Vanishing Islands

Hawera Star, Volume L, 29 November 1930, Page 9

Vanishing Islands

“rpilESE 1 Admiralty sailing' directions contain some of the finest, literature of the sea,” said the master of the coasting steamer. “Why, there is not a novelist, living with imagination! enough to give- you in one volume, all this romance and adventure. And it is true, as exact as man can make it, set down in the precise language of the sea.” The eld captains eyes shone as 'lie tapped the thick blue cover of the “ Africa Pilot.” Affectionately he turned the pages and! handed the book to me, says a writer in the “Nefiv York Herakl Tribune.” “Now read about the island that vanished in ,Wolfish Bay.” On June 1, 1900 (so the statement ran) a mud or clay island 150 feet long, 30 feet wide, and 12 feet above the water mark, was formed off the north-west corner of Pelican Point. Steam was observed rising from. the\ clay composing the island. Within three months o.f the- date of the uplieav- ( al the island disappeared. “That island has broken surface onieo or twice since then,” said the captain “I have steamed past it —a weird little place, smelling of sulphur and covered with dead fish.” “But you hear of islands rising and vanishing like that all over the world; in the cyclone-ridden China iSea, the Indian Ocean, the Pacific and the Oaribean. I could) toll you about dozens of them —a queer trade, navigation.”

The! captain pulled down a roll of charts, and selected one on which sprawled the thin half-moon of the West Indies. “Now here is Trinidad, where I used to load pitch —this large island close to the Venezuela coast. Near the island you .see tlieie is a virgin, a warning of possible danger. This particular speck represents an island born one day, visited by Trinidad! harbour people, and claimed for Britain. A few days later the island sank back again, leaving only this mark on. the chart.” “Other island® in the 'West Indies have suffered great disasters as a result of submarine earthquakes. Then' was the tragedy of Port Royal, Jamaica. The whole town sank beneaththe bay. ” “ Nevis met the same fate. T was in there with a fruit steamer years ago, and saw the streets and houses of the old town, through the clear green water. “You find virgins on every chart. When r ma,s in the whaling traded saw some enormous ice-islands hundreds of feet high, twenty or thirty miles long, and strewn with rocks and earth from tliis Antarctic Continent. It. was hard to believe that they were afloat. The early explorers thought they were island's, -and fixed their positions as well as thev could.

‘There was am emigrant, ship, the Guiding ISltar, that sighted a bookshape .1 ice-island sixty miles long. She

Romances of the Sea

Irritants for Chartmakers

•was trapped in the bay, and all hands were lost.

“Then there was the ice-island reported by Captain 'Coward of the brig Renovation, in 1 Sol —an ice-island with field-ice attached, and a, couple of threemasted ships high and! dry on it. 'Some thought they mere 'Franklin’s Erebus and Terror/ but the descriptions did not tally. ’ ’ To the ships of the British Navy often falls the task of placing new j islands on the chart, or, after a long search, reporting as non-existing islands “sighted” years before and never seen again. 'The captain opened the “Red Sea Pilot,” with its appropriate red cover, and showed me the brief three lint's dealing with Avocet Ro'ek, a small coral patch with at least depth of two and l , one-half fathoms and from twenty-eight to thirty fathoms close round. “’Those three lines cost two ships and thousand's of ponds spent ini verifying the position of the rock,” he said. “ The crew made port in the boats, hut Board of Trades officials at the inquiry could hardly .believe that there was an uncharted' rock in thar neighbourhood. Bo 11.M.5. Flying Fish steamed to the spot, took soundings' and' reported deep water. “The captain of the Avocet stuck to his story, but the Admiralty decided against making another search. Then the Teddington rammed'the same rock and sank. A search by two man-o’-war followed, and after hot weeks of weary dragging with wires (lie boats of 11.M.5. Stork found the rock.” The charts used' to show a group of 'dots on the lonely sea-track to the south' of Australia —the Royal Company Islands. After many years a liner! passed: right over their supposed posi- 1 tion. They were officially wiped out 1 and they 'have not reappeared. In the Aleutian Islands, however, islands well known: to mariners, like .Ship Rock Island, have vanished, only to rise again years afterwards in new shapes. The Bogosluv Islands in those seas have been charted, icxpunged, and l charted again a puzzling 'task for the hydrograph ers. Falcon Island, in the South Pacific, has irritated the 'chart-makers often since it was first observed by shipmasters in IS'BS. The cliffs of the island were then 150 feet .high, and it was placed definitely on the 'map. Down it went, and stayed down for several years, only to come up piping hot with a volcano in eruption. ' In 1900 it was six feet above highwater mark, rain and wind having broken up tlie lava; hut in T 927 when American geologists landed, it liad grown again, and the volcano was throwing out a cloud of ashes and steam. Shells, coconuts, and even bottles had been washed up on the beaches and a solitary bush had taken root. No ■ doubt Falcon Island will continue to

be a jack-in-the-box, and' remain on tlvc chart as a vigia.' 'Submarine volcanoes have been responsible for .many of these new-born islands. There was Grrahanc’s Island, a solid lull of dust, sand and lava, emitting lire and smoke, explored by British naval seamen soon after its appearance in the Mediterranean near* Sicily. New charts gave its exact ; position ; no sooner had they been printed than the whole island dropped back to the troubled sea floor. The American corvette. Levant, calling at 'Honolulu on the may to Panama in I'SGO, was instructed to leave her| course and; search for an island which! was much in doubt. It had been des-J eribedi by a whaling skipper as a low-' lying coral atoll, a little ring marked I by tall palms and a lagoon reflecting its light upwards like a mirror. Nor 0110 knows whether the Levant ever! made that island; she was never seen* again. Dougherty Island is still sought by occasional deep-sea exploration vessels between New Zealand and iCapo: Horn. It was described by Captain Dougherty in 3841 as a great ro.cky ridge seven miles long and 300 feet high. Twenty years later another shipmaster supplied similar details. Yet, when Captain Scott's famous old barque Discovery searched 'for it early this century, soundings gave a depth of three miles. Did Dougherty see an ice-island' and mistake it for solid land l ? It‘ so, it is extraordinary that a second vessel, 20 years later, should have encountered another ice-island in the same place and .with l the same appearance. Finally there i« the greatest vanishing island of all —the lost. Atlantis. Chains of repairing made ibv steamers I laying and repairing the deep-sea * > ables iir recent years have proved that immvi mountains' are constantly being created on: the bod of the Atlantic, that groat depths may become much shallower, and vice versa. 'These 'discoveries give strong support te those who believe- that tli-e. peaks' of T'en.efifl'e. Ascension, Tristan dla Cunha. and other Jone.lv islands are the last vestiges' of an enormous Atlantean 'continent which disappeared long before Columbus sailed out into the eye of the setting sun.

Naturalists, geologists and scientists of a dozen different professions' have studied the problem, and decided in, favour of a lost Continent. Thus one finds lizards on tlm Atlantic islands which must have been at home in ‘Europe. and! butterflies that really 'belong to the Mediterranean. Most mysterious clues of all were discovered by the f-lpnniards—th'o Guanches of the Canary Islands—that extinct rake of humans 'which may .have been the last of tho Atlantenns, survivors who clung to their great mountain peak when the Continent, sank almost beneath the surface of the sea.