Phantom Island

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Erdapfel by Martin Behaim , 1492
Map by Nicolo Zeno , 1558
Route of the SY Nimrod in search of the Phantom Islands in the South Pacific (1909)
The two southernmost islands on this map of the Tuamotu Archipelago from 1839 are also phantom islands: St. Juan Baptist and Encarnation I.

A phantom island or false island (also Isla fantasma , Spanish for false or ghost island) is an island that is recorded on historical maps or described in historical documents, but actually never existed. According to the current state of knowledge, phantom islands cannot be safely derived from an existing island, nor have they sunk below sea ​​level volcanically , tectonically , climatically or through erosion . Most of the phantom islands were temporarily marked on nautical charts .

Even today there are still unsecured islands, especially in the South Pacific . For example, the existence of the two reefs Ernest-Legouvé and Maria Theresia , which are recorded in many contemporary atlases, is currently controversial.

In 1906, the explorer Robert Peary even believed that he had found an eighth continent called Crocker Land, which had long been suspected in the Arctic Ocean .

Real effects of phantom islands

Even if phantom islands do not exist, they are by no means only amusing marginal phenomena in cartography . Expeditions set out to look for many phantom islands, and people were richly rewarded (for example, João Vaz Corte-Real for his discovery of the phantom island of Bacalao ). Trading companies paid money for the right to trade with Phantom Island (such as the Hudson's Bay Company for trading rights with the island of Buss ), and seafarers ventured out into the Atlantic, trusting that they would be able to anchor with them. Allegedly, on his first trip to America , Christopher Columbus hoped for a stopover on the phantom island of Antilia .

Causes of the appearance of Phantom Islands

The oldest phantom islands have their origins in ancient or Christian legends . Antilia, the Saint Brendan Islands or Hy Brasil were entered on nautical charts because cartographers and seafarers believed that saints and bishops had established ideal empires in the Atlantic. If such land could not be found, it was assumed that it was further west. This is why such phantoms appear on early modern maps.

A number of islands have also been discovered several times over the centuries. For example, knowledge about certain islands already known in antiquity was lost again in the course of the Middle Ages (such as the Canary Islands or the Azores ). Occasionally these were also responsible for the creation of legends of the kind described above. If seafarers now encountered the real island and it did not correspond to the legendary ideas, the island with the "correct" attributes had to be further west. In some cases, the first discovery left no traces on the island in question and its geographical location was inaccurately reproduced or the “second discoverer” was mistaken about his own geographical location.

Magnetic compass deviations, the inability to reliably determine geographical longitude until the late 18th century (→ longitude problem ), and invisible ocean currents that could drive a ship considerably faster or make a ship imperceptibly drift away, ensured exact descriptions of nonexistent islands. For almost three centuries, the island of Buss was marked on all maps of the North Atlantic . Strong currents had probably dissuaded several visitors to the "island of Buss" so far from their assumed course to the north that they mistook the southern tip of Greenland (whose geographical location was for a long time too far north) to be an island southwest of Greenland.

In addition to legends, double discoveries and nautical errors, seaman's thread , deliberate misleading by glorious captains and optical illusions were also causes for phantom islands. In no case are these phenomena limited to a pre-scientific, unenlightened age. One of the last large phantom islands to appear in the Atlantic was the island of Kantia , "discovered" by the German Johann Otto Polter in 1884 and later searched in vain , named after the greatest exponent of the German Enlightenment , Immanuel Kant .

List of Phantom Islands

Real phantom islands

Real phantom islands are islands that were historically assumed to be real, but no longer exist.

The Roggewein Islands (an obsolete name) actually exist, but probably got their name because of a confusion with Samoa .

Peninsulas that were considered islands

Mythical islands

Mythical islands are part of sagas and legends. Their existence is often to be understood figuratively rather than geographically.

Made up islands

Fictional islands are those whose existence was deliberately faked by their inventor, e.g. B. for commercial interest.

Hypothetical islands

Hypothetical islands emerged from the idealization of historical map images. Too large land masses without lakes inside seemed just as unthinkable until the 19th century as too wide seas without islands. Also one could not imagine the "overweight" on land in the northern hemisphere. So one looked for islands and land masses, which also found their way into the maps, although they were never sighted.

swell

  1. ↑ All examples from: Donald S. Johnson: Fata Morgana der Meere. 1999, e.g. B. Hudson's Bay Company, p. 136, on João Vaz Corte-Real see also article in Wikipedia

literature

  • Donald S. Johnson: Mirage of the Seas . Diana-Verlag, 1999, ISBN 3-8284-5019-9 .
  • Henry M. Stommel: Lost Islands: The Story of Islands That Have Vanished from Nautical Charts . University of British Columbia Press, 1984, ISBN 0-7748-0210-3 .
  • Raymond H. Ramsay: No longer on the map: discovering places that never were . Viking Press, New York, 1972, ISBN 0670514330 .
  • Karoline Weber: Phantom Islands . In: Butis Butis (Ed.): Mistakes make history. Böhlau Verlag, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna, 2009, ISBN 978-3-412-20426-6 , pp. 224-227.
  • Edward Brooke-Hitching: Atlas of Invented Places. From the English by Lutz-W. Wolff. dtv Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG, Munich 2017. ISBN 978-3-423-28141-6 .
  • Ulli Kulke: How islands disappear from the map. In: The world. December 7, 2012, p. 29.
  • Dirk Liesemer : Lexicon of the Phantom Islands . mareverlag, Hamburg 2016, ISBN 978-3-86648-236-4 .
  • Christian Weber: The world of invented places . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung from 25./26. November 2017, pp. 36/37.

Web links