'Here be Dragons . .' MYTHS & LEGENDS ON OLD MAPS MYTH: A purely
fictitious narrative, magnified by tradition, usually involving
supernatural persons or events and expressive of primitive
beliefs. LEGEND: An unauthentic story handed down by tradition
and popularly regarded as historical. A study of cartography may
well seem to many to be a weighty subject, so let us digress in
lighter vein for a moment to look at some of the myths and
legends which over the ages have intrigued our ancestors and
which, to a surprising extent, may be claimed to have affected
the course of historical discoveries. Writing in 1665 John
Bunyan could have conjured up the most unlikely dragons in the
awareness that his readers would accept them, however fearsome,
as nothing more than allegorical. Chaucer, writing three hundred
years earlier, would not have been so confident of readers'
acceptance of his dragons as mythical beasts and, indeed, in the
setting of the time, why should he have done so. In the
fourteenth century anyone loo