Maps can do more than express flat or neatly measured ideas:
[M]apmakers don’t always value precision above all else. Indeed, historically, cartographers have introduced outrageous inaccuracies into their atlases. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. During the Age of Discovery, explorers plotted islands and continents where none existed. First, writers, and later, propagandists, discovered that a fake map can lend legitimacy to wild ideas.
Faking it brought legitimacy to wild ideas. Or perhaps this was just an early version of prototyping.