Phantom Islands of the Atlantic: The Legends of Seven Lands That Never Were

by Donald S. Johnson

Explores strange tales of seven mythical islands that were claimed, described, and carefully mapped but never existed, combining history and myth to explain how these lands, conjured out of rumor, mistaken identity, and sheer fantasy, managed to stimulate hope and the imaginations of explorers for centuries.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Mythology, Travel, Cartography

220 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

Reviews

[Colleen Villasenor · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a well-researched study of islands in the Atlantic that were once shown on maps but never actually existed or were misidentified. I found the first part of the book to be dry and a little tedious, possibly because I don't know much about sailing and maritime navigation. The author is an experienced sailor who spent a lot of time sailing in the Atlantic and uses some technical information I was unfamiliar with. It became more interesting as it continued, blending history and mythology. I especially liked the chapters about Hy-Brazil and the Islands of St. Brendan. St. Brendan's voyage is explained as a religious metaphor and does not necessarily correspond to any actual islands. Hy-Brazil is sometimes used in fantasy stories and songs so I was interested in learning its background. This was not a great read for me, but I'm not sorry I read it. I'm always interested in learning new things and this taught me some things about history that were definitely new to me

[Victoria Angelone · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title of the book had me assume that the book centered around the lore of these places and stories surrounding them- but it’s very technical with cartography maps, places, dates, and people. So, if you were reading to enjoy, you would quickly lose interest because of all the dates, places, people- and pronouncing the stuff- forget about it lol

I did enjoy the section of each chapter where it did talk of the myth and lore surrounding the phantom islands. I loved the beginning quote from the chapter ‘Hy-Brazil’

“On the ocean that hollows the rocks where ye dwell,
A shadowy land has appeared, as they tell;
Men thought it a region of sunshine and rest,
And they called it O’ Brazil- the isle of the blest.

From year unto year, on the ocean’s blue rim,
The beautiful spectre showed lovely and dim;
The golden clouds curtained the deep where it lay,
And it looked like an Eden, away, far away.”

- Gerald Griffin

[annabelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

this is a pretty interesting read! a lot of technical stuff about navigation (i won’t lie that i had to skim a lot through a lot of it bc girl idk), but it is very cool to learn about the myths, and if it correlated to an actual island, or if it was just pure myth, etc.

[Elizabeth K. · Rating 3 out of 5]

The premise is pretty decent. It's a look at some islands that first appeared on maps at the beginning of the age of exploration -- not with intent to fraud, more due to honest mistakes on early maps -- and then another guy repeated it on his map, and before you know it, everyone thought they were real islands.

The concrete information about the islands is somewhat interesting, although it's a little anti-climatic because more than one ends with "so, then they realized it wasn't really an island, but the southern coast of Greenland." "Oh, and that other island? Yeah, that was also Greenland." The author did an excellent job, on the other hand, of tracing the social/economic/cultural significance of what people thought about the island when it was believed to be real. Kind of cool, in fact.

One thing I always look for in a book a A Great Truth. My standards aren't very high, it only has to be great to me. The Great Truth of this book is that it would really behoove me to go out and find a book called "Actual Islands of the Atlantic" because wow, I was alarmed when I located some of the real islands on a map. I'm looking at you, the Faroes. And Grimsey -- don't get me started. I've heard of them, and I had a general idea where they were (You know, in the water. Like islands.) but it was educational to see them on an map. There was also one that I was convinced was one of the fake islands, then I realized the author was comparing a fake island to this real island. I apologize to the natives of Terceira.

Grade: B
Recommended: People who are knowledgeable about sailing would probably enjoy this quite a bit, as it covers a lot of information about the development of navigation and map-making and other sea-faring type stuff. Ahoy!

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Phantom Islands of the Atlantic is a short treatment of how "mythical" or mistakenly described islands got on so many charts of the Atlantic during the Age of Exploration.

The author Donald S. Johnson speaks from practical experience about the challenges of navigation as he repeatedly crossed the Atlantic in a small sailboat, an accomplishment that I deeply respect.

Given the size of the book, those looking for more detailed historical treatments of navigating and charting the Atlantic will not find it in this book. For instance, the topic of "Muslim knowledge of the Atlantic" gets a few paragraphs but little else.

So it is not be taken as a comprehensive historical treatment, but more of a companion to other works, such as the earlier No Longer on the Map by Raymond H. Ramsay.

I'll update this review once I've completely read it.

[Gortius Octavo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un entretenido e ilustrador ensayo sobre cómo la gente del pasado pensaba que era el Atlántico. Tiene unas ilustraciones preciosas, creo que del mismo autor, y aunque puede llegar a ser un poco monótono porque los capítulos siguen todos la misma fórmula y estructura, al final sales con mucho más conocimiento. Por supuesto, es mejor aplicar este conocimiento a algo, un proyecto o lo que sea, pero también sirve como anécdotas para fiestas.

[Shaun · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book suffers from wanting to be two different books: one geographic and one narrative/mythic. The first half of the book is invested with tales that seem to chart the belief in and disappearance of different islands that were confused for other islands, or gained notorious reputations but were not actually extant in the locations where they were mapped. The second half goes almost entirely into the realm of Christian narrative and the lives of Saints, and discusses not islands that have disappeared from the maps, but islands that have been entirely misattributed due to previous stories. While there is theoretically not much between these two types of storytelling, I found the execution to be a bit disjointed and confusing.

My other major complaint is in the maps that are provided. They are line-drawing reproductions of original maps, which I think takes some of the grandeur away from the storytelling that the maps are supposedly doing. There is a narrative to the mapping processes that Johnson describes, but the text suffers by reproducing a flattened and more scientific version of the maps rather than photographs or scans of the originals. I feel this especially in the early sections, where Johnson discusses how the maps shift over time, and the line drawings convey only a shifting a space rather than a shifting of meaning and emphasis.

I did like that the book seemed to have a vested interest in connecting various islands stories however, even if it wasn't explicit all the time. The various phantom islands that are discussed make appearances in each other's stories, which makes sense given that these stories circulate contemporaneously. I do wish there was a bit more foregrounding of this, either in the introduction or in the text itself, but I think it is a fine element.

Overall, I found the book to be less than satisfactory in terms of organization, and in terms of hooking narrative about these changes. It felt like there wasn't anything compelling in some of the stories, especially that of Hy-Brazil, and that the overreliance on technical detail in the beginning brought away some of the useful storytelling. Ironically, the last section was perhaps the most interesting (save the Isle of Demons section, which is the best) because of its storytelling, even though I think it had the least to do with the "phantom islands" concept that Johnson outlines in the beginning. I think this book would have been better served either being totally technical in tracing the history surrounding these various islands, or by leaning more thoroughly into the folkloric/narrative aspects of the telling. Not a huge recommendation on my part, but I do think that it would be a useful book in an overview sense.

[Justin Neville · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this book on a whim at a secondhand bookshop 15-20 years ago and finally got round to reading it.

Overall, underpinning the tales of each of these 'phantom islands' is a pretty fascinating history of navigation and cartography over the past 1,500 years or so. At times, there was a bit too much technical detail for my own interests. But that was only to be expected, and you can easily skip over those bits.

I'd have welcomed a few more modern-day maps alongside the historical ones - just to compare what we know now to be where and what history got wrong. (Not all of us know instinctively without reference exactly where Baffin Island or the Antilles, say, actually are.) But that's a minor gripe. The historical maps are pretty copious, excellently reproduced and annotated.

3.5-4 stars

[Trey S · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a simple, quick and fun read. The phantom islands of the Atlantic are cool to read about and why people believed they were there or not. For example St. Brendans island(s) are cool to read about and the story of the saint himself are cool as-well. The whole book is fun and short. I only give it 4/5 because the book is short at only around 200 pages and the chapters therefor can’t get into much detail. I would like if this book was 800 pages to be honest but of course that’d be hard. This book was fun and short and gives brief ideas and stories about islands and phantom islands. I recommend if you are interested in sailing history, maps, the Atlantic, and just history in general.

4/5

[Caleb Diffell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love histories from the Age of Discovery. Johnson does an excellent job cataloging the (supposed) existence of various lands that turned out to be, well, not there. He follows the threads and lays out the most likely explanations for the mistakes. I particularly enjoyed the maps. This is a worthwhile read.

[Katherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extremely fascinating read on a unique subject. I sometimes found it a little difficult to follow Johnson's geographical descriptions, but the book still gave me a good insight into how determined humans have always been to explore and understand the unknown, and how difficult that was without the technology we have today.

[Jimmacc · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this book up on a whim. The story of the Virgin Islands alone is worth the read. Nice detail on navigation issues. The resources the author investigated to get this condensed information is incredible. Enjoyable book.

[Melissa Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading the myths and the cartography description! I kept this as a fiction resource for myself. Having lived in the midwest and the south and hearing about the cities of gold and Atlantis, this fit in my what-if geography along with ley lines and faerie circles.

[Christy Warlow]

This was a different and kinda slow read for me. It was a lot of info packed into a small book, but there was quite a bit of interesting information too!

[Jacob Wells · Rating 3 out of 5]

The actual storytelling wasn't too bad, but this isn't a scholarly work, and there are a ton of inaccuracies. It struck me as pop-history written by someone with no interest in actual history

[Nathan Albright · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is a bit of a tease on multiple levels. On the one hand, many of the so-called phantom islands in this book, like the Isle of Demons, Frisland, Buss Island, Antilla, Hy-Brazil, and the Islands of Saint Brendan, actually exist, and the story of Saint Ursula and her virgin companions, when properly understood beneath the legendary accretions, forms the basis for the naming of the contemporary Virgin Islands in the Antilles. So, when the author talks about islands that never were, he is committing an untruth in order to gain attention for the book and to, presumably, sell more copies, since the imaginary aspect involves the stories that surrounded places, or the fact that many of the places here were called by many names, and the fact that it was difficult for early navigators to recognize the exact placement of islands and the difference in icy seas between islands and capes where it was difficult to navigate and where currents and mirages made visual observation and dead reckoning tricky. The book that is promoted and what is ultimately differed, therefore, are not the same.

In terms of its contents, the book itself is straightforward in its fashion, and if it repeats a great many canards, the little canards are in service of one giant canard that the author never openly acknowledges, although they are often related to each other. For example, the author mentions the fable of Columbus sailing in order to prove that the world was a globe, when that was a fact not in serious dispute, in service of a larger fable, namely the denial of previous European exploration and colonization and trade with the New World. Over and over again the author subjects various maps and texts, like the Legends of St. Brendan, for example, to a withering critical analysis in order to show that these texts were bogus. At times, as is the case with the Isle of Demons, there is nothing legendry at all about the core story, that a beautiful young widow survived the horrors of continual unknown bird calls while fighting off the polar bears that killed her husband, and the polar bears and the crying birds exist exactly where the original story put them, on the northern coast of Newfoundland. Likewise, the supposedly mythical island of Frisland ends up being Iceland, albeit under another name, just as Buss Island is actually a cape on the southern edge of Greenland, at least as originally described. And on and on these supposedly imaginary islands go, demonstrating the difficulty of nailing down location in a world where longitude was not known and where navigation was rare and in some cases, where the Atlantic was actually submerging some of the islands known to people in the past.

All of these individual stories, most of which demonstrate a factual basis despite the overblown claims of the author, are enlisted in service of two larger lies which are transparently obvious but which the author attempts to negotiate via sleight of hand. The first matter is the fact that the author has a giant ax to grind against Christianity, claiming that it was early Christians who were responsible for the loss of knowledge in the Greco-Roman world and for the dark ages that followed. Christians are similarly blamed for not being credulous enough to believe lies from philosophers about the antipodes, which as a point of fact do not actually exist, a fact which ought to have vindicated the Christian belief in a uniform human identity as being children of Adam, but which only marks them as stubborn and obstinate in the author’s unsound judgment. The second lie is related to the first, in that the author seeks to discredit texts, like maps and reports and collections of travelers’ tales, in order to discredit the prior knowledge and exploration and settlement of the New World before Columbus, while ignoring the extensive physical evidence for such travels as has been documented by far better and far more honest historians and archeologists [1], even though in many cases the author grudgingly concedes the reality at the basis of the stories he attacks, even as he denies their implications. Consider this book as at best a tease, and at worst a fraud, even if it demonstrates the difficulties that early navigators faced, which alone makes it not without value.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...

[Othy · Rating 2 out of 5]

A perplexing book, not because of the content, but because of the author. Johnson seems at once both enamored and disgusted with his subject matter, respecting some tales and looking down at others with derision. At one point he even calls a legend "preposterous." How any author could do this is beyond me, and weakened any reading of the tales Johnson presented. Further, all but one of the maps are reproductions, the reasoning being that Johnson wanted to simplify them so as to remove any unnecessary details. One wonders, though, with his views on tales and legends, whether Johnson's ability to distinguish between necessary and unnecessary is all that good. Finally, the writing was uninteresting and usually muddled, and the author even at times even mixes together stories told hundreds of years apart for no apparent reason. The only reason this book received more than a single star for me is that, when I could get past Johnson's editorializing, some of the stories were interesting. I'd rather get them from somewhere else, though, as Johnson's book made me feel bored at one of my favorite topics.

[David R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intriguing geography. Johnson makes thoughtful cases for what became of a number of fantasy islands that show up on maps throughout the Age of Discovery. Having encountered occasional efforts to explain places like Antillia, I think Johnson could have gone just a little deeper. But overall it is a very satisfactory treatment.

[Tanyadee Reyes · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like phantom islands as much as the next girl, and very much looked forward to reading this book.
This book was well researched but not very well written. I was somewhat disappointed with the chapter layouts as well.

[Lindsay · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this to be a was well researched book, and really interesting all these islands which have now been removed from maps because they never existed.

[Travis · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a disappointing book.