When the world's at stake,
go beyond the headlines.

Editor’s Note: Nick Danforth’s journey as author of this column is drawing to a close. Keep an eye out for his forthcoming book, tentatively titled Fifty Maps That Don’t Explain the World! Meanwhile, we will continue our cartographic explorations, with more on maps coming soon from War on the Rocks. We’ve finally come to the edge of the map, and I, for one, am stumbling off it. Mid-Afternoon Map will continue to appear in some form — perhaps under AI authorship — but this will be the last installment I write.As tragedies we’ve covered go, this hardly compares with the disappearance of Atlantis or New Zealand — much less the last century of human history. Still, it seemed like a good time to reflect on where the maps end.Despite being endlessly compelling as an image, sailing off the edge of the world was not, apparently, an animating concern for European sailors in the era before Columbus. Indeed, the whole notion that an ignorant and superstitious religious establishment dogmatically insisted the earth was flat before being proven wrong turns out to itself be a myth. In this case, it was a myth spread by partisans of science to malign the church in the late 19th century. Amidst a more heated and real controversy over the theory of evolution, a handful of influential historians of science presented the tale of Columbus versus the Spanish Inquisition as an early example of the eternal war between science and religion. In fact, the roundness of the earth had been widely accepted since the Classical era. To the extent the Spanish clerical establishment expressed skepticism of Columbus’s planned voyage, it was on the entirely accurate grounds that Columbus had miscalculated the circumference of the earth, and falsely believed Asia to be much closer than it was.But inevitably, where people