The Phantom Atlas
The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps Edward Brooke-Hitching Simon & Schuster 2016 Hb, 256pp, illus, bib, ind, £25.00, ISBN 9781471159459
Discrete chapters and illustrations from antique maps and travelogues make this ideal for charting your own voyage to 60 of the world’s imaginary places – islands, reefs and mountain ranges, along with a few mythical creatures such as the Patagonian Giants and sea monsters of the Carta Marina that cartographers described, then dropped upon realising they didn’t exist, though sometimes not for centuries. These phantom lands were often known but misidentified by positioning errors. Pepys Island in the South Atlantic, for example, was probably the Falklands. Others, such as Sannikov Island off Russia’s northern coast, pursued by Russian scientists in the early 20th century, could have been tricks of Fata Morgana, complex mirages. There was the belief that Korea and California were islands; that the southern Sahara was fringed by a mountain range; at the North Pole was a mountain; and that North America and Australia had vast inland seas. Amusing now, yet many died in pursuit of these blunders.
Then there are the liars and the fraudsters who conjuredup illusionary places for glory and profit. From the relatively harmless Benjamin Morrell, “the biggest liar of the Pacific”, who ‘found’ at least three imaginary islands, to the doyen of conniving fantasists, Gregor MacGregor, who dreamt up Poyais, a territory in South America to which he led hundreds of colonists having traded their assets for his worthless land grants and currency in 1823.
Did the CIA really use a hydrogen bomb to obliterate Bermeja Island, discovered in the Gulf of Mexico in the 16th century, so as to extend the United States economic zone and lay claim to the oil in that area, or did the purported landmass sink in an earthquake? And what of Sandy Island, northeast of Australia and west of Caledonia? The Google Maps satellite image shows an underwater feature corresponding to the shape of an