The Un-Discovered Islands

by Malachy Tallack

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  THE LATE MIDDLE AGES saw a flourishing in the science and art of cartography. European mapmakers finally caught up with their Islamic counterparts, having rediscovered the geographical knowledge of Ptolemy twelve centuries after his death. From then on, advances came quickly. Exploration and colonial expansion brought new places to the map, and at home there were great minds at work on how best to portray those places to an eager audience. This was the era of Gerardus Mercator, whose world map of 1569 changed the way people saw the world. It was the era, too, of Abraham Ortelius, producer of the first modern atlas in 1570.

  To look at these maps today is to see a familiar image. The planet is presented much as we know it now, with the continents more or less in their rightful places. But look closer and something else emerges. For despite the enormous leaps made by explorers and cartographers, still people were struggling to let go of what they expected to be true. Mythical islands remained stubbornly in place, and were joined by a growing legion of errors.

  Maps in this period began to be printed in ever greater numbers, each one different from all those that had come before. Cartographers did not always share their sources, so when a new island appeared in the ocean it was not easy to know how it got there. From a distance of four or five centuries, it is almost impossible.

  Other factors only increased the problem. A mistake on one map would be copied on others, propagating it and prolonging its life. Often, and for no explicable reason, different names would be attached to the same place. Islands migrated, drifting one way and then the other across the Atlantic. And while a single source could announce the discovery of new lands, it would usually take several non-sightings to confirm the falsity of that source. Added to all this, navigators did not find a reliable way of measuring longitude until the mid-eighteenth century, by which time their blunders were countless. The maps of this era, then, were well adorned with phantoms.

  Hy Brasil

  THE STORY OF Hy Brasil demonstrates a problem common to many of the places in this book: namely, it is hard to establish facts about phantoms. Much has been written about the island over the centuries, and much of what has been written is certainly wrong. The traditional story, repeated in countless books and articles, begins with cartography and then moves backward into folklore. It goes something like this.

  From the early fourteenth century, maps produced in Genoa and then elsewhere in Europe showed an island west of Ireland, circular in shape, labelled ‘Insula de Brazil’, or some variant of that name. Many of these maps also showed one or two other islands elsewhere in the Atlantic with the same name, but this was merely an etymological coincidence. While these other islands – and later the South American country – were named after a kind of wood used to create red dye, the more northerly Brazil had an entirely different origin. It was derived either from the Old Irish word bres, meaning ‘beauty’ or ‘strength’, or else from some historical figure by the name of Breasal.

  As these derivations suggest, the island was rooted in Celtic mythology. It was one of those mystical lands, like Tir na nÓg or St Brendan’s Isle, that echoed back to earlier beliefs in a paradise on earth. Brazil – or Hy Brasil, as it was later known – was a place rarely seen. It was hidden by thick fog, and only appeared to a chosen few, once every seven years. Or so the story went.

  But the line between myth and map took a long time to become settled, and it seems the belief in an island somewhere to the west of Ireland lingered for centuries. Not only did Brazil continue to appear on charts of the Atlantic, but numerous ships were sent out from Bristol in search of it. Even John Cabot, who is generally considered the first European since the Vikings to reach North America, in 1497, apparently went looking for Hy Brasil. But without success.

  There were exceptions though. A few lone sailors did claim to have seen the mysterious island, including several in the seventeenth century. The best-known of these, a Captain John Nisbet of Killybegs, Ireland, gave an extraordinarily detailed description of the place, having arrived there by accident in 1674. These details were recounted the following year in a letter written by William Hamilton of Derry to his cousin in London.

  According to this letter, Captain Nisbet and his crew were returning from France by sea when a thick fog descended, immersing the ship. When the fog lifted, the sailors found themselves beside an island, where cattle, sheep and horses grazed, as well as ‘multitudes of black rabbits’. The following day, an old man with ten servants approached the ship and conversed with the sailors. He told them that, until a few days previously, the island had been under the spell of a necromancer, making it invisible. Now, however, that spell was broken.

  Whatever the truth or otherwise of such accounts, the island gradually began to disappear from maps, and despite a few unconvincing sightings right up into the nineteenth century, it made its last cartographic appearance in 1873 as ‘Brasil Rock’. And then it was gone. An old Irish myth had been taken up by mapmakers, resulting in centuries of confusion. But finally, the confusion was cleared up.

  That, at least, is the traditional story, often repeated and widely accepted. But it turns out there are some very serious problems with it.

  First, there is good evidence to suggest that sailors in the late fifteenth century were using ‘Brasil’ as a codeword. What they were actually referring to was precisely that place John Cabot is credited with discovering: North America. Their secrecy was a means of concealing knowledge from other European powers, not just about the land itself, but about the extraordinarily rich fishery off the coast of Newfoundland.

  Second, that famous account by Captain John Nisbet is a work of fiction. Not in the sense that Nisbet made his tale up – which would hardly be surprising – but, rather, that the captain himself did not exist. He was invented by the Anglo-Irish writer Richard Head, who used the island of Brasil as a setting for several of his works. The pamphlet containing this letter was a piece of satire, and quite how it came to be accepted as genuine by so many is hard to surmise. It must surely count as one of the most successful literary hoaxes of all time.

  Third, and most significantly, research into the earliest recorded Irish myths has failed to turn up any mention of an island called Hy Brasil. There are plenty of tales of mysterious islands, both in lakes and in the sea, but neither that name nor any variation of it is used in connection with them until long after it began to appear on the map. In fact, according to a thorough study by Barbara Freitag, no reliable folkloric sources use that name until the nineteenth century. After which it became ubiquitous.

  It seems that, rather than beginning in myth and ending up on the map, as long believed, Hy Brasil went the other way. It appeared on charts first, was later used by sailors as code, then by writers as a fictional setting, and was finally appropriated into mythology.

  None of which provides an answer as to what Brazil was doing on the map in the first place, of course. But it seems logical, once the myths and misconceptions are pushed aside, to assume that its name should have the same root as the other Brazils that appeared at the same time. Red dye, or brazil, was a hugely valuable commodity, and could be derived not just from wood but from certain types of lichen found on islands in the North Atlantic.

  Perhaps the Genoese cartographers believed a source of this lichen lay to the west of Ireland. Or perhaps there were rumours even then of a new land across the ocean, where brazil might be found in abundance. The only thing we can say for certain is that we can never be certain. The truth of the matter is long lost. Hy Brasil is a phantom, a fiction, a myth and a mistake. It is all of these things, and in the end it is nothing.

  Frisland

  THE BRITISH EMPIRE boasted several non-existent islands at one time or another. Indeed, some of its very first acquisitions turned out not to be real. Frisland was one, and a peculiar one at that. But no less peculiar was the man who first claimed it for the crown.

  Dr John Dee was a
mathematician and occultist, a spy and alchemist. He was also a strangely influential figure in the court of Queen Elizabeth I. On the back of a map he presented to the monarch in 1580, Dee argued that it was not the Spanish crown that had first claim to the New World, but Elizabeth herself. North America had been discovered three centuries before Columbus, he said, by the Welsh prince Madog ab Owain Gwynedd, and was therefore British territory. But not only that. In fact, the whole of the North Atlantic region had been conquered around 530AD by none other than King Arthur. Iceland, Greenland and even the North Pole: Elizabeth was queen of them all. And what’s more, Dee concluded, King Arthur ‘did extend his jurisdiction and sent Colonies thither’ to ‘Friseland’ and probably even ‘the famous Iland Estotiland’.

  The good doctor was not being wholly truthful. He was relying on some rather suspect sources, and adding some myths of his own. But what he didn’t realise – what he had no way of knowing – was these latter two colonies did not actually exist. After all, they were not his inventions. They were there on the map. And they were there, too, on the maps of esteemed cartographers elsewhere in Europe. Neither Dee nor Elizabeth had any reason to think they might not be real.

  The widespread belief in these islands, particularly in Frisland, which was to appear on maps until well into the seventeenth century, is in some ways baffling. After all, they were not discovered by any great explorer or well-respected mariner. Instead, their existence was announced by a single source, far away in Italy, who did not even claim to have been there himself. But Nicolò Zeno, like John Dee, was a powerful man – a member of the Council of Ten of the Venetian Republic – and this wealth and political influence, along with impeccable timing, led to the rather dubious volume he published in 1558 having a major influence on the cartography of the North Atlantic.

  The book, and its accompanying map, purported to be an account of a journey taken by one of Nicolò’s ancestors, another Nicolò Zeno, two centuries earlier. In 1380, Nicolò the elder set off on a voyage from Venice towards England and Flanders, but he never reached his destination. Instead, on nearing the British Isles, his ship was caught in a violent storm and lost at sea for many days. When finally land was sighted, the Venetians put ashore on what turned out to be the island of Frisland. There they were met by a band of angry locals, who looked set to end the story before it had even begun. But in the nick of time, ‘a great Lord’ arrived on the scene. Being a nobleman, he conversed with the men in Latin, and his intervention saved their lives.

  As would be expected in such a tale, the mysterious lord, Zichmni, asked Nicolò and the crew to join him in his efforts to conquer more islands in the Atlantic. And because of the skill and bravery of his new recruits, success was won without much difficulty. Nicolò, of course, was made a knight, and the Venetian invited his brother Antonio to join him in Frisland. The navigational instructions he gave for the journey were presumably good, since Antonio successfully found his way north and remained in the service of Zichmni for fourteen years, before eventually returning to Venice. Nicolò himself died on the island, four years after the arrival of his brother.

  While living in the north, Antonio wrote detailed letters home to a third brother, Carlo, and produced a map of the region. These letters described the travels of the two Italians, and included details about numerous other places, including Estlanda (Shetland), Engroneland (Greenland) and Islanda (Iceland), as well as less familiar locations: Groeland, Neome, Icaria, Estotiland and Drogeo. The map and letters were passed down through the Zeno family until they reached Nicolò the younger.

  Had the source of cartographic confusion been these original documents, this would be a different tale indeed. The brothers Zeno would since have been cast as fraudsters or fools, and their account dismissed as nonsense. But the plot is thicker than that. In theory, there is no particular reason to doubt that the pair could have travelled in the North Atlantic. By then, the region was well known, particularly by the Norse, and islands like Faroe and Iceland were populated. What’s more, these populations could certainly have included Latin speaking noblemen such as the one described in this story (often identified as Henry Sinclair, earl of Orkney). But in this case, however, an additional layer of confusion was added to the story, not by the elder Zenos but by Nicolò the younger.

  No one except Nicolò seems ever to have laid eyes on the original map or letters, and the book he produced in 1558 was not even a direct transcription of the originals. In fact, Nicolò claimed that, as a child, he had read and, rather inexplicably, destroyed the letters. What he wrote down much later was partly from memory and partly from the remaining fragments he could piece together. The map, similarly, was rotten by the mid-sixteenth century, and must have required some imaginative interpretation to bring it back to life.

  What these alleged facts leave behind, therefore, are several possibilities. Either the story is true in essence, with allowances made for Nicolò’s poor geography and the limitations of his source material. Or else the brothers invented their own myth, concocting Zichmni and his Atlantic islands in order to put themselves, quite literally, on the map. Alternatively, and most plausibly, it was Nicolò the younger who was the mythmaker, and his book was a partial or total invention.

  Had this tale been told by a less wealthy or powerful man, and had it not been taken up by the likes of Mercator and Ortelius, Frisland would have sunk back into the ocean immediately and would never have been seen again. Instead, it appeared on maps of the north for over a hundred years, and continues to be debated today. It fooled cartographers, magicians and monarchs.

  Davis Land

  ONLY ONE BRIEF BUT intriguing account of Davis Land exists, and it comes from the memoirs of a Scots-Irish surgeon and pirate by the name of Lionel Wafer. Though he began his career as a conventional ship’s doctor, Wafer, like many young men in the late seventeenth century, was drawn towards greater adventures. In 1679, he was recruited in Jamaica by the buccaneer Edmund Cook, and the following year, together with more than 300 others, he crossed the Isthmus of Darien to raid Panama from the Pacific coast.

  Wafer sailed with William Dampier, another pirate who would later gain some respectability as an explorer and naturalist. The pair were among dozens who returned to Panama in 1681, with the aim of reaching the Atlantic again. But things did not go according to plan. During the crossing, Wafer was seriously injured when a plate of gunpowder exploded beside him, scorching and tearing the flesh from his leg, exposing the bone. A few days later, things turned even worse when a group of slaves escaped, taking with them not only guns and money but also the medicine necessary to treat the wound. Unable to continue, the pirates left Wafer behind in the hands of the local Cuna people, who saved his life.

  During his time with them, he learned their language and familiarised himself with the customs and practices of the indigenous people. In turn, he taught the Cuna some of his own medical knowledge. Eventually, the following year, Wafer made it through to the Atlantic coast, where he found his former shipmates again. Dressed and painted like a native, and sporting a large nose ring, it took them almost an hour to recognise him.

  For several years, Wafer and Dampier continued to sail as buccaneers, first in the Caribbean, then around Africa and back into the Pacific. Though both men wrote memoirs that sought to minimise their involvement in illegal activities – focusing instead on the land, people and wildlife they encountered – both were up to their necks in it, taking part in countless raids and attacks on Spanish vessels. After one of these assaults, Wafer transferred to a stolen ship, renamed the Batchelor’s Delight, first under Captain Eaton and later Edward Davis. Together they explored the islands of the eastern Pacific and the coast of South America.

  In October 1687, the men were heading south from the Galápagos Islands, intending to reach Juan Fernández (the island from which, a decade later, William Dampier would rescue Alexander Selkirk, the castaway whose story inspired the tale of Robinson Crusoe). But en route the crew exper
ienced a massive earthquake that confused and terrified the sailors. They continued as planned, but what they found was not what they expected. According to Wafer’s memoir:

  Having recover’d our Fright, we kept on to the Southward. We steer’d South and by East, half Easterly, until we came to the Latitude of 27 Deg. 20 Min. S when about two Hours before Day, we fell in with a small, low, sandy Island, and heard a great roaring Noise, like that of the Sea beating upon the Shore, right a Head of the Ship. Whereupon the Sailors, fearing to fall foul upon the shore before Day, desired the Captain to put the Ship about, and to stand off till Day appeared; to which the Captain gave his consent. So we plied off till Day, and then stood in again with the Land; which proved to be a small flat Island, without the guard of any Rocks. We stood in within a quarter of a Mile of the Shore, and could see it plainly; for ’twas a clear Morning, not foggy, nor hazy. To the Westward, about 12 Leagues by Judgement, we saw a range of high Land, which we took to be Islands, for there were several Partitions in the Prospect. This Land seem’d to reach about 14 or 16 Leagues in a Range, and there came thence great Flocks of Fowls. I, and many more of our Men would have made this Land, and have gone ashore at it; but the Captain would not permit us. The small Island bears from Copayapo almost due E. 500 Leagues; and from the Gallapago’s, under the Line, 600 Leagues.

  And that was that. One small, flat island, and another, or perhaps others, to the west. Captain Davis’ failure to explore his discovery makes it impossible to identify, but after Wafer’s account was published in 1695, numerous sailors were encouraged to search for it. After all, the pirates knew this region better than anybody else alive, and if the land was unknown to them it was certainly unknown to others.