What a discombobulating find, Gp. Just as soon as I thought I'd settled my mind on this one, too!

Well, since Caspian was delighted by the idea of round worlds, maybe the globe was just a trinket or conversation piece, modeled off the spherical earths described in the fairy tales he had heard and loved. I can imagine him spinning it and wondering what it's like for people to walk around on the bottom of it.

Yeah, I don't know what to make of that. . . it's interesting, but Lewis was also VERY clear that Lucy had blonde hair, although Baynes' always gave her black hair.

Okay, in all seriousness... I don't think there's any reason to let that illustration affect your opinion on the matter in the slightest. I'm sure Baynes was just adding little details of things that might appear on a ship and didn't bother to re-read the first 3 books cover to cover one more time to make absolutely sure there was nothing in the text to contradict the idea of a small globe being present on the Dawn Treader.

I also suspect Lewis included the idea of Narnia being flat without much concern for scientific plausibility and 100% watertight internal consistency. And I have no problem with that. Somehow, the fact that it's hard to completely make sense out of it, and that the book never definitively states that Narnia IS flat... only makes me love the idea more.

... That said, it's probably a lot more fun to accept the illustration as canon and try to come up with SOME kind of explanation. Nevermind! Disregard this post!

It's round. There's a helpful picture in Companion to Narrnia.