It's also granite. Granite is nowhere near as permanent as one might think, even weakly acid rain reacts with the constituents to weaken and crumble it.Your point, good sir, is well-taken. The size of islands is sometimes hard to determine especially from a distance. And some of them are no doubt, mirages. Saxemberg, mentioned earlier in this thread may well be an example of this.
On the other hand, the chief navigation problem for seamen has always been longitude, not latitude, and Rockall is quite a ways almost due north of the reputed location of Hy Brazil, and this makes it a bit less likely, in my humble opinion, that Hy Brazil is simply confused version of Rockall. Not impossible, just less likely.
Your point, good sir, is well-taken. The size of islands is sometimes hard to determine especially from a distance. And some of them are no doubt, mirages. Saxemberg, mentioned earlier in this thread may well be an example of this.
On the other hand, the chief navigation problem for seamen has always been longitude, not latitude, and Rockall is quite a ways almost due north of the reputed location of Hy Brazil, and this makes it a bit less likely, in my humble opinion, that Hy Brazil is simply confused version of Rockall. Not impossible, just less likely.
Shucks.The much-esteemed coal
Duly bookmarked. Thank you for the link. I will certainly go through it.Angelino Dalorto's 1325 Carta Nautica and the 1339 map from Angelino Dulcert (who may be the same person) show multiple islands to the west of the British Isles. I can't upload a file with the required resolution, as it is too big, so you'll need to search for them yourself and save a copy at highest resolution.
Also, possibly the definitive text about legendary islands of the Atlantic is available here:
https://archive.org/stream/legendaryislands00babc/legendaryislands00babc_djvu.txt
Yes likewise, fascinating stuff.Duly bookmarked. Thank you for the link. I will certainly go through it.
I am about halfway through the book that Mr Socks was kind enough to link to. I note some similar stories told by Gaddis in Invisible Horizons.Yes likewise, fascinating stuff.
Interesting book. If anyone here decides to download it, the book itself is reproduced at the top of the link provided. On my screen it is a blue color and it is much easier to read. It also has the maps referenced in the book, which is not shown in the scan.Angelino Dalorto's 1325 Carta Nautica and the 1339 map from Angelino Dulcert (who may be the same person) show multiple islands to the west of the British Isles. I can't upload a file with the required resolution, as it is too big, so you'll need to search for them yourself and save a copy at highest resolution.
Also, possibly the definitive text about legendary islands of the Atlantic is available here:
https://archive.org/stream/legendaryislands00babc/legendaryislands00babc_djvu.txt
In March, 1882, some 200 miles west of Madeira and about the same distance south of the Azores, a British merchant ship suddenly found itself passing through muddy water and enormous shoals of dead fish. The next day they encountered more of the same.
Smoke was seen rising from mountains of an island which should not have existed. Where charts indicated a depth of several thousand fathoms, the anchor now hit bottom at only a few fathoms.
A landing party found itself on an enormous island with no trees, no vegetation, not even a sandy beach. It was totally bare, as though it had just risen from the sea. Volcanic
debris covered it.
What was more amazing was that the island showed signs of habitation in the remote past, and then disappeared back into the Atlantic. There was one other report of the island around the same time-frame from another ship.
The story is from an email from Jonathan Gray.
Thoughts?
... "It may continue for some days or weeks, and an island may form temporarily," Martin Jutzeler, a geologist at the University of Tasmania who studies underwater eruptions, said in a statement. "However, new volcanic islands are easily eroded by wave action." ...
Yes, indeed, fair sir; you are quite correct. Last night, I did some further checking and noticed that the Australian researcher, Karen Mutton, mentioned in another thread, goes into this as well. She gives the geographic co-ordinates of the newly-formed island as 31N, 28W. And there is a seamount in this vicinity.Regarding the 1882 incident ...
That would be the story of the Jesmond. The surface conditions and the purported island were allegedly corroborated by a second vessel (Westbourne*). Jesmond's encounter occurred the first week of March 1882.
For example, see the incident's entry in The Atlantis Encyclopedia:
http://books.google.com/books?id=NwvgPxA62KkC&pg=PA151&lpg=PA151&dq=jesmond 1882&source=bl&ots=g4W0VI3W_w&sig=omdaXgYFQck94m_2jG8iFrxQFIw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwibpsrkmK_SAhXLsFQKHcERBSsQ6AEIRzAG#v=onepage&q=jesmond 1882&f=false
This and the numerous other online accounts of the Jesmond encounter vary quite a bit on details other than the events leading up to seeing the phantom island.
I mention this because you should consider these events as reported before becoming too confused about the distance (from Madeira and the Azores) bit.
The reported island wasn't 200 miles west of Madeira; it was 200 miles west of Madeira where the Jesmond first encountered the muddiness / dead fish. The island wasn't sighted until the following day, when the surface conditions were even more muddy / fish-fouled than the day before. The Jesmond had been steaming generally westward / southwestward all along.
I'm not claiming the island had to be associated with the seamount (circa 600 miles west of Madeira) you cited. All I'm claiming is that the Jesmond's phantom island was certainly more than 200 miles west of Madeira.
* FWIW: The account of the Westbourne's island sighting appeared in the New York Post on April 1.
EDIT: I forgot to mention the Jesmond allegedly arrived in New Orleans on March 31st. Its captain was interviewed for the New Orleans Picayune, which was the original source of the story. This would put the Jesmond story's first publication on or around April 1 as well.
EDIT #2: Corrected geo-references from Azores to Madeira. D'oh! :banghead:
... The story is looking somewhat more credible now. ...
Agreed: take away the ancient artifacts nonsense and it is a fairly believable story. As in the Urania Island discovery in the late 1940's off the coast of Japan. There, no claims were made that any artifacts were found, and I don't even think that any landings were attempted. Just curious: have you read Gaddis' book Invisible Horizons? It is a good read, but it is long out of print. It not only goes into phantom islands, it covers other sea mysteries. Henry Stommel's Lost Islands, OTOH is devoted to questionable islandsI tend to agree - to the extent the story is focused on an anomalous, and presumably transient volcanically-induced, island.
However, once you look beyond that basic discovery per se ...
The Jesmond story has been associated with Atlantis for some time. This connection derives from the claims Robson and his crew landed on the island, found wondrous ancient human artifacts, and brought a collection of said artifacts with them to New Orleans. According to the newspaper story at the time (second-hand; via various authors ... ) Robson only showed these artifacts in confidence to the one reporter who interviewed him and claimed he was going to donate them to the British Museum upon his return to the UK. There's no record of any such donation being offered, much less transferred, to that or any other museum.
My plausibility meter readings steadily declined as I read through the Atlantis / artifact - focused versions of the story ...
... But my outright BS detector started squawking when I determined (a) the two ships' reported positions didn't add up and (b) the seminal accounts of both ships' encounters were apparently published on April 1.
... Which still leaves open the possibility that the 'newly emergent volcanic island' aspect was authentic, but became encrusted with fictive tantalizing Atlantis bits so as to turn a prosaic oceanographic / geographic note into a sensational April Fools story.
... Just curious: have you read Gaddis' book Invisible Horizons? It is a good read, but it is long out of print. ...
I just got a hard-cover version from amazon. I have two of Gould's books on order, as well as Karen Mutton's effort that I mentioned elsewhere, in this thread, if memory serves.I honestly don't know if I've read Gaddis' book. It was first published in 1965, when I was moving from elementary to high school and voraciously reading a lot of Fortean-related books. In those days I was especially interested in sea / ocean Forteana, and I tended to always check out any book fitting that scope of interest.
In any case, if I've ever read Invisible Horizons it would probably have been at least 45 - 50 years ago.
"The Navigatio Sancti Brendani (Voyage of Saint Brendan) fits in with a then-popular literature genre, peculiar to Ireland, called an immram. Irish immrama flourished during the seventh and eighth centuries. Typically, an immram is a tale that describes the hero's series of seafaring adventures. (Some of these immrams involved the search for, and visits to, Tir na nOg, an island far to the west, beyond the edges of the world map.)”
New South Greenland was supposedly discovered by Benjamin Morrell in 1823.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_South_Greenland
Agreed. Even Gould, who the wiki article describes as favorably inclined towards Morrell, said of Morrell, that if he said it was raining heavily outside, 'you would feel quite safe in leaving your oilskin below'. This was from his first book.There's plenty of reason to suspect Morrell of deceit in reporting his alleged discovery. I've always considered the most benign interpretation to be that his claimed / recorded positions were 'way off and he was actually viewing the Antarctic Peninsula (aka Graham Land). Morrell himself complained he was operating with deficiencies in his available navigational equipment, and his account of the discovery voyage was written years after the fact.
This led me to another link. A fisherman was rescued from an uninhabited island near QL.
This led me to another link. A fisherman was rescued from an uninhabited island near QL. ...