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

Welcome to Mid-Afternoon Map, our exclusive members-only newsletter that provides a cartographic perspective on current events, geopolitics, and history from the Caucasus to the Carolinas. Subscribers can look forward to interesting takes on good maps and bad maps, beautiful maps and ugly ones — and bizarre maps whenever possible.The place names on this 1901 map of New Guinea read like the abbreviated ship’s log of a voyage gone bad. In rapid succession along the eastern shore are Alligators Point, Traitor’s Bay, and Caution Point. Elsewhere around the coast are Deception Bay and Alert Rock, as well as Cannibal Point and, close by, Deliverance Island.George F. Cram, Cram’s Standard American Railway System Atlas of the World, Chicago, 1901.By comparison, the week that produced Wednesday Island, Thursday Island, and Friday Island must have been a welcome bit of monotony. At first, the modestly named Goodenough Island also suggests a similarly monotonous moment. But it turns out to be named after the most honorable and distinguished Commodore James Graham Goodenough, who subsequently met a distinctly nonmonotonous fate at the tip of a poison arrow. In some spots, the map records more detailed observations as well. If “low and swampy” feels like a damning description of the landscape, it is far from the worst. Inland from Attack Island, the map notes, perhaps redundantly, “The Natives are Treacherous and generally hostile.”But of course, the proliferation of points and bays at New Guinea’s edge only highlights just how blank the inside of the island is. Some topography that could be seen from the coast has been mapped, forming a broken ring of mountains. Beyond that, nothing. Only “Fly River” is charted, albeit in a way that conveys even more vagueness. Along the riverbank, several hundred miles upstream, is a small dot representing one of the few human settlements