Product Description
Rich with the wonder of the Age of Exploration, Phantom Islands of the Atlantic explores the strange tales of seven mythical islands that were claimes, described, and carefully mapped, although they never actually existed. "A single, deceptively simple volume that is profoundly researched . . . truly in a league of its own."--The Explorers Club Journal. 35 maps and illustrations.Amazon.com Review
Prior to the discovery of continental drift and the birth ofislands by volcanic action, a different sort of movement and birth oflandmasses took place: the continual cartographic displacement ofapproximately 27,000 nonexistent islands reputed to exist in theAtlantic and the ontological displacement of the islands fromimaginative "existence" on maps and in traveler'stales. Johnson traces the birth, lives, and deaths of seven of theseelusive islands of the Atlantic--including their towns, villages,and exotic inhabitants such as St. Ursula and her 11,000 virgincompanions (what a lure this must have been to lusty sailors!)--frommaps and ship's logs. In the process, he reveals much about the waysin which imagination becomes reality through social consensus and theauthority of the printed document. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

One of them seems to have been found...
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.

The Title's Got It All Wrong
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.

Geographical Myths Debunked
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?

quaint little interesting text
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.

intelligently written
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. ... Read more