Africa’s largest lake, known to this day by its colonial name Lake Victoria, features an indentation in the south-west that many texts and maps refer to as Emin Pasha Gulf (Fig. 1). Located in the Tanzanian part of the lake, this indentation has a surface area of around 2,600 square kilometres and thus is about five times the size of...
On May 16, 1893, the cartographer Paul Langhans (1867–1952) wrote to German explorer Joachim Graf von Pfeil und Klein-Ellguth (1857–1924), a former farmer in the Orange Free State and colonial politician: “Highly esteemed Count! […] The crossing of Neu-Mecklenburg in 1:200,000 is now in autography, […]. I request a short text for the map, according to which also the lettering...
Picture in your mind’s eye a map of the world. If asked to point to Asia, where does your finger land? The answer to this question has shifted throughout the centuries, depending on who you were and where you lived. For European cartographers of the early to mid-nineteenth century responsible for representing the vast territory also known as the “Orient,”...
