According to older charts of the Gulf, the closest piece of Mexican land to the disputed zone was a small island called Bermeja, around 100 miles off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula. The problem was that when a vessel from the Mexican navy was sent to find it, the island was nowhere to be seen. The country’s claim had to be shifted, consequently, some distance to the south.
As it turned out, there was little controversy over this disappearance at the time. At least in public. The negotiations continued and, in the year 2000, were finalised. Concerns that drilling close to the border could lead to one side profiting from the other’s oil or gas reserves, however, led to a ten-year moratorium on extraction being agreed. It was not until 2009, as the end of the moratorium approached, that the question of Bermeja was raised again. And this time people wanted answers.
Bermeja had appeared on maps for a long time. Its first mention came in the early sixteenth century, with details given not only of its location and size, but also its appearance (the name Bermeja is derived from a Spanish word used to describe the island’s reddish colour). It continued to be shown on maps for several hundred years, always in the same place and conforming to roughly the same shape. Up until the nineteenth century, no doubts were ever raised about its existence. But by the end of that century things had changed.
In The Navigation of the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico, published by the United States Hydrographic Office in 1885, Bermeja is only briefly mentioned. And for good reason. ‘This island is found on all the old charts’, the book explains, ‘but its existence is more than doubtful. The officers of the Spanish navy, in their search for the Negrillo, saw nothing of it, neither did another officer who purposely looked for it in 1804. Captain E. Barnett, R.N., also closely examined this neighbor-hood in 1844, without meeting with anything.’ The rest of the world, it seemed, had long considered Bermeja to be lost. Only its owners had failed to notice.
By 2009, however, Mexican politicians and journalists were certainly taking notice. And they were incredulous. How could a piece of the country’s territory have simply vanished? Opposition leaders in the senate demanded to know what had happened. How could the island have been allowed to disappear? And how could the former president, Ernesto Zedillo, have been so complacent? He had ceded territory unnecessarily to the United States, they claimed, and in doing so had potentially handed billions of barrels of oil to their northern neighbour.
As the accusations flew, conspiracy theories began to circulate. Many Mexicans suggested that, far from a cartographical error or natural disaster, the disappearance of Bermeja had been a deliberate act – the work of the CIA, on behalf of its government. America had stolen Mexican oil, they said, by destroying the island with a bomb.
Journalists too smelled something fishy in the story. Looking back at the original negotiations with the US in the late 1990s, they found that papers relating to these discussions were missing. The minutes of debates on the treaty were no longer available, and no one could explain where they were. The suggestion was raised that perhaps President Zedillo himself had been involved in the disappearance of Bermeja, in a secret, corrupt deal with American oil firms.
Such theories were given more fuel when it was recalled that only one senator had opposed Zedillo’s stance at the time. José Angel Conchello had argued that Mexico should claim the disputed Hoyos de Dona for itself, and had gone on to condemn the exploratory work being done by US companies in the region. This was Mexico’s water and Mexico’s oil, he had said. But Conchello was killed in an unexplained car accident while negotiations were still ongoing. Eleven years later there were calls, from all sides, for an investigation.
Answers to the question of Bermeja were clearly needed, and to try and find them two more comprehensive surveys were commissioned in 2009. These surveys were intended to discover whether the island had sunk, and if so how. They would also explore the wider area in the Gulf, to see if it might just have been misplaced.
Those surveys were completed in the spring of that year, with researchers from several universities involved in searches by sea and by air. Many hundreds of square miles were covered, and soundings of the ocean floor were taken. But the scientists found nothing at all. Bermeja wasn’t there, and most likely never had been.
No further investigations have taken place, either into the disappearance of the island or the events surrounding the treaty with the United States in the year 2000.
Sandy Island
IN NOVEMBER 2012, the Southern Surveyor, a research vessel from Australia, was in the Coral Sea west of New Caledonia. The scientists on board were studying the tectonic evolution of the region, but took a break from their work to investigate a rather peculiar anomaly. They had noticed that an island indicated on some of their maps was not present on the nautical chart they were using. According to the chart, the ocean was never less than 1,400 metres deep in that area, yet the maps – and Google Earth – indicated otherwise. A roughly oval stretch of land, 15 miles long by three miles wide, was clearly shown, alongside its name: Sandy Island.
The researchers approached the stated position with some caution. After all, they had no idea exactly what to expect. A half-submerged sandbar, a reef or shoal: such hazards are no less real in the twenty-first century than they ever were before, and the ambiguity of the available information meant that hidden dangers were a real possibility. But in the end their caution proved unnecessary. The ocean floor remained stubbornly in place, more than a kilometre beneath them. The ship sailed right through the middle of Sandy Island, and Sandy Island wasn’t there.
Within a few days, the world’s media were relating the details of this un-discovery to their readers. The Sydney Morning Herald gleefully announced ‘The mystery of the missing island’, while the Guardian called it ‘The Pacific island that never was’. Online, it became one of the most widely-shared news stories of the year. But why? The non-existence of a small, uninhabited piece of land in a remote corner of the world is hardly significant, politically or geographically. Yet somehow the idea of a place that was on the map and yet was not real caught the public’s imagination.
In the weeks following its un-discovery, scientists and journalists scrambled for answers. How could an island have slipped through the net of satellite technology for so long? Where did this ex-isle originate? At first it was assumed that a computer error was to blame: a blip of pixels somewhere in the system. But no, there it was on a British Admiralty map of 1908, in the same place and the same shape as it still was 100 years later.
Sandy Island was first reported by a whaling ship in 1876. It was a single sighting, and most likely a simple error. It was later marked on some maps, though not others, and was occasionally flagged up as a potential phantom. But when the US military digitised their charts, the island found its way into the World Vector Shoreline Database, which is widely used by scientists and in mapping software. In this rarely visited part of the ocean, that database is still far from perfect.
Had it been there, Sandy Island would have belonged to France, located as it was within the territorial waters of New Caledonia, a ‘special collectivity’ of the country. But the French were not much concerned about the disappearance; they had removed it from their charts more than three decades earlier. As had the Americans. In fact, as it turned out, Sandy Island had been un-discovered more than once already.
Most recently, in the year 2000, a group of amateur radio enthusiasts had noticed its absence while travelling to the Chesterfield Islands, 100km to the west. But while their testimony had received little attention at the time, in 2012 the response was swift. By the end of November, the National Geographic Society had declared that the island would no longer appear on their maps, and other publishers soon followed suit.
But Sandy Island has not disappeared altogether. Look carefully on Google Earth between Australia and New Caledonia, where the island was once thought to lie. At first there is nothing to be seen, but zoom in a little and the island’s yello
w outline reappears: an empty shape on the ocean’s surface.
For a time, fantastical photographs appeared inside that shape, added by the programme’s users. Green valleys, harbours, waterfalls, forests, a beach resort, even an atomic explosion: the space that Sandy Island once inhabited was filled with the imaginings of people the world over. The photographs were meant to be funny, of course, but they also express a kind of delight that such a space could still exist in the world. Now, however, those photographs too are disappearing.
For millennia, explorers had edges to reach and to go beyond. They had blanks to fill and terra incognita to discover. Always, they had mysteries to solve. Part of the joy of geography was the knowledge that there was still more out there, just waiting to be found. Today, with maps on our computers and our phones, and with satellites circling above us, it seems all that has gone forever. The science of navigation has worked towards the eradication of uncertainty and the end of mystery, and to an astonishing degree it has succeeded. We can know where we are and what direction we are travelling with just the click of a button. And though that technology brings its own kind of wonder, part of us mourns what has been lost.
The story of Sandy Island offered people hope. It showed that mystery had not been destroyed entirely; it is still out there, if you know where to look. There may be no more unknown islands to be found in the world, but perhaps there is another ex-isle still intact, a phantom waiting to be un-discovered. And perhaps we should leave it that way.
Other Un-Discovered Islands
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Hundreds of islands have come and gone over the centuries, in our stories and on our charts. This book has introduced only a small selection of them. Gathered below are ten additional islands, just waiting to be explored.
Buyan This Slavic myth has clear echoes of classical and Celtic stories. The island is a place of happiness and eternal life, which can appear and then disappear again. Some versions of the tale describe Buyan as the source of all weather, where the winds have their home. It has been linked to the real island of Rügen – now part of Germany – in the Baltic Sea.
Mayda Like Hy Brasil, the island of Mayda appeared early on European charts; and like Hy Brasil, there is no clear explanation of why it is there. Most often crescent-shaped, it was first marked in the Atlantic west of Brittany, but gradually drifted towards North America. Despite never being visited or claimed by any country, Mayda appeared on a Rand McNally map as late as 1906.
Isle of Demons A relatively short-lived phantom, the Île des Démons (often shown as a pair of islands) was mapped off the coast of Labrador or northeastern Newfoundland from the early sixteenth into the mid-seventeenth century. The name was probably supposed to refer to Quirpon Island and Belle Isle, off the northern tip of Newfoundland, which were widely believed to be haunted.
Elizabeth Island Discovered by one of the greatest British explorers, Francis Drake, in 1578, Elizabeth Island lay at the southern tip of South America. It was one of the very first overseas claims by Britain (along with Martin Frobisher’s in Baffin Island the previous year). But unfortunately, nobody was quite certain what piece of land the name actually referred to, so the claim meant little.
Rupes Nigra Gerardus Mercator’s map of the northern polar regions, published posthumously in 1595, is a beautiful and ambitious piece of cartography. At its centre is Rupes Nigra, a mountain as tall as the clouds, surrounded by an enormous ocean whirlpool. As far as speculative geography goes, a magnetic mountain at the North Pole at least had a degree of logic on its side. But, like much of that map, it had no basis in reality.
Saxemberg In the middle of the South Atlantic, about 600 miles northwest of Tristan da Cunha, Saxemberg was first reported by a Dutch sailor in 1670. After disappearing for more than a hundred years, it was seen again – though in a slightly different position – at least twice in the early nineteenth century. Then it disappeared forever. Whether these reports were errors or lies, it is impossible to be sure.
Dougherty Island One of several non-existent islands in the far south of the Pacific Ocean, Dougherty was seen at least three times between 1841 and 1886. But that was the end of it. Captain Scott looked for it in 1904, but found nothing, and John Davis made a thorough and unsuccessful search in 1909, when he also un-discovered the Nimrod Islands, Emerald Island and the Royal Company’s Islands.
Podesta First sighted by the marvellously named Captain Pinocchio in 1879, in the Pacific Ocean far to the west of Chile. The island was small, the captain reported, with a circumference of less than a mile, and rose to just forty feet above sea level. It also didn’t exist, and was gradually erased from the charts throughout the twentieth century.
Kantia Plato is not the only philosopher to be linked with a phantom. When the trader Johann Otto Polter found a new island in the Caribbean in 1884 he named it after Immanuel Kant and claimed it for Germany. Unfortunately, Kantia was never seen again. Despite searching for it numerous times without success over the next 25 years, Polter refused to accept he had been mistaken.
Maria Theresa Reef There are a handful of phantom reefs in the South Pacific still waiting to be fully expunged from the maps. Hydrographers shifted this one more than 1000km eastwards in September 1983, but that didn’t make it any easier to find. It does not appear on Google Earth, but is still included on some paper charts.
References
The Isles of the Blessed Homer, trans. Samuel Butler, The Odyssey, New York, 1898. Plato, trans, B. Jowett, ‘Gorgias’, in The Dialogues of Plato, Oxford, 1871.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, trans. Basil Clarke, Vita Merlini, University of Wales Press, 1973.
Kibu A. C. Haddon, W. H. R. Rivers, C. G. Seligmann, A. Wilkin, Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits: Volume 5, Cambridge, 1904.
Hawaiki Te Ahukaram Charles Royal, ‘Hawaiki: The significance of Hawaiki’, Te Ara: the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/hawaiki/page-1.
Hufaidh Gavin Maxwell, A Reed Shaken by the Wind, Longmans, Green and Co, 1957. Wilfred Thesiger, The Marsh Arabs, Longmans, Green and Co, 1964.
Thule Strabo, trans. Horace Leonard Jones, Geography, Vol. I of the Loeb Classical Library edition, Harvard University Press, 1917. Polybius, trans. Evelyn Shuckburgh, The Histories of Polybius, London, 1889.
St Brendan’s Island Trans. Denis O’Donoghue, Brendaniana: St Brendan the Voyager in Story and Legend, Dublin, 1893.
Frisland John Dee, manuscript in the British Library, quoted in John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus by Peter J. French, Routledge, 1972.
Davis Land Lionel Wafer, A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America,
The Auroras Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, New York, 1838. Log of the Atrevida, quoted in James Weddell, A Voyage towards the South Pole, London, 1825.
Atlantis Plato, trans. H. D. P. Lee, Timaeus and Critias, Penguin, 1971. Ignatius L. Donnelly, The Antediluvian World, New York, 1882.
Island of Buss George Best, A True Discourse of the Late Voyages of Discoverie, London, 1578. Thomas Wiars, quoted in The Principall Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques, and Discoueries of the English Nation by Richard Hakluyt, London, 1589.
Sarah Ann Island Asenath Taber, ‘Diary, December 3, 1854 – September 2, 1855’, The Mariners’ Museum Library Gallery, librarygallery.marinersmuseum.org/items/show/43.
Lemuria or Kumari Kandam Philip Sclater, ‘Some Difficulties in Zoological Distribution’ in The Nineteenth Century 4, 1878. Philip Sclater, ‘The Mammals of Madagascar’ in The Quarterly Journal of Science, April 1864.
Crocker Land Donald Baxter MacMillan, Four Years in the White North, London, 1918.
Terra Nova Islands Phillip Law, quoted in the Independent, 16 May 2010. Phillip Law, quoted in The Scotsman, 11 March 2010. Phillip Law, quoted in Antarktis by Norbert Roland, Spektrum Akademischer Verlag, 2009. Telex sent by Dr Roland from the Polar Queen, quoted in Antarkt
is by Norbert Roland, Spektrum Akademischer Verlag, 2009. (Translated from the German by Anja Hedrich.)
Further Reading
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General William H. Babcock, Legendary Islands of the Atlantic,
American Geographical Society, 1922.
Donald S. Johnson, The Phantom Islands of the Atlantic, Souvenir Press, 1997.
Raymond H. Ramsay, No Longer on the Map, Ballantine Books, 1973.
Henry Stommel, Lost Islands, University of British Columbia Press, 1984.
Individual Islands Hundreds of books have been written about Atlantis, and dozens more about Lemuria. The vast majority of these can probably be read as fiction.
Joanna Kavenna’s The Ice Museum (Penguin, 2006) is an excellent introduction to Thule, both as a place and as an idea. Barry Cunliffe’s The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek (Walker & Company, 2002) provides a more scholarly approach to the subject.
Andrea di Robilant’s Venetian Navigators (Faber & Faber, 2011) offers a very readable account of Frisland and the other Zeno islands, though the author seems rather too eager to believe the tale.
Barbara Freitag’s Hy Brasil: The Metamorphosis of an Island (Rodopi, 2013) peels away the many falsehoods and misconceptions that surround this island.
About the Author
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The Un-Discovered Islands Page 9