For centuries, explorers, merchants, and military forces have relied upon maps to help them describe and navigate our planet. Using anecdotal evidence and sometimes scant geographical data for places they themselves may never have seen, cartographers frequently included fanciful or factual drawings to tease the imagination and the intellectincluding this calendar's mythical sea dragon on a map of Ireland, figureheads symbolizing the wind rose on Ptolemy's World Map, heraldic imagery on the Map of the World with Coats of Arms of Various Countries.
