Enchuysen

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Portolan map by Johannes Janssonius from 1650 with the phantom islands Enchuysen and Buss

The island of Enchuysen , also Enckhuysen or Enkeuysen , originally Opdams , is a phantom island that was suspected in the 17th and 18th centuries east of Iceland , in the western part of the North European Sea .

history

Postage card by Pieter Goos, 1663
Bellin map from 1767: "doubtful"
Bellin map from 1768: "extremely doubtful"

Their alleged existence goes back to the Dutch navigator and cartographer Joris Carolus (approx. 1566 – approx. 1636). Carolus had made some trips into the northern seas on behalf of the Noordschen Compagnie , a whaling company operated jointly by several Dutch cities . With one of these, carried out in 1617, he reported on his return that he had been able to discover two new islands. In one, between the ages of 60 and 63. Latitude located and Carolus than Nyeu Hollandt referred, it is probably a sighting of the east coast of Greenland . He found the other, named Opdams Eylandt , twenty Dutch miles off the east coast of Iceland at latitude 66 degrees north.

The oldest existing representation comes from a portolan map drawn up by Carolus from 1634. There, a small archipelago consisting of a main island and several smaller islands off the east is entered and is approximately at the point where the Opdams island would be assumed with the name Enchuyser Eylant and the note that it was discovered in 1617. The port town of Enkhuizen, on the other hand, was the hometown of Carolus. The island was taken over in the following decades on various maps of the northern seas and Iceland, including those by Pieter Goos , Jacob Colom and Hendrick Doncker and was also included in Zedler's Universal Lexikon , published between 1732 and 1754. It was on French maps from the middle in the 18th century with the addition douteuse (questionable, doubtful) and later extremmement douteuse . After it became clear that no land existed in the area mentioned, the island disappeared from the nautical charts at the end of the century.

Explanatory approaches

Yves Joseph de Kerguelen de Trémarec headed for them on his first trip to Iceland at the end of August 1767, but could not find them. Among other things, Kerguelen was commissioned to provide logistical support to French fishermen around Iceland on this voyage and another in the following year and, as a result, to contact numerous of them. He stated that none of the approximately five hundred boats that had been in the area in question had seen a corresponding island in the past thirty years. Possibly it was a sighted iceberg, which was wrongly classified as an island. But it could actually have existed once, but then have been swallowed up again by the sea.

Besides the possibility that the island was a pure invention of Carolus, it could also have been a measurement error on his part. In fact, he may have stumbled upon Hvalbakur Island or the Faerabakur reef, just below the surface of the sea . These are around one and a half latitudes south of that given by Carolus, but much closer to the east coast of Iceland.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Samuel Muller: Geschiedenis of the Noordsche compagnie. Utrecht 1874, p. 382. Digitized at the Open Library. Text archive - Internet Archive (Dutch)
  2. ^ Martin Conway: No Man's Land: a history of Spitsbergen from its discovery in 1596 to the beginning of the scientific exploration of the country. Cambridge 1906, p. 80. Digitized at the Open Library, right to the page (English)
  3. ^ A b c Halldór Hermannsson: Jón Guðmundsson and his Natural History of Iceland. (= Islandica. 15). Ithaca 1924, p. 33. Google Books USA directly to the side ; currently only accessible via proxy. (English)
  4. ↑ Enckhuyser Eyland. In: Johann Heinrich Zedler : Large complete universal lexicon of all sciences and arts . Volume 8, Leipzig 1734, column 1135.
  5. ↑ Des Herr de Kerguelen Tremarec's description of his voyage to the North Sea, which he made in 1767 and 1768 to the coasts of Iceland, Greenland, Faroe Islands, Shetland, the Orkneys and Norway. Published as the twenty-first and last volume of General History of Travel to Water and Land, or Collection of All Travel Descriptions , Leipzig 1774, p. 64. Digitized at the Open Library, Textarchiv - Internet Archive