For more than one hundred years, people sought Davis Land without success. Eventually, some assumed the men had stumbled upon Easter Island (and they would, indeed, have been the first Europeans to do so). But Easter Island is alone, and that explanation, like all others, seems not quite good enough.
The following year, Lionel Wafer was arrested and briefly imprisoned for piracy, before sailing to England and abandoning forever his buccaneering ways. At that point he might easily have disappeared from history, were it not for the fact that his expertise proved suddenly to be in great demand.
Wafer’s knowledge of the Darien Isthmus was sought out first in 1697 by John Locke and the Council of Trade and Plantation. Then, in secret, he was contacted by the directors of the Darien Company, and his advice proved to be influential in the siting of the new Scottish colony on the isthmus, based around a settlement called New Edinburgh. But Wafer’s enthusiasm for the project was not well-founded.
Around twenty per cent of all the money in Scotland was invested in the Darien Company’s venture, and all of that money was lost. The scheme was disastrous, and the consequences of the failure were huge. The near-bankruptcy of the nation that resulted was in large part responsible for the birth of the United Kingdom in 1707, when Scotland rather grudgingly signed the Act of Union with England. It was a union that Lionel Wafer did not live long enough to see.
The Auroras
IN EDGAR ALLAN POE’S novel of 1838, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, the eponymous sailor travels to the far south aboard a ship called the Jane Guy. Its captain is seeking fur seals and exploring the remote waters beyond the Cape of Good Hope. He visits the Prince Edward and Crozet Islands in the southern Indian Ocean, then goes onward to the Kerguelen archipelago, two thousand miles from the nearest human habitation – a place known, without affection, as the Desolation Islands.
The Jane Guy then turns west, sailing into the South Atlantic. It passes Tristan da Cunha and continues towards the far side of the ocean. The captain now has another destination in mind. He is looking for the Auroras, a group of three small islands midway between the Falklands and South Georgia. His aim, says Pym, is to ‘settle the question so oddly in dispute’. That question: do the Auroras really exist?
We kept on our course, between the south and west, with variable weather, until the twentieth of the month, when we found ourselves on the debated ground, being in latitude 53 degrees 15’ S., longitude 47 degrees 58’ W.—that is to say, very nearly upon the spot indicated as the situation of the most southern of the group. Not perceiving any sip of land, we continued to the westward of the parallel of fifty-three degrees south, as far as the meridian of fifty degrees west … We then took diagonal courses throughout the entire extent of sea circumscribed, keeping a lookout constantly at the masthead, and repeating our examination with the greatest care for a period of three weeks, during which the weather was remarkably pleasant and fair, with no haze whatsoever. Of course we were thoroughly satisfied that, whatever islands might have existed in this vicinity at any former period, no vestige of them remained at the present day.
Pym’s experience drew on and reflected the accounts of other, real-life sailors who had gone looking for the Auroras. In 1820, James Weddell thoroughly searched the area and found nothing; and two years later Benjamin Morrell claimed to have done the same thing. These reports and others led, ultimately, to the removal of these islands from the map.
But the Auroras are somewhat different from most ex-isles, and expunging them was not the simple matter it might otherwise have been. For they were not the product of a single, unreliable sighting, and nor was their location inadequately recorded. In fact, the islands were seen numerous times, and by very credible witnesses, over a period of several decades.
The first known account of their location came in 1762 from the whaling ship Aurora, which gave them their name. The same ship saw them again twelve years later, though not before the San Miguel confirmed their existence in 1769. They were seen a fourth time in 1779, then twice more in 1790. And if there were any doubts at this stage as to the reliability of these sightings, they must surely have been assuaged by what happened next. For in 1796, a Spanish research vessel, the Atrevida, was assigned the task of precisely locating and surveying the islands, which she did, apparently without difficulty.
According to the log of the Atrevida, the largest of the three Auroras comprised ‘a great mountain in the form of a pavilion (or tent) divided vertically into two parts; the eastern extremity white, and the western very dark; on which latter side was a snowy band’. The following day, the second of the islands was recorded, and was found to be ‘also covered in snow, but not so high as the former one’. Three days later they found the third: ‘a large rock, making in sharp pinnacles, but formed like a saddle-hill’. The exact location of each was checked using chronometers that had been tested only a few days previously.
The Auroras are surely unique among non-existent islands, having not only been sighted numerous times but also surveyed by a highly skilled and qualified crew. It is no surprise, then, that nautical charts from the late eighteenth century onwards included them, and that most mariners chose to avoid the area as they headed for Cape Horn. Such dangers to shipping had to be taken seriously.
But aside from two rather less convincing sightings, in 1820 and 1856, the Auroras were never seen again. In half a century or so their status changed from certain to doubtful to gone, then finally to almost forgotten. Few islands have had such a precipitous decline. So what on earth happened to them?
James Weddell – an authority on the region, and a captain of tremendous ability – blamed nothing more sinister than human error. After completing a thorough search of the area in 1820, he concluded ‘that the discoverers must have been misled by appearances; I therefore considered any further cruise to be an improvident waste of time’. The most likely cause of confusion, he speculated, was the Shag Rocks, a group of six islets at roughly the same latitude as the Auroras, but more than 100 miles to the east. These lonely skerries, or else a trio of rock-like icebergs, must surely be to blame.
It is a logical conclusion, and one that is impossible to disprove. Yet even Weddell found himself hard-pressed to explain how experienced mariners could have made such a blunder. And not just once, but several times. The Atrevida carried the very best of navigational equipment, and had the most able of sailors and scientists on board. Even ignoring the fact that their description of the Auroras does not match that of the shark-tooth Shag Rocks, an error of 100 miles, or six degrees of longitude, seems highly improbable. Perhaps, Weddell suggested, the Spaniards were simply unused to the ‘cold and tempestuous seas, encumbered with ice’. Perhaps he was right.
There is, in the end, no explanation that seems entirely adequate to account for the appearance, then disappearance, of the Auroras. They remain a mystery, and among the most inexplicable of phantom islands. The Auroras
Sunken Lands
Atlantis
The Island of Buss
Sarah Ann Island
Lemuria or Kumari Kandam
Sunken Lands
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THE STORY OF NOAH and his ark is just one of many ancient flood myths recorded across Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas. Whether these tales represent cultural memories of rising sea levels or tsunamis is impossible now to know, but what is clear is that submergence has long been an important motif in the stories people tell. It is perhaps unsurprising then that Atlantis has become the archetypal ex-isle: a strange land lost to the ocean. No matter that it was conceived as fiction, it now serves another purpose entirely: as a kind of sponge for human fantasy.
Several of the islands in this book have, at one time or another, been thought to have sunk. In the early days of European exploration, sailors were generally assumed to be reliable witnesses, so when new lands were reported they would be faithfully added to the map. And if those new
lands could not be found again, natural causes for the disappearance would be assumed before error or fraud were suspected.
One of the difficulties in determining the truth of the matter, though, is that sometimes islands do sink. In some parts of the world, land that has long seemed stable can disappear almost without warning. Up until the fourteenth century, Gunnbjörn’s Skerries were a stopping-off point for Norse travellers between Iceland and Greenland. For a time they were even farmed. Then, following a volcanic eruption in 1456, they were gone. Another Icelandic island, Geirfuglasker, sank in similar circumstances in 1830. Inaccessible to hunters, it had previously been the last safe breeding ground for great auks, which were flightless and clumsy on land. When it disappeared the great auks were forced to breed elsewhere, and within fifteen years they were extinct.
But question marks remain over some disappearances. Tuanaki, in the Cook Islands, was visited in 1842, but two years later a group of missionaries failed to find it. There were reports that some Tuanakians had managed to flee to Rarotonga in the south before their home sank, and the story of its submergence is generally accepted to be true. But it is very hard, in retrospect, to be sure. The idea of a drowned island is somehow both irresistible and unbelievable.
Atlantis
THOUGH UNDOUBTEDLY THE most famous of all ex-isles, Atlantis is not strictly speaking an un-discovered island; it is a fictional island, invented by Plato for allegorical purposes. The story – told in two of his dialogues, Timaeus and Critias – was never supposed to be taken literally. But while scholars today are almost universally agreed on this point, there was more than enough ambiguity in those works to fuel two thousand years and more of speculation and pseudoscience.
The island appears initially in the introductory conversation of Timaeus, written around 360BC. That dialogue, which goes on to consider the origins, purpose and properties of the universe, was followed by the un-finished work Critias, in which the tale of Atlantis is expanded. The details contained in these two dialogues are a mixture of the fantastical and the almost believable.
Atlantis was a large island, they state, located somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. The dynasty of kings who ruled there were descendants of Poseidon, the god of the sea, but their divinity had become diluted ‘by frequent admixture with mortal stock’. They had become proud, over-ambitious and degenerate. Nine thousand years before Plato’s day, these kings were waging war against the people of the Mediterranean, and had already conquered much of the region.
Critias provides a great deal of information, not just about the geography and politics of the island, but about the architecture of its capital city, the design of its irrigation ditches and the characteristics of its ritual sac-rifices. Timaeus, on the other hand, concerns itself with the final, key elements of the story: the bloodthirsty Atlanteans were defeated by the warriors of Athens. Then the island itself was destroyed in a single day and night, by earthquake and by flood, along with Athens itself.
The story of Atlantis is not presented within the dialogues as being fiction. Quite the opposite: it is told as though it were historical fact. But that does not mean that it is historical fact. Even leaving aside the mythological elements of the tale – and, also, the sheer impossibility of what is described – it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that what we are dealing with is elaborate allegory, not ancient history.
But that has not stopped people claiming otherwise. A few early commentators – most notably Strabo, two thousand years ago – considered the possibility that the story might be true. But they were the exception. It was not until Europeans began to explore the American continents in the sixteenth century that the idea of Atlantis as geographical fact, or even as key to some deeper secret about the world, really began to take hold. Since then, hundreds of books have been published on the subject; television programmes and films have been made. This sunken island, which played only a minor role in Plato’s work, has risen to become an integral part of our cultural landscape.
Some of the speculation surrounding the Atlantis myth has been vaguely scientific. Researchers have attempted to tie the story to real geological events. Some have argued that the Minoan eruption, an enormous volcano that devastated the island of Thera – today’s Santorini – around 1600BC, provided the historical inspiration. Others have pointed to Doggerland, which once joined the east of the British Isles to mainland Europe, and which was finally submerged more than eight thousand years ago; or to Helike, a Greek city destroyed by a tsunami during Plato’s own lifetime.
But alongside these theories has been another, less credible but no less persistent, thread of investigation. Though the claims are diverse, the central idea is generally this: Atlantis, wherever it was located, was the birthplace of civilisation, and a lost utopia. In the words of Ignatius L. Donnelly, whose 1882 book The Antediluvian World is certainly one of the most influential of its kind, Atlantis was once home to ‘a great, wise, civilized race’. A few of these people migrated to Egypt, to Europe, to North and South America, and carried with them their technology – including writing – as well as stories of their kings and queens, who came in time to be thought of as gods. Later, a great flood drowned the island and its people. That flood was the same one described in the Bible and in other, similar stories on both sides of the Atlantic.
Though Donnelly’s claims are certainly crazy, he is far from a lone voice. Today, if you want to explore the astonishing limits of human credulity, searching online for websites about Atlantis is a good place to start. There one can learn that proof of the story has been found within the Great Pyramids of Egypt (which are, some claim, not tombs but ancient power stations or radio transmitters). Others argue that Atlantis was situated in the Caribbean, and was destroyed by a meteor shower; or else it was in Morocco, on the edge of the Sahara Desert. One persistent theory is that Antarctica was Atlantis, but a shift in the earth’s crust caused it to move southwards. Some have even suggested it was a planet that once orbited our own.
In fact, you can discover almost anything you want to discover about Atlantis, and pretty much every word of it is nonsense. Theories rise, then topple beneath the weight of their own silliness, to be replaced by several other, equally silly ideas. To investigate them is to be faced with an impenetrable forest of absurdity, into which no one ought to wander.
The paradox of course is that, at their most basic level, these theories are not so far away from what Plato originally intended, for he too was imagining a lost, perfect society. The difference is that his utopia was ancient Athens, ‘conspicuously the best governed [state] in every way, its achievements and constitution being the finest of any in the world’. Atlantis, for Plato, was merely an imaginary foe.
The classical scholar Desmond Lee called the Atlantis story ‘the first exercise in the art of science fiction’. In it, the familiar and the fantastical are tied together to illuminate elements of the real world. The island was a pawn in a rhetorical game; it was created in order to be sunk. That it is still with us, more than twenty-three centuries later, is surely the most extraordinary thing about Atlantis.
The Island of
Buss
MARTIN FROBISHER DIDN’T have much luck. Though supported in his three Atlantic voyages by Queen Elizabeth I, he never really achieved what he set out to do. His first expedition, in 1576, was a search for the Northwest Passage, but he got no further than Baffin Island, losing two out of three ships and several crew members in the process.
The second voyage, the following year, was a rather bigger affair, taking 150 miners, soldiers and officers back to the Arctic. Frobisher believed he had found gold on Hall’s Island, and was instructed to bring as much back as he could carry. While there, he claimed the region in the queen’s name – the very first piece of what would become the British Empire – then returned triumphantly with two hundred tons of ore on board. Tests would later prove it to contain not gold but pyrite: fool’s gold.
His final expedition, one year later
, comprised fifteen vessels and was supposed to establish a permanent colony in the Arctic, and to collect even greater quantities of the as-yet-unidentified ore. On this occasion, Frobisher entirely failed in the first task, but he did succeed in carrying many more tons of worthless rock back across the ocean. It was not, overall, a great record.
On that final return journey, however, one of the ships under Frobisher’s command did make an exciting discovery. Having become separated from the fleet during a storm, the captain of the Emmanuel found himself in the vicinity of an island that was previously uncharted. According to a contemporary account by one George Best, land was first spotted at a latitude of around 57 degrees, somewhat south of Greenland. The ship then ‘sailed three dayes alongst the coast, the land seeming to be fruitfull, full of woods, and a champion countrey’. This was a significant find indeed.
A passenger on the Emmanuel, Thomas Wiars, confirmed the discovery, and offered more details regarding its appearance and whereabouts. (It was, he said, around fifty leagues southeast of Frisland, which raises more questions than it answers.) Wiars was rather less positive about the climate of the island than the earlier account, however, stating that there was ‘verie much yce neere the same lande’.
The new discovery began to appear on maps under the name of ‘Buss’ (a type of small fishing vessel, of which the Emmanuel was one). There were, at least to begin with, no doubts raised about its existence, but it was certainly elusive. Buss was seen again in 1605 by Captain James Hall, but four years later Henry Hudson could not find it. Nor could anyone else, in fact, until Zachariah Gillam in 1668, then Thomas Shepard in 1671.
Despite its three previous sightings, Shepard was the first sailor who claimed to have actually set foot on Buss. Not only that, he explored and mapped the island, showing it as roughly diamond-shaped, with two narrow inlets on the southwestern coast and a broad range of mountains in the northwest.
The Un-Discovered Islands Page 5
