They all laughed at Christopher Columbus
When he said the world was round
As referenced on the Flat? or Fiction? page, from at least the 14th century, belief in a flat Earth among educated Europeans was almost nonexistent. The issue in the 1490s was not the shape of the Earth, but its size, and the position of the east coast of Asia, as Irving in fact points out. Historical estimates from Ptolemy onward placed the coast of Asia about 180° east of the Canary Islands. Columbus adopted an earlier (and rejected) distance of 225°, added 28° (based on Marco Polo's travels), and then placed Japan another 30° further east. Starting from Cape St. Vincent in Portugal, Columbus made Eurasia stretch 283° to the east, leaving the Atlantic as only 77° wide. Since he planned to leave from the Canaries (9° further west), his trip to Japan would only have to cover 68° of longitude. The Spanish scholars may not have known the exact distance to the east coast of Asia, but they believed that it was significantly further than Columbus's projection; and this was the basis of the criticism in Spain and Portugal, whether academic or among mariners, of the proposed voyage.
The disputed point was not the shape of the Earth, nor the idea that going west would eventually lead to Japan and China, but the ability of European ships to sail that far across open seas. The small ships of the day (Columbus's three ships varied between 20.5 and 23.5 m – or 67 to 77 feet – in length and carried about 90 men) simply could not carry enough food and water to reach Japan. The ships barely reached the eastern Caribbean islands. Already the crews were mutinous, not because of some fear of "sailing off the edge", but because they were running out of food and water with no chance of any new supplies within sailing distance. They were on the edge of starvation. What saved Columbus was the unknown existence of the Americas precisely at the point he thought he would reach Japan.
Phantom islands?
In the age of GPS and Google Maps, it is hard to believe that maps can include places that don’t exist. But author Malachy Tallack argues that maps are as much “a cartography of the mind” as they are a way to figure out where we are. In his new book, The Un-Discovered Islands, Tallack takes readers on a journey to imaginary places—mythic islands, mapmakers’ mistakes, mirages, and outright hoaxes.
"It is natural for us, standing on the shore looking out to the horizon, to imagine there are places out there we cannot see. Many cultures have such places that are important parts of their cultural traditions. One of the best known is Hawaiki, which the Maori people believe to be not just their geographical origin, but also their spiritual origin—the place they were born from and would die into."
Saint Brendan's Island, also known as Saint Brendan's Isle, is a phantom island or mythical island, supposedly situated in the North Atlantic somewhere west of Northern Africa. It is named after Saint Brendan of Clonfert. He and his followers are said to have discovered it while travelling across the ocean and evangelising its islands. It appeared on numerous maps in Christopher Columbus's time, most notably Martin Behaim's Erdapfel of 1492.
The first mention of the island was in the Latin text Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis ("Voyage of Saint Brendan the Abbot") of the ninth century, which inserted the island into Irish and European folklore.
Others arose through the faulty positioning of actual islands, or other geographical errors. For instance, Pepys Island was actually a misidentification of the Falkland Islands. The Baja California Peninsula appears on some early maps as an island but was later discovered to be attached to the mainland of North America. Similarly, the Banks Peninsula, part of the South Island of New Zealand, was originally called "Banks Island" by Captain James Cook. Thule was perhaps actually discovered in the 4th century BC by the Greek explorer Pytheas but was lost, and then later reidentified by ancient explorers and geographers as either the Shetland Islands, Iceland, Scandinavia, or even as nonexistent.[vague]
Other phantom islands are probably due to navigational errors, occasional breakers, misidentification of icebergs, fog banks, pumice rafts from underwater volcanoes or optical illusions. Observed in the Weddell Sea in 1823 but never again seen, New South Greenland may have been the result of a superior mirage. Even deliberate fabrication has been suggested.
Some "errors" may have been intentional. For example, Lake Superior's Isle Phelipeaux, an apparent duplication of Isle Royale which appeared on explorers' maps for many years and served as a landmark for the original border between the United States and the territory that would become Canada, was named for Louis Phélypeaux, a government minister influential in allocating funds for additional voyages of exploration.
While many phantom islands appear never to have existed, a few (such as, perhaps, Thompson Island or Bermeja) may have been actual islands subsequently destroyed by volcanic explosions, earthquakes, or submarine landslides, or low-lying lands such as sand banks that are no longer above water. Pactolus Bank, visited by Sir Francis Drake, may fit into this category.
Fictional islands
There is an undoubted human appeal in the phenomenon of the imaginary island. There is an A-Z list of fictional islands on Wikipedia, beginning with The Abarat: 25 islands in an archipelago, one for each hour and one for all the hours, from the series The Books of Abarat by Clive Barker, and ending with Zoombini Isle: The origin of the Zoombinis, featured in the Logical Journey PC puzzle game. The page ends with a section identifying "unnamed islands", including:
- The island, somewhere in the South Pacific, in "The Isle of Missing Ships" by Seabury Quinn
- The island in Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- The island in Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
- The island in Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- The island, a few hundred miles off the coast of Liberia, in "The Island of Five Colors" by Martin Gardner
- The Outer Hebrides island in the children's novel Great Northern? by Arthur Ransome
- The islands in the novels, films and TV shows called Castaway
- The island in the PC and Game Boy Advance video game Backyard Football 2006
- The island in the 1980 film The Blue Lagoon and its 1991 sequel Return to the Blue Lagoon (called "Palm Tree Island" in the novel)
- The island in Theodor Herzl's Altneuland (unnamed, but specified as being part of the Cook Islands, near Raratonga)
- The Island of Zombie Women, in the song by The 3-D Invisibles[9] (as covered by The Horatii[10])
- The island, which was the location of the Fountain of Youth, in the 2011 film Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
- The unnamed Pacific island where Megatron makes his base in Transformers (2003 video game).
