The vanishing island

Ready for a strange story, that has a curious connection to yesterday's post, about doorways and liminal spaces?

Let's start with H. P. Lovecraft's famous short story "The Call of Cthulhu," written in 1926, which sets up the tale with the discovery on a small island in an archipelago in the South Pacific of a small stone statue that looks like some kind of octopus/human hybrid.  Then, when anthropologists go to the island chain to try and find its origins, the natives not only deny knowing anything about the idol, they say the island where it was allegedly found is uninhabited and always has been.  Sure enough, when they go to that particular island, it's empty -- but there are some "suspicious traces" that certainly look like there'd been people living there, but who were all mysteriously done away with in the not too recent past.  Inquiries are launched, but the people who know something about the idol and where it was discovered all seem to have the unfortunate habit of dying before they can tell anyone about it.  The last part of the story describes the landing of a ship called the Emma on an island that had surfaced temporarily "in the open ocean south of the Cook Islands" due to an earthquake.  Second Mate Gustaf Johansen and six others go ashore looking for a supply of fresh water and other provisions, and soon enough regret their decision:

Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase.  The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarizing miasma welling out from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance showed concavity after the first showed convexity.

It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the monolith and shouted of what he had found.  The rest followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved door with the now-familiar squid-dragon bas-relief.  It was, Johansen said, like a great barn door; and they all felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap door or slantwise like an outside cellar door...  [T]he geometry of the place was all wrong.  One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.

Then, because any reader with a scrap of common sense is by this time screaming at the characters "DO NOT OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR!", of course one of them opens the fucking door:

Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down or along the jamb and rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal.  In this fantasy of prismatic distortion, it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.

The result is that Cthulhu wakes up, most of the sailors are messily devoured, and the survivors are left with some seriously eldritch PTSD.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dominique Signoret (signodom.club.fr), Cthulhu and R'lyeh, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Despite Lovecraft's regrettable tendency toward purple prose and the fact that he never met an adverb he didn't like, you have to admit the whole thing is pretty damn atmospheric.

What you may not know is that it's based on a true story.

Well, not the evil octopus monster part, at least so far as I know.  In 1916, the Polynesian Society of Honolulu printed an account from a sailor who claimed to have years earlier visited an island called Tuanaki, where he lived with the natives for six days.  It was, he said, south of Rarotonga, the largest of the Cook Islands; in fact, the Tuanakians ultimately left their home (for unknown reasons, but there were hints of it being something bad) and resettled in Rarotonga, where some of them still lived.

So... explorers set out to find Tuanaki.  When they arrived at the point where the island allegedly was, there was nothing there but open ocean.

Off to Rarotonga to interview any Tuanakians who still lived there.  You guessed it -- the Rarotongans not only said that no one had emigrated there from other islands within living memory, no one they talked to had ever heard of Tuanaki.

Or so they claimed.

More prosaically, maybe (the explorers suggested) Tuanaki had sunk beneath the waves, either due to an earthquake or erosion or both.  One of them recalled that in 1862, some seafarers traveling from Auckland to Rarotonga had hit a submerged shoal near the coordinates supposedly corresponding to Tuanaki's location.  The shoal had been named Haymet Rocks in honor of the ship's owner, J. E. Haymet.

But further exploration couldn't find those, either.  If the Haymet Rocks were the remnants of Tuanaki, they seemed to have vanished as well.

And just to add an extra weird twist to the whole story, explorer Ernest Shackleton launched an expedition in 1921 with the express purpose of relocating Tuanaki -- then died of an apparent heart attack on South Georgia Island before he could go there.

The upshot of it all is that we still don't know where, or if, Tuanaki existed.  Considering the dicey state of navigation in the mid-nineteenth century, it's likely the initial account from the sailor had misidentified the location of the island where he stayed and/or misremembered the name of it.

But the fact remains that it's a very odd story, and you can see why it would have inspired Lovecraft.  Even without the oozing cyclopean architecture with impossible geometry, the whole tale is curious, and leaves more questions than answers.  After all, even with our modern mapping tools, the Pacific Ocean is a big place; the latitude and longitude Lovecraft quotes as the location of R'lyeh is not far from Point Nemo, the "oceanic pole of inaccessibility" -- the place in the Earth's oceans that is the farthest from any possible landfall.

So not a place anyone is likely to visit.  But if you do, and there's an uncharted island there, just remember the cardinal rule:

DO.  NOT.  OPEN.  THE.  FUCKING.  DOOR.

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Islands of the imagination

There's a long list of what have been nicknamed "phantom islands" -- islands that have been recorded on maps, sometimes for centuries, but then when people follow the map and go out where the island supposedly is, there's nothing there.

Well, there's something there, namely a shit tonne of salt water.  In one way, it's unsurprising that misidentifications like this can happen; icebergs, pumice rafts from volcanic eruptions, and even low cloud banks in the distance can look like land, and when you couple that with the desperation to reach terra firma a lot of mariners felt after weeks at sea, it's understandable that this sometimes occurred.  What's more curious is how persistent some of these phantom islands were -- there are ones that were only conclusively proven not to exist in the last two decades.

A big part of the problem is that in the days before satellites and GPS, when you were out at sea, it was awfully hard to be certain of exactly where you were.  Latitude, as it turns out, is fairly easy; in the Northern Hemisphere, the altitude of Polaris above the horizon (which you can measure with a sextant) is equal to the latitude.  (It's a little trickier in the Southern Hemisphere -- there is no "South Star" -- but with a little adjustment, the same principle can still be used.)

Longitude, on the other hand, is a whole other can of worms.

You can figure out your longitude using the rising times of various stars, but the hitch is that requires you have an accurate timepiece that isn't thrown off by the incessant jostling and jolting on board ship.  It wasn't until the eighteenth century that such a clock was invented, and it only went into widespread use in the nineteenth -- how this happened is the topic of Dava Sobel's wonderful book Longitude -- but even with more accurate timekeeping, figuring out exactly where in the trackless oceans you were was no easy task.  This is probably what happened with the nonexistent Saxemberg Island, first sighted in 1670, which appeared on maps for almost two hundred years (and was "viewed extensively from a distance" in 1804 and again in 1816).  It's now surmised that they were actually seeing the remote Tristan da Cunha Island, and had simply miscalculated where they were.

One that is likely to have been a combination of inaccurate longitude calculation and seeing something that looked like an island but wasn't is "New South Greenland," which was "discovered" by the curious figure of Captain Benjamin Morrell, originally of New York.  To say that Morrell had a checkered career is a bit of an understatement.  He ran away to become a sailor at age seventeen, served during the War of 1812 (and was captured twice by the British), but eventually rose through the ranks to captain the Wasp, which he took down into Antarctic waters in 1823.  He had a penchant for exaggeration and occasional outright lying, but in this particular case he seems to have simply been mistaken.  He reported an extensive land which he initially thought was part of the Antarctic Peninsula, and sailed along it for five hundred kilometers -- but subsequently he found his position to be ten degrees of longitude (at that latitude, about two hundred kilometers) east of where he thought he was, in a part of the ocean that has no land masses whatsoever and by later sounding was found to be 1,500 meters deep.  So what he saw clearly wasn't part of Antarctica.  What it actually was remains a mystery -- the best guess is a long connected chunk of icebergs.

For what it's worth, Morrell's career didn't improve much thereafter.  He was involved in piracy in China and Madagascar and was lucky to escape with his life, launched a fruitless search for gold in New Guinea, and supposedly died "of a fever" in Mozambique in 1838 -- although a letter with his signature showed up in New York in 1843, leading some people to believe he faked his own death to get away from all the people he'd defrauded or otherwise pissed off.

Sometimes imaginary islands get wrapped up in mythology, and that makes it even harder to tease out what's real and what isn't.  Penglai, "thirty thousand leagues off the east coast of Shandong, China," described as one of the homes of the "Great Immortals," is pretty certainly a tall tale -- although interestingly, there's a legend both in Vietnam and Japan pinpointing an island in more or less the same place (where it's called Bồng Lai and Hōrai, respectively).  Saint Brendan's Isle, supposedly first seen in 512 C.E. by the Irish monk/explorer Saint Brendan of Clonfert, is another one around which wild tales have arisen, but it was reported so persistently that its existence was considered a fact for hundreds of years.  (Its reputation for being the home of devils and demons led a priest in the Canary Islands to perform an exorcism directed toward the entire island in 1723.)  The last alleged sighting of Saint Brendan's Isle was in 1772, but it still appeared on maps -- somewhere off the west coast of Africa -- well into the nineteenth century.

Bedarra Island, off the coast of Australia, which is actually real [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Banfield1 at English Wikipedia, Bedarra Island aerial, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Sometimes islands do exist -- temporarily.  This seems to be the case with Bermeja, discovered by Spanish explorers off the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula in 1539, and extensively described (along with its precise location) by other mariners in the sixteenth century.  Expeditions to find it later proved unsuccessful, although close to the reported location there is a significant seamount.  It's likely that Bermeja was the victim of a combination of erosion and tectonic shifting, and what was once dry land now isn't.

A lot of them, though, have eluded explanation except as mirages.  This is almost certainly the case with the aptly-if-unfortunately-named Fata Morgana Island (a fata morgana is a common type of mirage experienced at sea, especially in polar regions).  The explorers Johan Peter Koch and Aage Bertelsen reported it -- once again, along with an exact location, off the northeast coast of Greenland -- in 1907, and its existence was confirmed from the air by Koch's son Lauge in 1933.  Unfortunately for all three of them, there's no land there, just lots of extremely cold salt water.  The sightings were undoubtedly a combination of mirages and wishful thinking.

In any case, our precision GPS systems, satellite photography, and (I hope) less tendency to fall for fanciful tall tales has improved our ability to discern between what's real and what's not.  Although I have to say I'm kind of disappointed that Antillia isn't real.  A favorite claim amongst the Spanish and the Portuguese until the sixteenth century, at which point their own explorers came back and reported that there wasn't anything where it allegedly was but a big blob of the Atlantic Ocean, Antillia supposedly had seven cities run like some utopian paradise, where everyone lived in harmony and there was no crime or violence, and its leaders were wise, kind, and benevolent.  I don't know about you, but if that one is ever rediscovered, I'm buying a plane ticket.

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A traveler's tale

Pytheas of Massalia was a Greek polymath who was born in what is now Marseilles, France in around 350 B.C.E., making him a generation younger than Aristotle, and an almost exact contemporary of Alexander the Great.  When I tell you about what this guy did, you will (I hope) be shocked that his name isn't as familiar to students of history as the other two gentlemen I mentioned.

The reason for his relative obscurity is one that is all too common; he is known to have written a single book, Τὰ Περὶ τοῦ Ὠκεανοῦ (On the Ocean), possibly supplemented by a second work, Περίοδος Γῆς (Around the Earth), although some scholars believe those were two alternate titles for the same account.  In any case, nothing of his writing survives except for excerpts and references to him and his accomplishments in other writing, most notably in the books of such luminaries as Strabo and Pliny the Elder.  Sadly, like so much of the brilliant work of antiquity, all the copies of Pytheas's book (or books) have fallen prey to the ravages of time.

What Pytheas of Massalia recorded in his writings would have been an incredible feat for anyone, and nearly beggars belief for someone in the fourth century B.C.E.  He'd heard that there were these islands off the northwest coast of Gaul, inhabited by some curious folks called the Celts, and he decided to go see for himself.

How he started his travels is uncertain.  At this point in history, the Carthaginians had control of the Straits of Gibraltar, and the hostilities between them and damn near everyone else in the region would have made passage a dicey affair.  There's a possibility that he crossed Gaul overland and launched from the mouth of either the Garonne or Loire River into the Bay of Biscay.  In any case, once he got into the Atlantic, it was off to the races.

He sailed up the west coast of England, stopping to do considerable travel on foot, up through the Irish Sea, past the Isle of Man and the Hebrides.  He is the first to note that the natives called the main island Prydain -- Romanized to Britannia -- which is where we get the modern name Britain.

Then, amazingly, Pytheas kept going.

Marble sculpture of Pytheas by Auguste Ottin (1860)  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rvalette, Pythéas, CC BY-SA 3.0]

There are credible claims that he made it as far as either Iceland or the Lofoten Islands -- which it was is uncertain.  He reports being in a place "six days north of Britain," an island of "perpetual frost and snow" where, nevertheless, "the Sun never sets" -- the first known Greek to realize what happens to day length when you're above the Arctic Circle.  Not content even yet, he began to head east, making his way into the Baltic Sea.  There, he met a people he called the Gutones (almost certainly the Goths), who made their living trading amber, which is abundant in what is now Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia.  From there he went inland, possibly traveling along the region's many navigable rivers.  It's thought that he made it all the way to what was then called Scythia, along the north shore of the Black Sea.

One of the most remarkable things about Pytheas and the others who traveled with him is how well received they were.  Despite the reputation for hostility that the ancient Celts, Norse, Teutons, Baltics, and Scythians all had, there's no indication Pytheas ever had any trouble -- just showing that for the most part, if you treat people with kindness and respect, they reciprocate.  Even the "barbarians."

Pytheas also had a couple of striking scientific achievements -- using the changing elevation above the horizon of familiar stars as he went north, he tried to estimate the circumference of the Earth using a sextant.  His measurements were off -- Eratosthenes of Cyrene did way better a hundred years later -- but still, it was a creditable attempt.  Second, he is the first person known to have associated the tides with the position and phases of the Moon, a remarkable idea during a time when the celestial objects were supposed to be gods of various sorts, and there was no inkling of a law of gravitation.

Finally, Pytheas made his way back home to write his book(s), and lived the rest of his life in comfort in his villa in Massalia.  But can you imagine what he must have seen and experienced?  Meeting the people of the British Isles, Scandinavia, Germany, the Baltic lands, and Scythia before they'd had much chance to contact people from other cultures.  Seeing the enormous expanse of the oceans and the pack ice of the Arctic from the deck of a simple sailing ship.  What an adventure -- and what extraordinary curiosity, drive, and courage.

It's such a tragedy that Pytheas's original manuscript(s) have been lost; imagine what more we could learn from his voyages by reading a first-hand account.  Regardless, he was an extraordinary person, someone determined to see as much of the world as he could, and who amazingly (considering the times) lived to tell his traveler's tale to the astonishment of his friends back home.

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Explorer, scientist... and hoaxer

Ever heard of André Thevet?

Born around 1516 in Angoulême, France, he was educated in the convent school of that city, although his teachers recorded that as a child he was "more interested in reading books than he was in religion," which seems like a reasonable choice to me.  Be that as it may, he evidently decided religion was worth studying after all, because at the age of twenty he took his vows and became a Franciscan priest.

[All the images in the post are in the Public Domain]

He led a life that was pretty remarkable, especially as compared to most of the people of his day (even the well-educated ones).  With the blessing of Jean de Bar-le-Duc, Cardinal of Lorraine, he visited Egypt, Greece, Turkey, and Palestine -- and in 1555 set out with Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon, a French naval officer, to cross the Atlantic and explore the eastern coast of South America.

Now, keep in mind when all this was happening.  This is fifty years before the founding of Jamestown, Virginia.  It's ten years before the founding of St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest continuously-occupied city founded by Europeans in North America.

So no one in Europe knew much about the Americas at that point other than (1) they existed, (2) they were big, and (3) they were inhabited by people who weren't really all that receptive to a bunch of white guys showing up and saying "this is ours now."

But that didn't stop Thevet and de Villegaignon, who ended up in what is now Brazil, with their base of operations as the tiny settlement that ultimately would become Rio de Janeiro.  And this is where the story gets interesting.

Thevet was a self-styled naturalist, and he set about to document, describe, and draw all the interesting new plants and animals he found.  But the problem was, Thevet was also apparently a dedicated spinner of wild yarns.  So his book, Les singularités du France-Antarctique, has a few at least marginally accurate bits, like the sloth:

And this toucan:

But then, for reasons unknown, Thevet threw in some things like the succarath of Patagonia:

Which looks like he could use a good meal or two.  Then there's the camphruch, a sort of weird water unicorn thing (notice the webbed hind feet):

And the aloés, a sort of fish-goose mashup:

The yuanat, which apparently is the bastard child of a cat and an iguana:

And worst of all, the licorne-de-mer, which looks a bit like a giant fish with a chainsaw protruding from its forehead:

What strikes me about all of this is that I've been to South America (twice), and there's enough weird and fascinating wildlife there that you have to wonder what Thevet's possible motivation was for inventing all of this.  (I'm aware that some of this may have been quick glimpses followed by filling in the blanks in his memory with whatever came to mind.  I already noted the yuanat's resemblance to an iguana, and the saw-horn of the licorne-de-mer looks like the flat, toothed snout of a sawfish.  But still, a lot of it seems to have been spun from whole cloth.)

It's a question I've asked before -- what does a hoaxer get out of hoaxing?  Assuming there's not some obvious motivation like money?  Profit doesn't seem to be the issue here.  Thevet would likely have had precisely the same number of sales of his book, once he got back to France, with illustrations of real animals and plants as he did with all of this fanciful stuff that he'd clearly made up as he went along.  I mean, you don't need to exaggerate anything to see how bizarre the Pink Fairy Armadillo is:

Or the White-faced Saki:

Or the South American Tapir:

My guess is that he just got lazy, and decided it was more fun to sit on board ship and sip brandy and make up fanciful animals than it was tromping around the rain forest trying to see what was actually out there.

Thevet was hardly the only one who did this, of course.  The early days of European exploration were rife with examples of people coming back from ship voyages with bizarre tales of human tribes with their faces in the middle of their chests, people who had dogs' heads, people whose feet pointed backwards so their tracks would confuse anyone trying to follow them, a tribe whose members had enormous, pendulous elephant ears, and one-legged men with a single enormous foot that they used as a parasol on hot days (a legend used for wonderfully humorous effect in C. S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader).  I guess "yeah, we had a good trip and saw some cool people who looked basically like us only with darker skin" just wasn't good enough.

As amusing as all this may seem, I find this tendency maddening.  It's hard enough to figure out what's real and what's not under ordinary circumstances, but hoaxers complicate matters, and for no good reason other than a desire for notoriety.  So as much as I can chuckle at Thevet's duck/lion/unicorn, people like him set back the actual science of natural history significantly with their fairy stories.

I'd like to say that all of this is a thing of the past, but it's the same thing that motivates a lot of claims of cryptid-hunters, isn't it?  Now, I hasten to say that this doesn't invalidate all cryptid claims; as I've said many times before, there may really be something weird and unknown to biology out there lurking in the woods, lakes, or oceans.  But we have enough trouble dealing with the inevitable tendency of people (especially under high-adrenaline conditions) to exaggerate or misinterpret what they see and hear without the added complication of hoaxers making shit up.

So I encourage you to go to South America, which is a wonderful, diverse, fascinating, and huge place to explore.  It's home to over 300 species of hummingbirds (the eastern United States has a grand total of one), and countless other birds, reptiles, amphibians, mammals, insects, and assorted miscellany.  If you go there, though, watch out for cat-iguanas.  I hear they pack a nasty bite.

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Last week's Skeptophilia book recommendation was a fun book about math; this week's is a fun book about science.

In The Canon, New York Times and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Natalie Angier takes on a huge problem in the United States (and, I suspect, elsewhere), and does it with her signature clarity and sparkling humor: science illiteracy.

Angier worked with scientists from a variety of different fields -- physics, geology, biology, chemistry, meteorology/climatology, and others -- to come up with a compendium of what informed people should, at minimum, know about science.  In each of the sections of her book she looks at the basics of a different field, and explains concepts using analogies and examples that will have you smiling -- and understanding.

This is one of those books that should be required reading in every high school science curriculum.  As Angier points out, part of the reason we're in the environmental mess we currently face is because people either didn't know enough science to make smart decisions, or else knew it and set it aside for political and financial short-term expediency.  Whatever the cause, though, she's right that only education can cure it, and if that's going to succeed we need to counter the rote, dull, vocabulary-intense way science is usually taught in public schools.  We need to recapture the excitement of science -- that understanding stuff is fun.  

Angier's book takes a long stride in that direction.  I recommend it to everyone, layperson and science geek alike.  It's a whirlwind that will leave you laughing, and also marveling at just how cool the universe is.