The Un-Discovered Islands

by Malachy Tallack

  On his map, and in the accompanying description, Shepard named several of the island’s natural features after directors of the newly incorporated Hudson’s Bay Company, including Rupert’s Harbour (after Prince Rupert), Viner’s Point, Griffith’s Mount and Robinson Bay. This was a canny act of flattery, which was dangled alongside descriptions of the island’s bountiful resources: fish and whales in abundance. This was bait that could not be resisted.

  The Hudson’s Bay Company sought a charter from King Charles II in 1673, which was granted two years later, giving them a monopoly on trade around the island of Buss. It cost £65, but did not prove to be their best investment. When Shepard was sent out to find the island again, and to secure the fortune that he and the company had been expecting, he couldn’t do so. The island was not there.

  Shepard’s map and his description of Buss had been an invention. Assuming, perhaps, that the previous sightings could not all be wrong, he had taken a gamble and lied about his own part in the story. It was a bold move, which could easily have paid off. Shepard would surely have been as surprised as anyone to learn that Buss did not exist.

  By the middle of the eighteenth century, the general assumption was that the island had sunk; some geological catastrophe had occurred, and Buss had been consumed by the ocean. There was logic to the theory, given the plausibility of the previous reports. Maritime charts sometimes marked the area as a reef or shoal – a potential hazard to shipping – and several captains reported shallow water in the area where Buss might once have been. But in 1818, Sir John Ross of the Isabella (who later that year would discover the non-existent Croker Mountains, in the Canadian Arctic) could find no water shallow enough to be a sunken island. Thereafter, the theory dissolved.

  The most likely explanation for theappearance and disappearance of Buss is simply that its original discoverers, on the Emmanuel, were lost. They had been blown off course by the storm, and what they saw was Cape Farewell, or some other part of southern Greenland. Certainly, there is little in the account of Thomas Wiars that would make this implausible. Later, Captain Hall might have been deceived by ice or by an optical illusion, and he saw what the charts told him should be there: an island.

  Perhaps Zachariah Gillam in 1668 was likewise confused, though no first-hand account of his sighting was ever published. It is worth noting, however, that on that particular Atlantic crossing – an historic expedition that had led, ultimately, to the founding of the Hudson’s Bay Company – the chief mate aboard Gillam’s ship was none other than Thomas Shepard.

  Sarah

  Ann

  Island

  WARS HAVE LONG BEEN fought over precious resources. Oil has been at the heart of numerous recent conflicts, and water is almost certain to fuel future ones. In the twentieth century, diamonds helped to stoke civil wars in Africa, and disputes over fishing grounds in the North Atlantic led to the three – fortunately bloodless – ‘cod wars’ between Britain and Iceland, from the 1950s to the 1970s. But a hundred years earlier it was a different resource altogether that brought conflict to the western coast of South America: bird droppings.

  High in nitrogen and phosphates, guano, as it is known, can be used to produce agricultural fertilisers, and in the mid-nineteenth century a lucrative trade was developing, with Peru as the main exporter. On arid islands, where birds had previously been undisturbed by people, the guano could be found in extraordinary depths, up to 150 feet. Before long, hundreds of thousands of tons were being removed each year.

  From early on, the United States was keen to cut in on the guano trade, but its first attempt was clumsy and entirely unsuccessful. The country got itself involved in an angry confrontation in 1852, when it brazenly claimed rights to the Lobos islands off the Peruvian coast. The claim was baseless, and it was were soon forced to apologise and withdraw. (Twelve years later, Spain succeeded in occupying the Chincha Islands, sparking a war with Peru, before it too had to withdraw. By that time, guano accounted for about sixty per cent of Peru’s total income, and the Chincha Islands were the most productive region of all. The country had no choice but to defend them.)

  Having failed to make inroads in South America, the United States then decided to try its luck elsewhere. In 1856, Congress passed a law known as the Guano Act, which essentially gave permission for a land grab.

  Whenever any citizen of the United States discovers a deposit of guano on any island, rock, key, not within the lawful jurisdiction of any other government, and not occupied by the citizens of any other government, and takes peaceable possession thereof, and occupies the same, such island, rock, or key may, at the discretion of the President, be considered as appertaining to the United States.

  More than a hundred islands were ultimately claimed under this law – most of them in the equatorial Pacific Ocean – and among the earliest of these was Sarah Ann Island (sometimes called Sarah Anne), registered in 1858 by the United States Guano Company. It was supposed to lie about 4 degrees north and 154 degrees west.

  Like the scores of other islets and atolls in the Pacific that never really existed, Sarah Ann should have faded quietly from the map. But instead, a coincidence of geography briefly made it famous. In the early 1930s, the United States Naval Observatory was looking for a convenient place from which to watch the total solar eclipse that was due in the summer of 1937. Searching their charts for the ideal location, right in the path of the eclipse, they hit upon Sarah Ann. But when the astronomers went looking for it, Sarah Ann was nowhere to be found.

  Somehow, the idea that the island had sunk became widespread. Newspapers and magazines at the time repeated this claim, sometimes concocting apocalyptic stories to explain the event. In December 1933, the Milwaukee Journal published a lengthy article about the disappearance, claiming the entire Pacific region was in a state of unprecedented upheaval.

  Coincident with the submerging of Sarah Ann island have come reports of immense activity all over the Pacific bottom, some islands slowly submerging and, in other instances, submerged peaks slowly rising to the surface to become islands. Submarine explosions and eruptions, tidal waves of various dimensions and velocities and earthquakes in southern California, Central and South America and New Zealand, have attended this activity in the Pacific basin, while old volcanoes, long quiescent, have again commenced eruption.

  And so the story of the island’s sinking stuck. Even today, at the time of writing, Sarah Ann is described on Wikipedia as ‘submerged’ rather than as a phantom. Yet quite why this explanation came to be accepted is difficult to understand. After all, as early as 1859 – just one year after it was registered with the US government – articles appeared in several publications declaring the island to be ‘of doubtful existence’, and a search in the 1870s turned up nothing. It seems certain that no one ever extracted guano from it.

  So the question of what actually happened to Sarah Ann remains open. And looking back to the first known mention of the island, the story seems even murkier. That mention came in December 1854, when the Alice Frazier, a whaling vessel, was travelling south from Honolulu. The skipper on the voyage was Daniel Taber, whose wife and two daughters were also on board, and the eldest of his daughters, ten-year-old Asenath, was keeping a journal. The crucial entry was made on 10th December, and it amounts to only a few words: ‘We passed quite near the Sarah-Ann & Christmas Islands’.

  Brief as it is, there are several things worth noticing about this entry. First, Asenath does not make it clear if these islands were actually seen, or if the ship merely ‘passed quite near’ where they expected them to be. Second, at least one of the details must be incorrect. Christmas Island – now known as Kiritimati – is a real place, lying about 2 degrees N and 157 degrees W. But Asenath also claims the ship had ‘crossed the line’ (i.e. the equator) two days earlier. So by this time they must have been several degrees south of that position. A log kept by crewman Benjamin F. Pierce confirms this. He puts the ship at 3 degrees S and 155 degrees W on 10th December, but
makes no mention of Sarah Ann or Christmas Island.

  These contradictions do not provide a certain answer, but they do hint at a possible solution. What they suggest is a case of double identities, with one standout contender. For there is another island in this region – Malden – which lies at the same longitude as Sarah Ann, but at 4 degrees south rather than north of the equator. Perhaps, like many such islands in the nineteenth century, Malden was known by more than one name. And perhaps, banking on the possibility that they were in fact two islands rather than one, the United States Guano Company claimed both of them. The change of latitude may have been merely an error, compounded by Sarah Ann’s failure to surface.

  Lemuria

  or

  Kumari

  Kandam

  IN THE MID-NINETEENTH century, the British zoologist Philip Sclater was faced with a puzzle. A well-respected scientist, who would go on to become secretary of the Zoological Society of London, as well as founding editor of Ibis, the journal of the British Ornithologists’ Union, Sclater specialised in zoogeography. He studied the distribution of animals and birds around the world, and was the first to divide the planet into the biological regions which today are called ecozones.

  Though he wrote most extensively on the birds of South and Central America, Sclater’s interests were wide-ranging and included the wildlife of Madagascar, which he described as ‘one of the most anomalous faunas existing on the world’s surface’. The anomaly that particularly interested him was the lemur, a primate endemic to the island but with relatives both on the African continent and in India.

  The connection with Africa was easily explained – the island is only 250 miles offshore – but India was a more troubling question, for a whole ocean divides it from Madagascar. This was the puzzle facing Philip Sclater, when, in 1864, he wrote a short essay for The Quarterly Journal of Science, in which he suggested one possible explanation:

  that anterior to the existence of Africa in its present shape, a large continent occupied parts of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans stretching out towards (what is now) America to the west, and to India and its islands on the east; that this continent was broken up into islands, of which some have became amalgamated with the present continent of Africa, and some, possibly, with what is now Asia; and that in Madagascar and the Mascarene Islands we have existing relics of this great continent, for which … I should propose the name Lemuria!

  In the nineteenth century, the notion of a sunken continent was not a particularly controversial one. It was a logical answer to a difficult question, and Sclater was not the first to suggest it. Nor would he be the last. Though some of his contemporaries, including Charles Darwin, were unconvinced, others took the idea and went even further with it.

  It was a German biologist, Ernst Haeckel,who first suggested Lemuria might be the birthplace of mankind. Like Sclater, he was well respected and influential, but prone to occasional leaps of logic and rather dodgy theories about race. In his book, The History of Creation, published in English in 1876, Haeckel proposed that the evolutionary step from ape to human could have occurred in the now sunken land, thus explaining the shortage of ‘missing link’ fossils elsewhere. On a map contained in that book, the various peoples of the world were shown emanating from Lemuria, which was given the additional label, ‘Paradise’.

  Both Sclater and Haeckel were scientists. They recognised their hypothesis lacked solid evidence, and neither tried to claim Lemuria as fact. But others did. The idea, once planted, took on a life of its own.

  Haeckel’s writing was influential not just among European racists, but also among the very same people who were then producing and consuming books about Atlantis. Indeed, many of these books began to link the two locations, with the Lemurian people sometimes identified as ancestors of the Atlanteans.

  Some of the claims made about Lemuria were, if anything, even more preposterous than those linked with Plato’s story. Helena Blavatsky, co-founder of the occultist Theosophical Society, argued in her book The Secret Doctrine that the Lemurians had been hermaphrodites with four arms, who laid eggs rather than giving birth. They were, she wrote, one of the seven ‘root races’ of the world. A later writer offered a somewhat different description, suggesting that the people of the lost land were twelve to fifteen feet tall with thick scaly skin, and that they kept large reptiles as pets. Another theory – still popular today – is that descendants of the Lemurians live inside Mount Shasta in northern California.

  But it wasn’t just Western fantasists who took an interest in Haeckel’s hypothesis. In India, the traditional stories and literature of the Tamil people included tales of a land that disappeared beneath the ocean, possibly destroyed by tsunamis. These stories had not previously been given much cultural status, and there was no clear indication within them of how large the land had been. But when the idea of Lemuria found its way into Indian textbooks at the end of the nineteenth century, the traditional tales were given unexpected credence.

  The Tamil people have an ancient language and culture, centred around Tamil Nadu in southeast India and on the island of Sri Lanka. The early twentieth century saw a revival of this culture, and a determined effort to push back against the dominance of other Indian languages. The notion of a lost homeland (either an island or a larger extension of the Indian subcontinent) was propagated by revivalist writers, and gradually Lemuria – renamed Kumari Kandam – became a central part of contemporary Tamil mythology.

  A peculiar mirror image then developed between Western and Eastern interpretations of this story. While some in Europe and North America used the idea of a Lemurian ‘root race’ to justify their belief in Aryan superiority,Kumari Kandam was specifically used in India to promote another falsehood: that the Tamil language and culture was the oldest and purest in the world. Some even claimed that all other peoples were descended from Kumarian Tamils.

  By the mid-twentieth century, science had moved on. The theories of continental drift and, later, of plate tectonics provided a more convincing answer to the questions that had troubled biologists and geologists a hundred years before. India and Madagascar were indeed connected, it turned out, but not by a land bridge, and certainly not as recently as Ernst Haeckel imagined. The split took place more than 80 million years ago, a very long time before anything like a human being had evolved. The idea of Lemuria, and of other sunken continents such as Mu in the Pacific, was swiftly abandoned by all but the most gullible.

  In India, though, it proved much harder to let go of the belief. Kumari Kandam had become important to people’s sense of cultural identity, and so it remained. Right up until the early 1980s the story of a lost homeland was taught in some Tamil schools as though it were fact, and still today many believe it has science on its side. Philip Sclater’s hypothesis may have been disproved, but the land he imagined has not yet disappeared entirely.

  Fraudulent Islands

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  Isle Phelipeaux

  Javasu

  Onaseuse

  Crocker Land

  Fraudulent Islands

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  AMONG THE MULTITUDE OF non-existent islands that have appeared on maps over the past few centuries, the vast majority are the result of mistakes. They are accidental phantoms, caused by imperfect navigation, optical illusions or poor recording by mariners and cartographers. Sometimes, though, there is no accident at all. Islands are invented deliberately, often creating inordinate confusion as a result.

  There were many reasons for mariners to lie about what they had discovered, especially if the chances of being found out were slim. Fame and prestige could be found by the most creative liars; the public were often eager to learn of new discoveries overseas, and a captain with a good imagination could do well. But there was money, too, to be made in this business. Investors would only support explorers if they thought it worth their while, so there was plenty to be gain
ed by lying. Rich businessmen and politicians were also keen to be immortalised, and what better tribute could there be than an island bearing their name?

  Just as it was hard to identify errors on the map, lies could take a long time to uncover, and they could cause a lot of problems in the process. In 1910, the International Date Line had to be redrawn after it was discovered that Byres Island and Morrell Island – around which it had previously diverted, northwest of Hawaii – did not actually exist. They were the inventions of Benjamin Morrell, a nineteenth-century sealing captain, whose reputation for fantasy was widely known in his own lifetime. Morrell’s semi-fictional memoir, A Narrative of Four Voyages, included accounts of his searches for other doubtful islands, including the Auroras. And though he apparently succeeded in finding Bouvet Island – a remote speck in the South Atlantic, which many had previously thought to be a phantom – the American couldn’t resist inventing a couple of his own. He was far from the only one.

  Isle Phelipeaux

  THE LOCATION OF international borders has often been the cause of conflict, and sometimes of confusion. Perhaps only once, however, has a border been marked by a fictitious island. And extraordinary as it may now seem, that border was between the British colonies in Canada and the newly founded United States of America.

  When the American Revolutionary War ended in 1783, confirming for the first time the existence of the United States as a sovereign, independent nation, the limits of that new nation had to be defined. The necessary negotiations for this took place in Paris, and were led, on the American side, by Benjamin Franklin, John Jay and John Adams, and on the British by David Hartley. The result of these talks was the Treaty of Paris, signed on 3rd September of that year, which set out the terms of the peace brokered between the new country and the old. While the first article of this short treaty was an official relinquishment of all claims by King George III on the territory of the United States, the second – a single paragraph of just over five hundred words – described the boundaries of that territory.