Buss (island)

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Map of Buss
Portolan chart of John Janssonius with the Phantom Island Enchuysen and Buss

The island Buss is a phantom island , which until the 19th century, from the late 16th century maps of the Atlantic held. It was allegedly during the third expedition of Martin Frobisher discovered in September 1578 of seafarers on board a Büse (Engl. Buss ), the name of the ship type, named Emmanuel were, hence the name of the island.

For three centuries this island was then located on maps between Ireland and another phantom island, Frisland , at about 57 ° north latitude. The Emmanuel's crew , like others before and after them, probably held the southern tip of Greenlandfor a new island or the island of Frisland and so came to wrong assessments of their position. Misjudgment of the currents in this area can easily lead to miscalculations of distances and positions. Perhaps optical effects were also mistaken for land near Greenland. However, the accuracy with which the coastal outlines of Buss were drawn on the maps, and the tenacity with which they stayed on the maps for centuries, indicate that the island had a real model (namely South Greenland) and also after the Emmanuel seafarers were subject to this South Greenland Buss error.

James Hall reported seeing the island in 1606, Zachariah Gillam in 1668. A certain Thomas Shepard claimed to have visited the island in 1671 and explored its outline. In 1675, the English King Buss loaned the Hudson's Bay Company property, which in 1676 sent an unsuccessful expedition to find the island, whereupon the company lost interest. As the traffic in this area increased, doubts about the island's existence grew. In 1745 the theory emerged that the island of Buss once existed, but had since "sunk". This theory gained some credibility because the sea in the area in question is relatively shallow. Buss lived on in two forms on Atlantic and world maps until the 19th century: as the island of Buss or as the "area of ​​the sunken island of Buss". Keith Johnston's 1856 Atlas was the last to record the island.

literature

  • Miller Christy: On “Busse Island” . Appendix B in: CCA Gosch (Ed.): Danish Arctic Expeditions, 1605 to 1620 . Volume 1, The Hakluyt Society, London 1897, pp. 164-202 (English).
  • Donald S. Johnson, Mirage of the Seas , Diana-Verlag, 1999, ISBN 3828450199