Featured Books
Fighting Temeraire by Sam Willis
Live Yankees: The Sewalls and Their Ships by W. H. Bunting
His Majesty's Ship by Alaric Bond
Galveston's the Elissa: The Tall Ship of Texas by Kurt Voss
My River Chronicles - Rediscovering the America on the Hudson by Jessica DuLong
The Frigate Surprise: The Complete Story of the Ship Made Famous in the Novels of Patrick O'Brian by by Geoff Hunt and Brian Lavery
James Nelson's George Washington's Secret Navy
Defying Empire:Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York by Thomas Truxes
Deadly Shoals, a Wiki Coffin Mystery by Joan Druett
Star Crossedby Linda Collison
The Privateer's Revenge: A Kydd Sea Adventure (Kydd Sea Adventures)
Peter Wicked: A Matty Graves Novel (The Matty Graves Novels)
The Jackass Frigate byAlaric Bond
Steady As She Goesby John Molloy
Voyages, the Age of Sail: Documents in American Maritime History, Volume I, 1492-1865
Expedition Whydah: The Story of the World's First Excavation of a Pirate Treasure Ship and the Man Who Found Her
Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom--and Revenge
The Illustrated Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
Sable Island – Graveyard of the Atlantic
Looking at a chart or even Google maps, Sable Island doesn’t look like it should be where it is - a crescent shaped sand bar, 42 kms long, rising near the edge of the Continental Shelf, a full 160 kms from the nearest shore. Add the area’s frequent storms and fog as well as the doubly unfortunate coincidence that Sable Island lies on the Great Circle route from Europe to the East Coast of North America, and you have all the ingredients for a mariner’s nightmare. With over 350 recorded shipwrecks, Sable Island is often referred to as the Graveyard of the Atlantic.
Thanks to Andy Hall at the Maritime Texas blog for pointing out a fascinating map of the known shipwrecks on Sable Island.
Even those vessels which do not run aground on the sandy shoals of Sable Island are still at risk in the treacherous seas nearby. The swordfishing boat Andrea Gail, the focus of the Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger , is believed to have gone down somewhere near Sable Island in 100′+ storm waves. The 406-megahertz EPIRB emergency beacon identified as belonging to the Andrea Gail washed ashore on Sable Island in November of 1991.
Interesting commentary on Sable Island from the Strange Maps blog.
I had never heard of Fagunda. A 17th-century map places it in the North Atlantic, not far from Estotiland, Bus and Frislant. These and other so-called phantom islands were a by-product of the Age of Discovery. They started out as errors of nautical observation, and lived on as cartographic misconceptions – sometimes for centuries (see also #62, #64, #295).
A comprehensive list of phantom islands is quite long, but Fagunda is not on it. That’s because Fagunda is real. Even if its history is equally obscure and hardly less fantastic than that of actual phantom islands. Even if that name is as absent from today’s maps as those of its fictional companions.
The island, basically a single, giant dune marooned off Nova Scotia, nowadays is known as Sable Island. And yet even under that name it’s an obscure piece of North Atlantic real estate. Contributing to its obscurity are its isolated, eccentric location (160 km out to sea), tiny surface (34 km2) and economic irrelevance.
Like the island itself, its history is frequently shrouded in mist. The first European visitor may have been the Portuguese discoverer João Álvares Fagundes, in the 1520s (hence its early name). At the end of the 16th century, a French attempt to establish a convict colony succeeded only in endowing the island with its subsequent name: île de Sable, literally Sand Island.
Only sealers, shipwrecked sailors and salvagers made their homes on Sable Island, impermanent ones at best. The salvagers must have had some pretty good times – over the last few centuries, more than 350 vessels were shipwrecked on what became known as the “Graveyard of the Atlantic”.
Located in shallow, often stormy and foggy waters, the elongated Sable Island (44 km long but never more than 2 km wide) might have been predestined as a catchment area for ships treading these Atlantic latitudes – a self-fulfilling curse for captains ignorant or oblivious of this huge, constantly shifting sandbar.
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