Here be dragons ...

Here be dragons / Hic sunt dracones

The famously evocative phrase—redolent of mystery and adventure, the danger and fear of the unknown, and the perilous task of knowing—appears in, and was perhaps popularized by, the Dorothy L. Sayers’ story, “The Learned Adventure of the Dragon’s Head,” in Lord Peter Views the Body (London: Gollancz, 1928); a character refers to having seen “hic dracones” on an old map. Did such a map exist? Robinson Meyer (2013) gave this information in an essay in The Atlantic, in which she also wrote that the phrase Hic sunt dracones appeared on the so-called Lenox Globe, engraved in silver in about 1510:

Detail of the Golden Chersonese on the Lenox globe (ca. 1510). The phrase is at upper right. New York Public Library. Click on image to see in high resolution.

Benjamin Franklin De Costa, in one of the earliest accounts of the Lenox globe, read the inscription in quite different terms:

In this region, near the equatorial line, is seen “Hc Svnt Dracones,” or here are the Dagroians, described by Marco Polo as living in the Kingdom of “Dagroian.” (De Costa 1879, 129, citing Marco Polo B. II. c. 14, “Ramusio’s ed.”)

That the phrase was neither commonly used on early maps, nor perhaps did not actually refer to dragons, does not mean that dragons themselves did not appear on maps. For example, there are a couple of dragons on a mappamundi in a 1436 atlas by the Venetian mariner, Andrea Bianco (Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS. Fondo Ant. It. Z.76). [n1] While the atlas has been displayed and was previously available to view via www.internetculturale.it, it seems to be currently unavailable, so I cannot show the original. So here is the 1783 facsimile by Vincenzio Antonio Formaleoni, entire:

Planisferio antico di Andrea Bianco, in Formaleoni (1783, 2: between 40–41). Image from John Carter Brown Library, Providence, R.I. (H788 F723e). Click on map to see in high resolution.

And here is the detail of the dragons, placed off southern Africa:

These dragons have posed a bit of a quandary for map historians in the twentieth century, but a valid explanation was perhaps offered by one of the pioneers of map history in the mid-nineteenth century.

Formaleoni’s facsimile made Bianco’s map well-known to many other scholars in the early nineteenth century. The Danish emigré Conrad Malte-Brun described the map extensively, working from the facsimile. Bianco’s mappamundi, he wrote, delineated

The three parts of the ancient world [that] form a great continent divided in two unequal portions by the Mediterranean Sea and by the Indian Ocean, which runs from east to west and contains a great number of islands. Africa extends from west to east parallel to Europe and Asia; eastern Ethiopia and the kingdom of Prester John extend to its southern extremity. It is still the Africa of the ancients, ending north of the equator; the deep gulf that the sea forms on the side of Guinea is not marked. On this same map, Bianco placed two dragons, with these words: Nidus Abimalion. Asia is just as badly represented. … (Malte-Brun 1810–29, 1: 425, my translation)

Malte-Brun misread the inscription about the dragons; it actually reads Nidus Ahamalion, with an ‘h’ not a ‘b’, and is untranslatable. Formaleoni’s (1783, 2:63) own description of the location as (among other things) a “nest of winged dragons” (“nido di dragoni alati”) was taken by R. A. Skelton (1965, 118 n. 29) as being intended as a direct translation; Skelton preferred to think of this obscure phrase as having originated in “a scribal corruption of sinus ethiopicus,” but did not suggest a reason for the dragons.

An alternative explanation for the dragons, although not the Latin, was provided by the viscount of Santarém. In discussing the map in still greater detail than Malte-Brun—he reproduced all of Malte-Brun’s commentary and then listed and commented on all of the maps toponyms—Santarém suggested that the well-drawn dragons off the south coast are the two unsleeping dragons that guard the orchard of the Hesperides, which legend placed at the furthest reach of Africa (Santarém 1849–52, 3: 393 n. 1). I have no idea of Santarém was correct, but the argument is appealing.

Now, if only someone can just explain the image of a hanged man to the south of the dragons.

Notes

n1. This mappamundi is famous today as the primary source for that well-known fake, the “Vinland Map.”

References

De Costa, Benjamin F. 1879. “The Lenox Globe.” Magazine of American History 3: 529–40.

Formaleoni, Vincenzio Antonio. 1783. Saggio sulla nautica antica de Veneziani, con una illustrazione d’alcune carte idrografiche antiche della Biblioteca di S. Marco, che dimostrano l’isole Antille prima della scoperta di Cristoforo Colombo. 2 parts in 1 vol. Venice: The Author.

Malte-Brun, Conrad. 1810–29. Précis de la géographie universelle, ou description de toutes les parties du monde, sur un plan nouveau d’après les grandes divisions naturelles du globe; précédée de l’histoire de la géographie chez les peuples anciens et modernes, et d’une théorie générale de la géographie mathématique, physique et politique; et accompagnée de cartes, de tableaux analytiques, synoptiques et élémentaires, et d’une table alphabetique des noms de lieux. 8 vols. Paris: Fr. Buisson and Aimé-André.

Meyer, Robinson. 2013. “No Old Maps Actually Say ‘Here Be Dragons’: But an ancient globe does.” The Atlantic. 12 December 2013. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/no-old-maps-actually-say-here-be-dragons/282267/.

Santarém, Manuel Francisco de Barros e Sousa, Visconde de. 1849–52. Essai sur l’histoire de la cosmographie et de la cartographie pendant le Moyen Age, et sur les progrès de la géographie après les grandes découvertes du XVe siècle, pour servir d’introduction et d’explication à l’Atlas composé de mappemondes et de portulans, et d’autres monuments géographiques, depuis le VIe siècle de notre ére jusqu’au XVIIe. 3 vols. Paris: Imprimerie Maulde et Renou.

Skelton, R. A. 1965. “The Vinland Map.” In R. A. Skelton, Thomas E. Marston, and George D. Painter, The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation, 107–240. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.