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Introduction:

This map includes one of the most curious cartographic mysteries of the nineteenth century, the mountains of Kong. The mountain range, in West Africa, usually stretches from roughly present-day Liberia as far Benin, and usually appears on or near the tenth parallel of southern latitude.

Geographers had long surmised that the Niger River of Africa must find its source in a mountain range. This hypothesis had circulated from at least the sixteenth century. Particularly in the late-eighteenth century, mapmakers began to include a line of hills or mountains in the interior of West Africa. Then, in his Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1799), Mungo Park asserted:

I gained the summit of a hill, from whence I had an extensive view of the country. Towards the south-east, appeared some very distant mountains, which I had formerly seen from an eminence near Marraboo, where the people informed me, that these mountains were situated in a large and powerful kingdom called Kong; the sovereign of which could raise a much greater army than the king of Bambarra.

Park’s popular account was accompanied by a map, A Map shewing the Progress of Discovery & Improvement, in the Geography of North Africa (1798), by none other than James Rennell, the meticulous mapmaker responsible for A Bengal Atlas (1779). Rennell’s map was the first to label the mountains as the “Kong mountains.” Rennell explained his choice in the appendix to Park’s book:

The discoveries of this gentleman…give a new face to the physical geography of Western Africa. They prove, by the courses of the great rivers, and from other notices, that a belt of mountains, which extends from west to east, occupies the parallels between 10 and 11 degrees of north latitude, and at least between the 2nd and 10th degrees of west longitude (from Greenwich). This belt, moreover, other authorities extend some degrees still farther to the west and south, in different branches

After this map, many others began to adopt the Mountains of Kong. In 1889, however, French explorer Louis Gustave Binger led an expedition to the mountains. He followed the Niger River from Mali to Kong. A town of Kong was there, but the mountains were not. Thereafter, the feature began to dwindle on maps, but it was still featured in the Oxford Advanced Atlas as late as 1928.