Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I hate to sound a sour note, especially in the face of unanimous five star ratings. However, Phantom Islands does not live up to its billing. To read the title and the book jacket, one would expect the book to be primarily about *legends* - tales of mysterious islands inhabited by wondrous people and creatures. One would think, too, that the cartography of the Atlantic would be secondary - an interesting side-note, but not the focus.

The opposite is true. Johnson gives an all-too brief description of the "phantom island" at issue, then launches into an exhaustive recitation of the island's appearance on maps; how so and so in 1524 put the island here, while such and such twenty years later moved it ten miles further south. It quickly becomes old.

Let me emphasize that my grievance stems largely from feeling misled. I opened the book expecting X and got Q instead. If one is looking for a history of cartography, this book probably deserves the five stars others have given it. But if you are looking for tales of legendary, vanished isles look elsewhere.

Until the problem of longitude was worked out in the 1700s, sailors and cartographers had great difficulty affixing exact locations of land masses. Islands were particularly elusive, and many of them had a habit of wandering around in the ocean! Occasionally, someone would bump into an island; think a new discovery was made; give it a name; and then spread the news to mapmakers. Some islands got discovered and named several times. Other islands were imagined or invented. Imagine the confusion of a poor navigator trying to figure out where he was if he was relying on a map drawn from hearsay.

Phantom Islands of the Atlantic is filled with quaint maps and illustrations. Mr. Johnson's narrative is breezy and entertaining yet well-researched and informative. This book is a delight!

There are numerous islands which have appeared on maps of the Atlantic Ocean which then disappeared when later maps were published. This delightful book tells the stories of some of these islands. These island discussed in this book are:

1.The Isle Of Demons, upon which Marguerite de la Roche spent over two years before being rescued.

2.Frisland, a large island with a king and numerous towns, sometimes south of Iceland, sometimes south of Greenland, sometimes in between.

3.Buss Island, sometimes small, sometimes large, east or west of Frisland.

4.Antillia, the Isle of Seven Cities, just West of Spain.

5.Hy-Brazil, circular with a river through it, just West of Ireland.

There are two chapters regarding two religious stories which were related to islands. One of them is the voyage of Saint Brendan, a story which inspired some to identify the islands as locations of miraculous occurrences.

Part history, part fairy tale, it is very entertaining reading of islands which, in fact, never even existed but were listed on maps for hundreds of years.

This book is a quaint text that is very interesting. I find the discussion of imaginary lands in the Atlantic to be very fun to read about. The imaginary lands that never really existed were a symptom of something greater within the human condition: our yearning for a better place than we where are currently.

Of course, most of the lands that he discusses were just secondary discoveries of places we had already been too, and/or aspects of them got misreported, or facts about them garbled. Frisland was probably just a misreported encounter with Iceland by somebody who wasn't aware or Iceland's existence, or thought he was nowhere near Iceland for whatever reason. None of these would be out of the question, since things like accurate measurement of ones Longitude laid in the future and illiteracy was very rampant until relatively recent times.

To use a quote that Donald Johnson uses, "The power of wish and the power of words are chief gods in the world of fable" - C. B. Firestone. Meaning that sometimes people want to dream things because they want too. And if they decide to believe those thoughts... while, it might not be healthy for them, like other vices, in moderation is probably okay for them.

Later generations, and most notably British, French and later American navel cartographers removed the mystery lands because they wanted to know where islands really were, like in case you really need to make land fall in an emergency. So, they cleaned up the nonexistent places from the old maps.

Beliefs in these lands made people feel better about themselves for whatever reasons they might have had. Today people immerse themselves into less healthy systems at times. Was something lost? Not really. We just moved our inherent yearning to other places... many have moved their thoughts to the stars and thoughts of other planets. Some yearning of that nature can be healthy, but it can be carried to extremes.

I liked this book because it placed some of this kind of thinking into a historical context.

Imagine setting sail 500 years ago without nautical charts (at least the technical masterpieces we have now), sextant ,GPS, not even a clue as to how to find longitute, sometimes no real idea of where you were headed; it's no wonder the sea around you can indeed play strange tricks. Johnson takes us on a tour where islands were placed on maps that were mere cloud formations and entire histories were written about lands that never existed. If your interest is in maps, navigation or history this little book is a delight.

I read this book about a year ago. The age of exploration is one of my interests, though a fairly recent one. So books like this help flesh out my understanding of what was going on at the time. It was a time when messages took weeks, often months, to get from sender to receiver, so the time lag could cause all kinds of problems with communication. And even the long time in returning from distant lands could cause memories to begin to fail a bit, so accounts told upon reaching home took on, shall we say, at least a little bit of expansion. Yet, I am sure all of the stories had some basis in fact.

I did enjoy the book, for what it did - recount reports and searches for islands that are now understood to be non-existent... except one.

One of these was the Island of the Seven Cities. There is a book on just this subject, The Island of Seven Cities: Where the Chinese Settled When They Discovered America, by Paul Chiasson.

Without intending to, Chiasson seems to have actually found the Island of Seven Cities, remarkable as that may appear. The book is about his search for an explanation for some ruins, his finding out that the Portuguese didn't build it, nor the French, English or the Scottish settlers later on. And aspects of it were not known at all until right at the end of his search, the ones that really tied it to the legend of the Island of Seven Cities, and its sands of gold. . .

Look the book up and read it, if this is a piece of history you don't want to miss.

This is more for the map and exploration buff than those who like ancient sea lore for its own sake. So if Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu and the fabled kingdom of El Dorado are your fare, this is not the book for you. It is a quite scientific and literal, rather than literary, tour of some Atlantic landfalls that were mis-labelled and badly charted, and how later expeditions relocated, redefined and eventually eliminated the fabled islands. There is more navigation than imagination, but then, the author is a small boat sailor and who can fault him for preferring accurate atlases to tall tales? The phantom islands, as explained by this seafaring scholar, have a hold upon the imagination of those who long for some lost paradise, only awaiting re-discovery. But they can be relegated to the realm of hallucination or
geographical confusion, unless one holds onto the belief as a kind of quixotic quest.

Having just read - and been greatly disappointed by - "The Riddle of the Compas" by some Amir Aczel, I was very pleasantly suprised by Johnson's book. Where the other book was naive and feckless, this book was erudite and sophisticated in comparison. Johnson easily and concisely covers the navigational and cartographic issues involved, alongside the stories, legends and theology that were involved. As the author puts it so well, these stories represent a brief period in history when "the geography of legend and tradition gradually gave way to the geography of reality." A fascinating new twist on the Age of Discovery. for anyone with a taste for seafaring and history, and anyone who enjoyed Dava Sobels' Longitude, I recommend this book highly.

This book is really worth checking out. Donald Johnson takes us exploring some of the cooler little nooks and crannies of history, and we walk away greatly enriched. These are the kinds of tales that would make fantastic campfire-side telling. One of my favorites is the tale of "Frisland". If you do an online search for the phrase "Westford Knight" on Altavista.com, Hotbot.com, Yahoo.co, or whatever search engine you prefer, you will find a re-telling of the legend with which this island is associated. There is a book by Frederick Pohl, the respected science fiction author, called "Prince Henry Sinclair: His Expedition to the New World in 1398", which tells this story in more detail. The town Westford, MA actually has an old carving on a rock by the side of the highway that looks like a knight, and the town government has allowed a plaque to be put up next to it, telling the story of how Sinclair and his knights voyaged to Newfoundland, and later may have made their way to Massachusetts. Who knows if it's really true, but the carving COULD be a knight.

And that's just one of the stories. There are seven here, and each one is enthralling. Absolutely worth it.

Phantom Islands of the Atlantic: The Legends of Seven Lands That Never Were by Donald S. Johnson was a rather disappointing book. I opened it hoping to be told legends of these mystery islands. Instead, I got a bunch of history and a bunch of scattered maps. The maps were rather plain too. Some of them weren't even written in English. How's a map supposed to help me understand something if I cannot understand the map?
I also don't see why the book was called the legends if there are no legends in the book. The only legend is that we don't know whether these islands truly exist or not. Man simply put them on a map and hoped we would be stupid enough to believe it. It irked me because I couldn't read interesting tales of mysterious islands waiting to be found. One would think that the book may contain some mythology.
The book told of seven islands: Isola des Demonias, Frisland, Buss Island, Antillia, Hy-Brazil, Saint Ursula and Her Eleven Thousand Virgin Companions, and the Islands of Saint Brendan. It gave a ton of information on each island, explaining who was said to have found it and where they presumed it to be. Of course, none was pure fact, for the title said it was all legend. It seems, to me, to be a waste of time to make up intricate legends of places that one believes to be true, when one doesn't even know it exists. The islands may exist, but they may be completely different than they were thought to be.
If you happen to be interested in cartography, improbable theories, or exploring lands that have yet to be found (even though we sure know a lot about them), this book is for you.