The Un-Discovered Islands

by Malachy Tallack

  Crocker, though, did not pay up, and had it not been for Peary’s frantic race to the Pole with Frederick Cook, that might have been the end of the matter. Crocker Land would have been forgotten. But Peary had influential friends, and when Cook claimed in 1909 that the new island did not exist, those friends jumped to his defence. This was to be a lie with tragic consequences.

  The University of Illinois, together with the American Geographical Society and the American Museum of Natural History, organised an expedition to explore Crocker Land. Its leader, Donald Baxter MacMillan, was filled with confidence: ‘Its boundaries and extent can only be guessed at,’ he said, ‘but I am certain that strange animals will be found there, and I hope to discover a new race of men.’

  The expedition did not discover a new race of men, but MacMillan did, briefly, think he had found Peary’s island. At the end of April 1914, nearly a year after setting out, he sighted land in the Arctic Ocean. He could see hills, valleys and snow-capped mountains up ahead. This, he thought, was surely the place. His guide was not convinced. It was ‘mist’, the Inuit said: a mirage or fata morgana. MacMillan scoffed and the men carried on, the ice around them breaking up as summer advanced. It was a dangerous journey, and a foolish one, for the Inuit was right. Five days and 125 miles later, MacMillan was forced to concede that Crocker Land was not there. ‘We were convinced that we were in pursuit of a will-o’-the-wisp,’ he wrote, ‘ever receding, ever changing, ever beckoning … My dreams of the last four years were merely dreams; my hopes had ended in bitter disappointment.’

  The return journey was to prove no more successful. Having stopped in northern Greenland to carry out scientific research, one of the Americans, Fitzhugh Green, murdered the Inuit Piugaattoq – a crime for which he was never charged, and showed little remorse. Among the other members of the expedition, Walter Ekblaw was struck with excruciating snow blindness and Maurice Tanquary had both big toes amputated after frostbite. All came close to starvation. And though two relief missions were sent to the Arctic to rescue them, both failed. It was not until August 1917 – more than four years after setting out – that the last of the men finally got home.

  For Peary, the findings of the expedition might have seemed like good news. The mirage seen by MacMillan provided a convenient excuse for his non-existent island. He too, he could claim, had been fooled by ‘mist’. But unfortunately for the explorer’s reputation, while he had lied to the world, he had not lied to his diary. In his book, Nearest the Pole, Peary had given the dates at which he sighted Crocker Land. But his journal, examined later, contradicted the published account. There is no mention of the island anywhere. So either he remembered what he had seen only later, or he invented it. And though he remains a hero to many in the United States, who still allow him the benefit of the doubt, the former explanation hardly seems likely.

  So while Frederick Cook had lost his title as the first to reach the North Pole, he had succeeded at least in catching out his rival. But that small achievement was itself undermined, for in his account of that journey, on which he crossed the sea ice north of Axel Heiberg Island, Cook had gone further. Crocker Land did not exist, he wrote, but there was another island out there, which he called Bradley Land. A detailed account of this discovery was offered, including two photographs as proof. Like Peary, Cook had named his island after a sponsor, and like Peary he had made it up. The photographs were fake. The race for the Pole had been desperate, and neither man came out of it well. It was not until 1969 that anyone reached the top of the world by foot. And that person was Wally Herbert.

  Recent Un-Discoveries

  Los Jardines

  Terra Nova Islands

  Bermeja

  Sandy Island

  Recent Un-Discoveries

  -------------------------------------------------------

  IN 1875, THE BRITISH Royal Navy decided it was time for a tidy up. They knew their charts of the Pacific were littered with inaccuracies, and Captain Sir Frederick Evans was tasked with putting them right. In total, Evans deleted 123 phantom islands from the Admiralty’s maps (though three of these later turned out to be real). It was a significant achievement, and a sign of just how many errors had been lingering unnoticed. But it was far from the end of the story.

  If the preceding centuries had been an age of great geographical discoveries, the twentieth was largely a time of un-discovery, when virtually all the remaining ex-isles were finally expunged. Many of these, understandably, were in the Arctic and Antarctic. These were most difficult regions in which to travel, and the last to be properly explored. They were also the places where optical illusions such as fata morgana were most liable to confuse weary sailors, and where enormous icebergs were sometimes hard to distinguish from tiny islands.

  For a long time there was good reason to leave uncertain islands, shoals and reefs on the map, even after doubts had been raised. Such things could be a real danger to shipping, and it was better to be cautious than to be sorry. But when navigational technology finally made it possible to determine a location precisely, this began to change. And in the latter half of the twentieth century, when satellites revolutionised our view of the world, one could finally check an island’s location without the inconvenience of actually having to visit.

  Today the era of new island discoveries is over, and the age of un-discovery is likewise coming to an end. But that convenience is accompanied by loss. For millennia our oceans have been populated by imagined islands, reflecting back at us something about our understanding of the world. But now these places are endangered and headed for extinction. We are paying for our cartographic completeness with a feeling that something, somewhere, is missing.

  Los

  Jardines

  LOS JARDINES SHOULD not have survived for as long as they did. As phantom islands go, they are among the most inexplicably stubborn. In the four hundred years or more in which they remained on the map, the islands changed size, shifted their location by twelve degrees of latitude, and shrank from ten to just two. They could never have been all that they were supposed to be, and in the end they were nothing at all.

  But perhaps it was that very ability to transform themselves that saved the islands for so long. When they couldn’t be found in one place, they moved to another; and when they still could not be seen, they became smaller. For century after century, mariners and cartographers gave them the benefit of the doubt. So while other Pacific phantoms were erased one by one, Los Jardines stood firm, the tiny letters E.D. – existence doubtful – sometimes appended to their name like a badge of honour. It was not until the Second World War that they began to disappear from charts, and not until 1973 that the International Hydrographic Bureau finally let go of them altogether. They had had a long and restless life.

  The islands were first mentioned by Álvaro de Saavedra, the cousin of Hernán Cortés, destroyer of the Aztec Empire. Saavedra was employed by Cortés to undertake an expedition from New Spain to the Indonesian Maluku Islands in 1527. Despite losing two of the three vessels that set out on that voyage, Saavedra succeeded, and in doing so became the first European sailor to cross the Pacific Ocean from east to west.

  Though he died in 1529, Saavedra left behind an account of that journey, describing his exploration of the coast of New Guinea and his discovery of several new islands in the western Pacific. Among these finds was an atoll or a group of low lying islands that he named Los Buenos Jardines (the good gardens) on account of their fecundity.

  The archipelago was located to the northeast of New Guinea, at somewhere between eight and twelve degrees north. On arrival, Saavedra and his crew were welcomed by the heavily tattooed inhabitants. The Spaniards were greeted with music and singing, and were led to a house to meet the chief. The islanders gave them presents, including 2,000 coconuts, and the crew remained as guests for eight days while their ailing captain rested.

  About fifteen years after this visit, another Spaniard, Ruy Lopez de Villalobos, also came upon a gr
oup of islands – ten, in this case – that he called Los Buenos Jardines. Whether these were the same islands as those found by Saavedra is not quite clear, for this part of the Pacific is well populated by islets, atolls and other specks of land, and in those days there was little certainty when it came to establishing one’s location. It is entirely possible that these Jardines may have been somewhere else altogether, but were given the same name for the same reason.

  Though firmly established on the map for the next two hundred years, Los Jardines could easily have been forgotten. Countless islands and archipelagos were ‘discovered’ several times over and given multiple names, only one of which could ultimately survive, and by the eighteenth century it was becoming clear that whatever Los Buenos Jardines had once been, the name had loosened its grip on the land. The next logical step was for it to be erased.

  But what happened next was not logical; it was almost completely inexplicable. For rather than disappear altogether, as ought to have happened, two pieces of extraordinarily creative cartography gave Los Jardines a new lease on life, and allowed them to remain undisturbed for another two centuries.

  The first of these occurred when, for reasons not at all clear, the islands migrated northwards to between 20 and 23 degrees of latitude, and became two rather than ten. This happened at some point in the mid-eighteenth century, and was probably the result of mistaken identity, though by whom and for what is unknown. For several decades thereafter the islands were in limbo, appearing sometimes in the north, sometimes in the south, sometimes in neither position, and occasionally both. But by the end of that century, their fate was certain: they had left the south behind.

  At this point it should have taken only a few failed attempts to find Los Jardines before the error was realised. But instead, one massive error was compounded by another, when an over-imaginative mapmaker was given the logs of two British vessels, the Scarborough and the Charlotte. These ships were part of the fleet that took the first British convicts to Australia, and were captained by John Marshall and Thomas Gilbert, both extremely good and respected navigators. In 1788, the two left Australia heading for China, and en route discovered several islands and atolls, some of which now bear their names. But according to their logs, the Scarborough and Charlotte made a rather strange about-turn while in the region of 22 degrees north and 150 degrees west. Presumably, with crews suffering from scurvy, they were making a quick, rather desperate search for Los Jardines. But neither captain claimed to have found them.

  Somehow, though, that over-imaginative mapmaker thought otherwise. While plotting the course of the two ships and noting the peculiar manoeuvre at this location, it was assumed that the missing islands had been found. Marshall was credited with the discovery, and lingering doubts over the existence of Los Jardines were suddenly (and wrongly) abandoned.

  Over the next 150 years, some mariners claimed to have seen the two islands, while others failed to find them, and gradually the doubts returned. But the reputations of Marshall and Gilbert were such that Los Jardines stayed put. They survived the thorough culling of phantoms in 1875, and they even survived, on some maps at least, the Second World War, when this region of the Pacific was particularly busy.

  The irony, of course, is that Los Buenos Jardines did exist. They were, most likely, one of the atolls – Enewitok or Bikini – that lie closest to the original location given by Saavedra. Quite why they took on a life of their own is not entirely clear. But at some point Los Jardines turned from real islands into phantom islands, and then finally into ex-isles.

  Terra

  Nova

  Islands

  IN THE HISTORY OF polar exploration, it is often those who have failed most spectacularly who have been lionised. Sir John Franklin is among the most famous of British explorers, though he didn’t find the Northwest Passage, and he and 128 of his men died (and probably ate each other). Captain Scott and Ernest Shackleton are national heroes, though neither man achieved exactly what they set out to do. Perhaps this is why the name of Phillip Law is not better known. For his is not a story of heroic failure, it is one of almost unmitigated success.

  Throughout the twentieth century, Australia was at the forefront of efforts to explore and map Antarctica, and the legacy of that work is clear. Today, the country claims around 42 per cent of the entire continent – a territory that, at more than two million square miles, is only twenty per cent smaller than Australia itself. Phillip Law is in no small part responsible for that legacy. Appointed as director of the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions (ANARE) in 1949, Law established the first two of the country’s permanent research stations – Mawson and Davis – and negotiated the transfer of the third, Wilkes, from the United States, thereby ensuring an Australian presence on the continent that continues to this day.

  He led 23 expeditions in his career, andgg succeeded in mapping more than 3,000 miles of coastline and almost 400,000 square miles of the interior. He visited parts of the continent no person had ever seen before, and did so with a level of courage and determination that few could match. His was an astonishing record, and he was rewarded with a CBE, a Polar Medal, the Founder’s Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, and numerous other honours. Law knew that what he had done was something quite special. ‘Scott, Shackleton, Mawson and such men,’ he once boasted, ‘I explored ten times as much as all of them put together.’

  After leading ANARE until 1966, Law retired to more sedate roles back home, though he continued to serve as chairman of the Australian National Committee on Antarctic Research for many years. Looking back on his time in the far south, he was often known to describe himself as ‘one of the last people in the world who’s had the joy of new exploration.’ He died, aged 97, in 2010.

  In a career as distinguished as this one, some small mistakes are both inevitable and, surely, forgivable. In Law’s case those mistakes came in the form of the Terra Nova Islands, which he discovered on 8th March 1961. These two scraps of land were spotted by the crew of the Magga Dan, 14 nautical miles north of Williamson Head, on Oates Coast, East Antarctica.

  In his record of that expedition, Law made little of the discovery, noting only that: ‘I was able to take some interesting bearings of features along the coast and also discovered two small islands about 8 miles to the west of the ship’s position. I called these the Terra Nova Islands after Pennell’s ship’ (the vessel that had brought Captain Scott south on his final, fateful journey).

  The islands’ existence was accepted in April 1970 by the United States Board on Geographical Names, and a brief note in the board’s archives sets out their position, together with a few details of the discovery.

  It was not until almost 20 years later that anyone went looking for the Terra Nova Islands again. After all, there was no particular reason to seek out two rocks in the half-frozen sea. But in February 1989, a German scientific expedition, GANOVEX V, was working along Oates Coast and took the opportunity to visit these unexplored islands. Their geologists were helicoptered out to the location to map them and to take rock samples. What they found, or didn’t find, surprised them.

  In a telex sent from their ship, the Polar Queen, shortly afterwards, the fruitless search for the Terra Nova Islands was described as an ‘interesting discovery that shows how incompletely known parts of the Antarctic coast still are today, or how much less secure the “known” is’. The telex was sent by Dr Norbert W. Roland, a scientist on board, who explained that they had good reason for assuming the islands would be there. They were noted, after all, in the Antarctic Pilot, used by nearly all shipping in the area. The telex went on:

  As the islands could not be located in previous days, either during helicopter flights along the coast or from on board the GANOVEX V ship Polar Queen, which had approached on the evening of 22.2.89 to two miles off the position of the islands, I made an expedition flight in the morning of the 23rd February together with the captain of the Polar Queen, Peter Brandal, and the pilot Tre
vor McGowan. An area of more than 15 x 20 km2 was searched from 5000ft in quadrants. The unlimited view permitted us to see a much larger area, and whereas other islands like the Aviator Islands that lie in the east and are according to the maps much smaller, or Babushkin Island that lies in the south, were clearly seen and recognised, and even the ship could be clearly seen from more than 10km distance from the pack ice, there was no trace of the Terra Nova islands.

  The Polar Queen later made depth measurements with an echo sounder, confirming ocean depths of 170–355 metres in the supposed location of the islands. Dr Roland suggested that Law had perhaps confused two icebergs for islands. ‘In summary,’ he wrote, ‘the islands don’t exist and have to be crossed out of the official maps.’

  Bermeja

  IN 1997, THE GOVERNMENTS of Mexico and the United States began to negotiate a treaty on the countries’ maritime limits in the Gulf of Mexico. It was a return to a tricky issue, which had been discussed in the late 1970s but never fully settled. There were, specifically, two parts of the Gulf that did not come within the 200 nautical mile limit of either country, and so remained in dispute. They were known as Hoyos de Dona, or the Doughnut Holes.

  The negotiations over these areas might have been simpler and less protracted had it not been for one important detail: the Doughnut Holes were thought to contain significant reserves of oil and gas, so control over them could be worth a lot of money indeed. Naturally, then, work was required to establish exactly where the land owned by each country extended to, and therefore how the areas might best be divided. From 1997, the two governments concentrated on the westernmost of the Doughnut Holes (which covers nearly seven thousand square miles) since the eastern region was also bordered by Cuban waters, making it considerably more complicated.