Old maps · c. 1510
Here be dragons.
We go anyway.
Medieval and Renaissance mapmakers filled the unknown edges of the world with sea serpents and monsters. Olaus Magnus’s Carta Marina (1539) is crowded with them.
The Latin phrase HIC SVNT DRACONES, “here are dragons”, survives on only a handful of objects, most famously the Hunt–Lenox Globe from around 1510. The English “here be dragons” came later, as a saying for uncharted territory. Programmers still leave it in code comments as a warning.
The edge of the map is where the interesting work is. When nobody has built it before, that’s where we start.