Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and their capes!
But we’ve got our brave captain to thank’
(So the crew would protest) ‘that he’s brought us the best –
A perfect and absolute blank’.
Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, 1876

In 1548, the young John Dee met the cartographer Gerard Mercator in Louvain, Belgium. For three years the two were almost inseparable. Almost five centuries later Mercator’s projection of the spherical Earth onto a flat rectangle is still used by schoolchildren and sailors, his name forever associated with enlightenment and progress. Dee first introduced the notion of a British Empire to the court of Elizabeth I and was a key navigational advisor to several major nautical expeditions.