulsion to go after that unattainable thing, even if you're the only one who will, and risk being swallowed into the whirlpool in the corner of the map just for the chance that you might succeed in expanding the map itself. So when we realize our blind spots, we get the opportunity to choose not to leave them intentionally blind and unaddressed, nor fill them with false narratives that make us feel better about ourselves; we can look at what we are at a loss to understand, what scares us and seems insurmountable, write "here be dragons!" across it, and go see what can be known.
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