Today's episode is about things which appear to exist but which don't.
welcome to...
Map Men...
I'm the men... and here's the map.
♫ Map Man, Map Man
♫ Map Map Map Man Man
Many years ago, being an explorer was the best job in the world.
The perks were obvious
months at sea, far from loved ones
with a good chance you might starve to death.
But these days there's no such thing as an explorer.
And what do you want to be when you grow up?
An explorer.
Well you can't cos of Google Earth.
Satellite technology was the death of discovery
as new aerial images could be used to perfectly map every inch of ter...
Hang on, what was that?
What was what?
Go back a bit.
But it's just ocean.
There, that black smudge.
Huh... something in the sea has been censored.
Oh my mistake, this is the pre-2012 Google Map.
In the up-to-date one, it's just empty ocean.
Wait, that's an even bigger mystery!
It's time to do some research.
I've just read a Wikipedia summary of this incredibly boring book
and it turns out this is the location of an island discovered by Captain Cook in 1774.
Cook was sailing in the South Pacific doing what he did best -
Looking out for land either small enough to be a crash hazard
or big enough to colonise.
And he succeeded, successfully spotting a small and previously unknown sandy island.
In a say what you see naming tradition befitting a man associated with Australia
he named it...
Sandy Island.
Sandy Island went on to appear on lots of maps, right up until 2012.
But it oughtn't have. Because it turns out
Sandy island has never, and never has, existed.
Sandy island is what's known as a "phantom Island"
an island that's marked on maps and believed to be real
but which was never actually there.
So if there was nothing there why did Captain Cook think there was?
And why did it stay on maps for so long?
And how did this mistake go uncorrected for so many hundreds of years
right into the age of satellites?
The best way to answer that is by looking at lots of
famous examples of phantom islands throughout history
each with their own explanations.
And thankfully I've made a list.
So have I. I'll start.
Reason number one: Sailors often got lost.
The sea is big
with very few landmarks.
So, back when they didn't have reliable navigation systems
or fancy boats
or fresh fruit
you can understand how, on a cloudy and very stormy night
it wasn't easy to find your way to Kenya.
Because it was so hard to know exactly where you were
sailors often found land where they weren't expecting it.
A great example of this is Peppy's Island
"Peeps" Island.
If it doesn't exist, I can pronounce it how I want.
In 1683 Admiral William Cowley, on a ship called The Bachelor's Delight
was just off the coast of South America
when he, inverted commas, "discovered" inverted commas, so-called "Pepys Island"
Cowley was delighted with the find and wrote at length about his great discovery.
"The island has a pleasant aspect.
There were a large number of birds.
We killed as many as we needed for food.
They were quite tasty."
Pepys Island appeared on 110 maps over the following century
despite no one but Cowley ever catching a glimpse of it.
Many sailors tried to find Pepys Island including Captain Cook
But no one ever managed it.
In the 19th century, historians looked at Cowley's extensive descriptions and sketches of Pepys Island
and noticed that they had a striking similarity with
The Falklands, 280 miles further south.
Cowley had been in the Falkland Islands all along
and Pepys was finally pooped.
Reason number two...
Uh uh, my turn.
Reason number two - a trick of the light.
Not all phantom islands are a result of navigational error.
Even when sailors knew exactly where they were
they might not have known exactly what they were looking at.
In 1821, Captain William Elliot spotted an island with
high mountainous land between Australia and South America.
He named it...
"Emerald island."
So if there was nothing there, then what not on Earth was he looking at?
Because he was in such a cold part of the world,
Elliot had likely fallen victim to a special kind of mirage.
Normally, things like this pack of sea ice which are straight ahead
appear to be straight ahead.
But, when a temperature inversion occurs
with cold air on top of hot air
a duct can form which distorts the light's path,
meaning this pack of sea ice now appears to be high in mountainous land
which is precisely what Elliot said he saw.
These mirages are known as Fata Morganas.
And as these terrifying pictures of floating boats prove,
could be very convincing.
Non-existent Emerald Island featured boldly on maps for almost 100 years
partly because nobody could be bothered to sail all the way back here just to check.
Reason number three:
The thing discovered is real, is really there and is land, but isn't an island.
One example of...
Oh, we have to take this. Sorry.
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Breaking news... an unsuspecting Goose farmer has had his golden egg laying bird stolen
by a tiny man accused of breaking and entering
She hadn't expected to see him come home with the biggest jackpot in make-believe history.
...putting hard-working giants out of business
...clear sign of magic as a force for good
...witchcraft being used by criminals.
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And now it's time for the news in your area.
Right... where were we?
Ah yes. Things that weren't islands...
The name "California" historically refers to a long stretch
of the west coast of North America
only the top half of which ended up as part of the USA.
The bottom half, or "Baja California" is this long peninsula dangling off Mexico
When the early Spanish explorers landed here in the 1600s
the extraordinary longness of what we now know is the Gulf of California...
(¡Ah, is boring!)
...meant that they never made it all the way up to the
connecty bit up the top
and made the understandable assumption that California was an island.
The "Island of California" appeared on many of the first maps of the newly discovered continent
and this now famous map mistake went on to appear on thousands of maps
right up until the end of the 18th century.
Did it really take them that long to figure out it wasn't an island?
No. The island had been disproven several times by several explorers
but the mistake persisted on maps for so many years
because people wanted it to exist.
The explorers named the fictional "Island of California"
after the even more fictional "Island of California"
from a popular 16th century romantic novel
about an island populated entirely by Amazonian women.
In an era where European high society were using maps
for decoration rather than navigation
it made artistic if not geographic sense to include
the famous island that well-read people wanted to see.
Ancient myths have been the source of a
surprisingly large number of multiplied map mistruths
which brings us to the fourth reason for phantom islands...
Map makers are lazy.
Our favourite completely fictional island that clumsily
sleepwalked its way onto factual maps
is this mythical one supposedly found in the Atlantic
off the west coast of Ireland, called Brasil.
What?
Not to be confused with Brazil, which is also found
in the Atlantic off the west coast of Ireland.
The two are in no way related, and the sameness of their names is a complete coincidence.
"Brazzle", as it's probably pronounced, is an enchanted island from Irish folklore
which, as legend has it, is forever cloaked in mist
but can be seen for just one day every seven years
like that ITV documentary about those children who turned into adults.
It first turned up on this portolan chart of 1325
when inaccuracies were a reasonably expected hazard of cartography
and distinguishing myth from reality was a low priority.
Once Brasil...
(not that one)
...made the jump from fairy tale to map,
it was only a matter of time before another map maker got the wrong end of the stick
and stuck it on their map because they were too lazy to do their own research.
And that's exactly what happened in 1375, when Brasil...
(not that one)
...turned up on the Catalan Atlas.
And now that it was on two maps, that was as good as a fact for all future cartographers
and it only snowballed from there.
Getting lost, trick of the light, lack of context and laziness are just...
four ways that Islands can be wrongly discovered.
It goes without saying that there are dozens more
including icebergs, pumice rafts, dense fog and dehydrated hallucinations.
So it's no wonder that through dozens of mistakes on hundreds of maps,
the world was littered with phantom islands.
These days phantom islands are merely amusing map anomalies
but not so long ago, for some sailors, phantom islands were a very serious nuisance.
In 1909, Ernest Shackleton and his crew were on board the HMS Nimrod
making their way home after a failed attempt to reach the South Pole.
(Boo!) (Sorry, lads.)
Looking at his map, Shackleton planned some much needed rest stops
between Sydney and South America.
Unfortunately the first of these was Royal Island.
Which turned out to be a phantom island.
Luckily they had Emerald Island to look forward to next.
But, as discussed 5 minutes and 49 seconds ago,
Emerald Island turned out to be another phantom island.
Undaunted, the exhausted crew continued on to Nimrod Island.
Which turned out to be another phantom island.
Leaving only Dougherty Island remaining, which...
Turned out to be another phantom island,
making this the greatest voyage of un-discovery in the history of exploration.
(...Yaay?)
Thankfully, for anyone trying to sail from Sydney to South America nowadays,
almost every phantom island ended up being undiscovered by the mid 20th century.
But how did Sandy Island manage to keep appearing on Google Maps as late as 2012?
Oh yeah, I was going to tell you, sorry. Erm...
It was down to the French.
Sandy Island, if it did exist, would belong to
and be the mapping responsibility of France
as it's in the region of French New Caledonia.
Its existence had been in doubt since the early 1900s.
So in 1974, a French flying reconnaissance mission went to check their island out
and to their not surprise, certified that there was nothing there.
Which incidentally is the second time we've discussed
France getting smaller as a result of a proper survey.
Having un-discovered their own territory,
the French pulled out all the stops to tell everybody
that there was less France in the world.
Fast forward to the 21st century
when Google created their digital maps with satellite view.
Satellite view is not created, as you might expect,
by taking lots of photos, stitching them together
and adding the map detail on top.
It's far quicker, easier, and more accurate to do it the other way around.
The pre-2012 edition used map data from the US National Imagery and Mapping Agency.
Data which had been digitised based on old maps that predated the French undiscovery.
So the satellites found sea
but their maps showed that there should be land.
And that's why they add a big black smudge...
meaning "error".
Because most people use satellite view just to look at their own house
and this was a part of the world where the fish don't even have dial-up
this smudge went largely unnoticed.
Until 2012 when a curious Australian research ship decided to take a detour
to check out the discrepancy once and for all.
And when they got there on the 26th of November
they announced to the world...
"Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope."
So even in the world of digital satellite maps
there are still parts of the world that remain mysterious
and I could still grow up to be an explorer?
No cos you haven't got a boat.
Oh.
It's all too easy to mock explorers who made silly mistakes
but before we let you go, consider this.
Discovering land was their job.
They were paid to do it, and paid more the more they did it.
So, even if Cook was in doubt about what he saw...
Hmm, could be driftwood...
He was incentivised to claim it was land for king and country.
Have you seen something Sir?
Er... er... yes.
land...
mark that down as land.
Today in 2024, the world map is completely perfect
and we're certain that nothing will be discovered or undiscovered
ever again ever ever.