THINKING
Last summer I noticed something unusual on on of my favorite James Monteith maps of Africa: a Lake Alexandra that I had never heard about. Digging into the story has turned into an article about the mapping, and subsequent disappearance of this fictitious lake. Henry M. Stanley claimed to have discovered the lake during his 1875-1877 explorations around the Nile headwaters and the lake appeared on most maps of Africa for the next two decades until it was proven to not exist. Stay tuned for the rest of the story.
I made this map overlaying the actual locations of Africa's great lakes onto the (otherwise beautiful) map that was included with Stanley's 1878 book about the journey.