A map of Virginia discovered to ye Hills, 1651
John Farrer's 1651 map of Virginia shows the Pacific Ocean just beyond the Appalachian mountains. (Note that west is at the top of this map.) Farrer's conception of the continent may have been influenced by the idea that a "Sea of Verrazano" split North America in two, or by the idea that California was an island. Both were common misconceptions in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cartography.
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