Lost Islands: The Story of Islands That Have Vanished from Nautical Charts

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Preface

Nineteenth-century nautical charts and atlases contained some two hundred islands that are now known not to exist. Despite efforts to expunge them, these islands have been tenacious of life and can be found on globes in airline offices, commercial atlases, and official sailing directions. The circumstances of their discovery, confirmation, and later, efforts to expunge them are a byway in the history of geographical exploration that should interest those who love old maps and travel to unusual places.

The oldest of the lost islands are mostly real islands whose positions were poorly determined. Others are the result of errors in reporting, charting, and typography. Some were born of fraud and deception. Quite a few must have been optical illusions. On the other hand, some volcanic islands do pop up and down. Lost Tuanahe was said to have sunk beneath the waves with all its inhabitants as they waited for a ship bearing missionaries and the Gospel.

The story of these lost islands is based upon collections of Admiralty charts, sailing directions, and lists of doubtful dangers to navigation, and brings the subject up to the present time.

The reader may ask, why should any sane person be so carried away with such an esoteric, perhaps frivolous, subject as islands that do not exist. The answer can only be that he is an islomane. In his Reflections on a Marine Venus, Lawrence Durrell defines islomanes as persons afflicted with a powerful attraction to islands. It is by no means uncommon. From the ancient story about Robinson Crusoe to the latest T.V. show, remote or uncharted islands have exercised a peculiar fascination upon the imagination. As an islomane, I find Tom Neale’s An Island to Myself (1966) engrossing. It is like an enchanting dream: the lonely white beach of remote Suvarov Atoll, the sound of distant breakers on the reef, the peace. And when I read in the census of the Cook Islands that in 1971 Suvarov still had a population of one, I wonder who he can be.

My interest in lost islands came about in the following way. I was leafing through my copy of the Oxford Advanced Atlas (1936 edition), and I suddenly spied Ganges Island off the coast of Japan.

My attention was called to Ganges Island by its location — favorable as a base for oceanographic monitoring of the Kuroshio Current. It occupied a position relative to Japan rather like that which Bermuda does to the United States, and for some fleeting moments I had envisaged its use as a platform for various recording instruments on the southern flanks of that great current system of the North Pacific. These dreams were quickly dispelled by newer charts, and for another instant I suspected that it might be a device of deliberately inserting errors, said to be used by some mapmakers, to prove that competitors are copying. However, it seems to have been a true error.

Recently surviving lost islands

I was further surprised to find two more non-existent islands on the same plate: Los Jardines south of Marcus Island and Podesta Island off the coast of Chile. Now the normal thing to do would have been to throw the Oxford Atlas away and to buy a new one. But here is where islomania comes in. I turned to my New York cartographic friend Richard Edes Harrison, who replied that he had thrown out his Oxford Atlas years ago and referred me to an earlier Bartholomew production, The Great Survey Atlas of 1922. In this Rikky introduced me to the full glories of lost islands, most particularly the host of islands between Hawaii and Japan called the Anson Archipelago (uninhabited). They are relics of the charts which Lord Anson commandeered from the Spanish galleon Covadonga off the Philippines in 1743, along with an immensely rich cargo including bullion.

Now one may well ask how such specious islands could persist on maps until 1922 — and some much longer. After all, Bartholomew and Sons of Duncan Street, Edinburgh, is a highly reputable firm, and today, under the direction of the sixth generation of Bartholomews, it produces the authoritative Times Atlas. Scarcely given to whimsy, beyond draughting a map of Treasure Island for Stevenson’s first edition and naming a couple of islands in a Scottish loch after family members, Bartholomew’s expunged most of the lost Anson Archipelago (including perhaps with a twinge of sadness both Bartholomew’s and St. Bartholomew’s Islands) in subsequent atlases.

So a poor islomane is led on, endlessly, to try to untangle some part of the puzzle. The trail led to marvelous places such as the Royal Geographical Society and the Hydrographic Department of the Admiralty. It led to many new friends and fellow island lovers. But it is not all ancient history; lost islands materialize wondrously even today. As an example, let me offer Ganges Island, the lost island with which my whole involvement began.

Ganges Island is apparently a concession made by mapmakers to the probability of there being something accurate in four reports of an island, and two of a reef, in positions close to 31°N, 154°E. In the 1870’s the U.S. Navy Hydrographic Office began to publish lists of doubtful dangers to navigation, and referring to this location its compiler wrote, The multiplicity of these reports is surely indicative of the existence of some danger in this region, the establishment of which is important. Notice of them is still carried in the 1880 supplement, with the additional remark that the Pacific Mail steamers had repeatedly passed over the position without seeing anything. After its establishment, in a three-storied yellow Italianate building on the (now) Boulevard President Kennedy in Monaco in 1921, the International Hydrographic Bureau assumed responsibility for keeping tabs on doubtful dangers to navigation (their Special Publication No. 20 series). Ganges could still be found among them up through 1932, accumulating notes such as "in 1911 the S.S. Winnebago passed over the assigned position of Ganges Is. without observing any indication of its existence" — and shortly thereafter the I.H.B. dropped it altogether. Recently (November, 1982) I saw Ganges Island in letters a quarter-of-an-inch high on a handsome globe (JRO Globus, Munich) in the Lufthansa Airlines Office at the Boston Hotel Statler Hilton, also in London and New York. Presumably it is to be regarded as a part of the office decor and not a tourist advertisement for the Bermuda of the Pacific. I have noticed that there are variations of this handsome globe, some with five lost islands, some with a few names deleted (but not the islands themselves, which are always there). There has been no reply from the firm in Munich that makes these globes to an enquiry into the cartographic background. I find myself fighting a wild impulse to ask a Lufthansa agent to arrange a vacation itinerary to Ganges via Tokyo.

Not all map errors are so blatant. Some indeed are minute. But this does not discourage the hunt for lost islands. One develops an attention to microscopic detail, giving to maps the kind of scrutiny that Treasury agents give to bank notes and philatelists to stamps.

Studying maps leads to surprises. For example, on the insert maps on the National Geographic Society’s Map of the World of December 1981, there are two little islands just north of the Equator between the longitudes of Nauru and Kapingamarangi. They are not labelled with names; but neither are they fly-specks. One gets the distinct impression that they are traces, overlooked by a draughtsman, of good old Atlantic and Matador Islands. The cartographic department of the society tells me that they will be removed from the next issue of the map. Atlantic Island was reported in 1827 by a whaler. It is not found on many nautical charts and was evidently regarded as a mistake before 1859. Matador Island — a group of fifteen small coral islets on an atoll — was reported in 1876 by the master of a British schooner at approximately l°30′N, 157°E. He claimed that one of the islands was inhabited by shy natives who gave Matador as the name of the islands, and he went on to say that many of the natives were albinos and all were lepers. In 1877 the U.S. Hydrographic Office helpfully suggested that they were probably just suffering from a skin disease prevalent in Micronesia and Polynesia and that this was sometimes mistaken for leprosy. Matador Island is still one of the islands to be seen on the Lufthansa-office globes, but it was expunged from Admiralty charts after 1922; it was allegedly nonexistent as early as 1902 in the pilots and sailing directions.

It is fit and proper that an author who finds the mistakes of others entertaining should be called upon to state his standard of truth. I choose the British Admiralty chart. These charts have a long and distinguished history.

In 1795 Britain founded its Hydrographic Office, and good charts based on reliable observations began to be produced. These Admiralty charts came to be recognized as the standard of excellence. They have evolved over the years, the results of some 200,000 surveys and countless reports from mariners and explorers which have been tidily stored away. These are the basic documentation for the corrections made to each series of nautical charts over the ensuing years. On these charts islands come and go — sometimes marked with an interrogatory. As geographical knowledge grew and special surveys and searches were made, the charts became more definitive.

In the early nineteenth century, many Admiralty charts were compiled, engraved, and printed by private publishers, merely being certified by the Hydrographic Office. But by 1850 a very large proportion was entirely produced by the Hydrographic Office itself — and there was a substantial catalog of its offerings. Today all the archival material, as well as the modern printing plant, has been removed from London to the Hydrographic Department’s new buildings at Taunton, Somerset, in the west of England. It constitutes the world’s greatest repository of maritime geographical knowledge. An advantage of using nautical charts is that they seldom omit tiny isolated islands from small scale (large area) versions, such as a chart of the whole Pacific. Commercial maps of small scale often omit tiny islands, as well as little villages and rivers, of course, from all but the largest scale maps. Thus on a commercial map issued for general public use it is customary not to expect much detail. But nautical charts of all scales are much more scrupulous about showing detached islands, rocks, and shoals.

Just as commercially produced nautical charts antedated official ones, the same can be said of sailing directions. Much detail about who claimed to have discovered a particular island, and about who searched for it but could not find it, is included in such compilations; the works of the prolific Alexander Findlay (1812–75) particularly come to mind. But these compilers did not command resources to launch explorations of their own. It was only in a rare instance that a publisher such as Edmund Blunt (1799–1866) would commission a privately financed survey such as the Orbit’s survey of the shoals south of Nantucket and of (St.) George’s Bank in 1821.

In addition to charts and sailing directions, various nautical authorities began to assemble lists of doubtful islands and dangers to navigation. The first official American list began in a curious way: it was the work of a young and indefatigable Ohio newspaper man, Jeremiah N. Reynolds, whose interest in geographical matters had been roused by the scientific crackpot John Cleves Symmes. Convinced that the earth is hollow, that it can be entered through large holes at both of the poles, and that the inside is habitable, Symmes strove relentlessly to engage the attention of the learned world, with little success. Despite being ridiculed as the Newton of the West, Symmes managed to have petitions placed before Congress (in 1822) to launch a national expedition to the poles. Reynolds was caught up with this notion and even more with the ideal of national glory.

In September 1825, Symmes and Reynolds embarked upon a lecture tour. Reynolds rapidly eclipsed Symmes as a public speaker, and as his eyes were opened, he subtly switched from his lobbying for an expedition to test the theory of a hollow earth to advocacy of a national expedition to survey the Pacific Ocean for unknown and doubtful islands. This was a project much more likely to be attractive to commercial whaling, sealing, and shipping interests. By 1828 he was asked to prepare a report for the House Committee on Naval Affairs. It was the chance he had been hoping and working for. After conferring with New England merchants and whaling skippers and looking over the accumulation of twenty years’ logs, he produced a report on the commercial possibilities of the Pacific Ocean and appended a list of some two hundred doubtful islands. This was the first American listing of islands, most of which did not exist. It had a great deal to do with the original public support of what was a decade later to become the U.S. Exploring Expedition (1838–42). Another list appears around the borders of Captain John Rodgers’s Register Chart of 1856, compiled to accompany the work of the U.S. North Pacific Exploring Expedition of 1855 — the results of which have never been thoroughly worked up, presumably because of the interruption occasioned by the Civil War. And finally, the very complete lists published for both North Pacific and South Pacific by the U.S. Hydrographic Office in 1871 and following years are an excellent source of detailed information. After the International Hydrographic Bureau was founded in 1921 at the invitation of Monaco’s Oceanographer-Prince, Albert I, the task of maintaining up-to-date listings of doubtful dangers to navigation was assumed by that body.

For ordinary daily purposes most people use the general world atlases produced by many different private firms. Some of these are of very high quality indeed, such as Bartholomew’s present Times Atlas. Most public libraries have editions of various works of this firm extending back into the nineteenth century. Stielers’ Hand-Atlas — produced by the Justus Perthes Geographical Institute of Gotha — has many editions extending back into the childhood of the Admiralty Hydrographic Office. Its successive versions offer a rich opportunity to the islomane for garnering a harvest of lost islands.

The compilers of these atlases were remarkably loathe to expunge lost islands promptly and in many cases they depict them on their oceanic plates for up to fifty years after they have disappeared from nautical charts. Whether this immense time-lag in presenting up-to-date information to their public was owing to prudent caution, to inattention to the detail of remote and forlorn places, or to parsimony over the expense of correcting the copper plates, I have not always been able to discover.

The history of geography, even just the discovery of islands, is vast, and there must be some limits to this survey. Considering only the nineteenth and twentieth centuries omits all sorts of legendary and fantastic islands which appeared on classical maps such as Ptolemy’s and on the charts used by explorers from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. This is a province for wealthy map-collectors and the curators of great library map-rooms. Doing so excludes a great deal of speculation about lost Atlantis and other ghosts from ancient times when the globe was largely unknown to western man; and it also excludes a great deal of fascinating history, such as the fifteenth-century Portuguese searches for islands in the Atlantic west of the Azores. Only in cases where such islands have persisted into the era of the Admiralty chart is an attempt made to trace their descent from earlier times.

The dates that seem appropriate for setting standards of truth differ from ocean to ocean. The North Atlantic, as may well be expected, was the first well-described ocean. Admiralty chart 356 (privately printed by W. Faden in 1807, but authorized by the Chart Committee of the Admiralty) is the first of the small-scale charts of the entire North Atlantic used, and Chart 357 of the Ethiopic or Southern Ocean (or South Atlantic, as drawn by Captain Dessiou) is the choice for the South Atlantic. Each contains some imaginary islands, but they are few and easily described without the necessity of reproducing the charts to accompany this book. Chart 748A of the Indian Ocean (1817) is a good starting place for that ocean, and it contains so many little known ephemera that it must be included.

The Pacific Ocean is a special case. It was poorly known for much longer. In the early 1800’s whole archipelagos were as yet undiscovered, and important expeditions such as the Wilkes U.S. Exploring Expedition (1838–42) and the extensive voyages of Russian explorers — in particular the work of Admiral Krusenstern, whom A. G. Findlay called the Hydrographer of the Pacific — were still in the planning stages. The first Admiralty chart of the entire Pacific, number 2683, the same number it proudly bears today, was issued in 1859.

Choosing these charts assures that hard-headed practical mariners had authorized and edited them and that accurate chronometric navigation was in widespread use.

And finally, to keep the subject within finite bounds, by and large, attention is only paid to islands and rocks which were said to extend above the sea-surface. Consequently, this excludes a vast number of banks and shoals, the existence of many of which remains doubtful even to this day but which burden the published lists of dangers put out by the International Hydrographic Bureau.

And now, before getting into the main stream of this book, I would like to make a very definite disclaimer. I can claim no personal knowledge of, nor have I ever visited any of the imaginary islands of this book, but I rather apprehensively expect to receive some letters from people who have. There is an indignant letter in the file on Dougherty Island at the Admiralty Hydrographic Department from a Mr. St. Clair Whyte of Auckland, New Zealand, protesting any attempt to expunge it, claiming that he had spent several hours clubbing seals offshore close to its charted position, and betting all the tea in China that it exists there.

There are two charts inserted in this book. Spread them out upon a comfortable table. Then gather your favorite atlases and maps around you. Now in your mind’s eye, translate yourself to that enchanted crimson hour at sea,