Phantom Islands Of The Atlantic, by Donald S. Johnson

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.com/2015/11/17/book-review-bronze-age-america/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/02/01/book-review-saga-america/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/02/01/book-review-the-graves-of-the-golden-bear/