Fonseca Island
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Fonseca, also spelled Fonzeca, Fonsequa, or Fonte Seca, other names San Bernardo, San Bernaldo, Galissonière's Rock, is a phantom island which was said to lie in the Atlantic Ocean at 12°27'N and 54°48'W, east of Barbados and Tobago.[1] [2]
It is unclear who was responsible for the "discovery" of Fonseca Island. On the world map printed in 1544 by Sebastian Cabot (Italian: Sebastiano Caboto), who was in the service of the English and Spanish crowns, an island is marked northeast of the mouth of the Orinoco that bears the name “San Bernardo”.[3] With a slightly different position, this island appears in 1599 on the world map by Jodocus Hondius under the name “y de fonte seca”.[4] The name Fonte Seca suggests a Portuguese origin: fonte = source, fountain; seca = dry.
The English geographer Richard Hakluyt located Fonseca in his main work of 1589: Principal navigations, voyages, and discoveries..., at the position 11° 15´ north.[5] This caused King Charles I to give the island to Philip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke & Montgomery, as a fiefdom, although little was known about Fonseca.[2]
It was also during the reign of Charles I, in the 1630s, that John Pym, along with other prominent Puritans, founded the Providence Island Company to help settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony disaffected by the climate to settle in the more pleasant region of the Caribbean. The island of Fonseca was originally chosen as the destination. A ship named Elisabeth with twenty emigrants was waiting. But since Fonseca could not be found, they sailed to Providencia Island, Colombia instead and founded a settlement there.[2][6][7]
Until then, no one had set foot on the island. In 1682 a book by an unknown author who went by the abbreviation “J.S.” was published. (This was possibly John Shirley (fl. 1680–1702), author of The Illustrious History of Women (1686).[8]) He claimed that a sailor told him that during a storm he had escaped to the island of Fonseca, which was populated by good-looking women, with male children being sent away at an early age. The women spoke Welsh and were survivors of an expedition led by Owen Gwynnidd. The climate was pleasant and the inhabitants, who were moon worshipers, received him kindly.[9]
A report published in 1708 is also unlikely to be based on facts. It is said to recount the experiences of two captains of a Turkish warship who landed on Fonseca in 1707. The island, which is located near Barbados, was inhabited by British settlers with African slaves.[10] The inhabitants were given to quarreling, drinking, gambling, gossip, and swearing.[11] Fonseca is probably confused with another island in the Antilles or with the island of Providencia, which today belongs to Colombia.
Soundings in 1852 proved there was no island at the purported location,[12] but Fonseca continued to appear on maps as late as 1866.[13] Fonseca appears southwest of Barbados in Keith Johnston's 1861 General Atlas.[14] The English geographer and hydrographer Alexander George Findlay (1812–1875) records Fonseca in his navigation manual of 1853 as a vigia under the name "Galissonière's Rock" (named after the French naval officer Roland-Michel Barrin de La Galissonière), but with a question mark.[15]
Galissoniere's Rock, about 12° 20' N., and 54° 49' W. This vigia was exhibited on the chart of M. Rochette,[16] as a rock, mentioned by M. Galissoniere, and some other navigators. A spot, nearly in the same situation, had previously been called the Isle of Fonseca. It is said to have been seen by the Rainbow, man-of-war. We have been vaguely informed, that the rock was again seen in 1822.
— Alexander George Findlay, Memoir, descriptive and explanatory, of the Northern Atlantic Ocean
In later editions of his work, a note declares "2,570 fathoms found ; perhaps volcanic."[17]
One can assume that Fonseca was one of the islands of the Lesser Antilles, whose position was incorrectly determined. Such serious navigational errors were not uncommon in the 15th and 16th centuries, especially in measuring longitude.
References[edit]
- ^ Hakluyt, Richard (1904). The Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation, etc. [Hakluyt Society; Extra Ser., nos. 1–12]. Vol. 10. Glasgow: James MacLehose & Sons for the Hakluyt Society. p. 332. Retrieved 2023-01-07.
- ^ a b c Brooke-Hitching, Edward (2018). The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps. Chronicle Books. pp. 106–109. ISBN 9781452168449. Retrieved 2023-01-07.
- ^ Sophus Ruge: The development of the cartography of America until 1570. Perthes, Gotha 1892, p. 66
- ^ Jodocus Hondius: Vera Totius Expeditionis Nauticae. Amsterdam around 1599
- ^ Richard Hakluyt : The principal navigations, voyages, and discoveries of the English nations: made by sea or over land to the most remote and farthest distant quarters of the earth at any time within the compass of these 1500 years. G. Bishop, London 1599
- ^ Kupperman, Karen Ordahl (1995). Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony. Cambridge University Press. p. 94. ISBN 9780521558358.
- ^ Feiling, Tom (2017). The Island that Disappeared: The Lost History of the Mayflower's Sister Ship and Its Rival Puritan Colony. Melville House. p. 111. ISBN 9781612197081.
- ^ Claeys, Gregory (2000). Restoration and Augustan British Utopia, p. xxxv.
- ^ J.S. (1682). A discovery of Fonseca in a voyage to Surranam. The island so long sought for in the Western Ocean. Inhabited by women with the account of their habits, customs and religion. And the exact langitude and latitute of the place taken from the mouth of a person cast away on the place in an hurricane with the account of their being cast away at Google Books. Dublin.
- ^ Aga Sha'bān (1708). A Voyage to the New Island Fonseca, Near Barbadoes: With Some Observations Made in a Cruize Among the Leward Islands. In Letters from Two Captains of Turkish Men of War, Driven Theither in the Year 1707. Translated Out of Turkish and French at Google Books. London.
- ^ Manguel, Alberto; Gianni Guadalupi (2000). The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (Newly updated and expanded ed.). San Diego: Harcourt. pp. 227. ISBN 0-15-600872-6.
- ^ United States Navy Department, Samuel Phillips Lee (1854). Report and Charts of the Cruise of the U.S. Brig Dolphin: Made Under Direction of the Navy Department, Volume 1
- ^ Newton, Arthur Percival (1914). The Colonising Activities of the English Puritans (PDF). Yale University Press. p. 133.
- ^ Alexander Keith Johnston, The Royal Atlas of Modern Geography. William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh 1861
- ^ Alexander George Findlay, Memoir, descriptive and explanatory, of the Northern Atlantic Ocean, and comprising instructions, general and particular for the navigation of that sea, 11th ed. London: R.H. Laurie, 1861, p. 689
- ^ William Faden, Louis S. d Arcy De la Rochette: A Chart of the Atlantic or Western Ocean […].William Faden, London 1780
- ^ Alexander George Findlay, Memoir, descriptive and explanatory, of the Northern Atlantic Ocean, and comprising instructions, general and particular for the navigation of that sea, 14th ed. London: R.H. Laurie, 1879, p. 802.