How the map was filled in — Phoenicians, Ptolemy, the Norsemen, Marco Polo, Prince Henry, Columbus, Cook, Livingstone — set out as a single argument about what each age believed the earth to be. Joseph Jacobs, who edited English fairy tales, wrote it for a general series in 1899. He is good on the errors: what people expected to find shaped where they went. Fifty-nine plates, among them Turner and Church, trace the same voyaging instinct the text describes, from storm-tossed boats to the Taj Mahal.
