Because the western coastline of North America on Vaugondy's map is so different from how we perceive it today, it is easy to dismiss his map as quaint and misinformed. In reality it was an attempt to portray the latest geographical theories by "armchair" scientists, who could never leave their quarters, and consequently had to rely on the reports of others. The de Fonte and Juan de Fuca accounts seemed reasonable to many European map makers. When analogies were made to more familiar European coastlines, they concluded that "all large continental coasts are broken somewhere between their mid-regions and the North... but above California our maps show a continuous land...such a continuity, without bays or rivers, is contrary to nature." To an eighteenth-century European map maker, Robert de Vaugondy's map may have been speculative but it was not fanciful.