Michael:
> > I've read a fair bit around the topic of sub-Antarctic islands, and
> > I've never heard of these, or seen them on a map.
> it or they are on the most recent 6 cia maps of antarctica at perry
> castaneda
Ah, I see what you mean. It looks like a cartographer with a tic has
attempted to insert the Diego Ramirez islands, just a tad too far
south and a tad too huge. Diego Ramirez is just a little scatter of
rocks and penguins, plus a Chilean weather station, at 56.5S - just
too far north for its EEZ to touch the 60S parallel.
> > a last dyng echo of the great "lost" islands of
> > the region, Macy and Swain and the Auroras.
> but that is even more interesting
> can you give us the skinny on these
Well, the Southern Ocean rather lent itself to imaginary or misplaced
islands, what with the fog and the fata morgana and the icebergs and
the rare view of sun and stars for navigation, plus in the early days
poor chronometers for longitude and a plethora of prime meridians that
folk sometimes misconverted between.Many of the islands in these parts
started out on the maps as an archipelago strung out along the various
longitude estimates they had received at some time or another. Others
turned out to be entirely imaginary.
The Auroras are probably in the first category. They were thoroughly
surveyed in 1794 by a Spanish naval vessel equipped with chronometers
which had been set in the Falklands only a few days previously, which
should have given them a very accurate longitude estimate - but there
are no islands where the Auroras are said to be! However, they're laid
down in the same latitude as Shag Rocks, but six degrees further west.
At that time Spain used a prime meridian through Cadiz, which is six
degrees west of Greenwich. So the most likely explanation for such
well-surveyed non-existent islands is a sighting of Shag Rocks
(perhaps beset by icebergs, making them look like mountains rising
from a snowy shore) followed by a charting error.
Swain & Macy supposedly lie west of the Drake. They first appeared on
maps in the early 1800s, and were still marked on the 1974 Soviet
Atlas of the Pacific Ocean. They contributed to the downfall of the
Palmer-Pendleton Antarctic expedition, which planned to offset costs
by sealing on Swain and Macy, but couldn't find them! And no-one has
found them since. There's nothing nearby that could have been
misplotted, so they were probably big tabular bergs or fata morgana.
All of this (and much, much more) from a splendid book called Lost
Islands, by Henry Stommel ISBN 0774802103.
Grant