The Un-Discovered Islands

September 1, 2017
Traveling through the islands of myth and fantasy with a guide who does his best to unravel the mysteries surrounding them.What Tallack (Sixty Degrees North: Around the World in Search of Home, 2016, etc.) calls "the line between myth and map" is a fine one, occasionally blurry and indistinct. The author, who lives in Glasgow but is originally from the remote island of Shetland, does his best to track these islands to their origins in tall tales sold by sailors, allegories of paradise, and even outright deception. Part of the trickiness is that many of these islands have appeared on maps, as if they were real, from a time when "people understood that the world was big and that their part of it was small, but they knew little of what lay beyond." Charting that world of what lay beyond was an inexact science, and some of those islands might now be known under a different name, while some were simply a product of myth or imagination. The best-known of these remains Atlantis, the sunken continent, which, writes Tallack, "is a fictional island, invented by Plato for allegorical purposes." He continues, "you can discover almost anything you want to discover about Atlantis, and pretty much every word of it is nonsense." Many of these islands seem to exist in the spiritual realm, as places inhabited by the dead or as a heavenly paradise on Earth, a different realm from the world the rest of us experience. Of one, he writes, once one has seen it, his words become unintelligible to others. Hence the lack of documentation. Yet the tales long persisted, because "the idea of a drowned island is somehow both irresistible and unbelievable." Scott's illustrations simply conjure the imaginative visions, while the prose tends toward the matter-of-fact (or matter-of-myth) and encyclopedic. Travel writing about places no one can travel.

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October 16, 2017
Glaswegian writer Tallack (Sixty Degrees North) muses on the human desire to “make-believe” in this delightful atlas of islands, some of which no longer exist and many of which never did. He tours phantom isles, forgotten spits, and outcrops known only through time and tale. “Their stories are so distant, and so infused with the imaginary, that they exist today only in name,” Tallack writes. The book tours Plato’s sunken island of Atlantis; an island near Britain known only from the travelogue of Greek explorer Pytheas around 330 B.C.E.; the island of Javasu, concocted by 19th-century huckster Mary Willcocks as exotic homeland of Princess Caraboo; and many other made-up islands throughout time. Tallack untwists their histories by asking questions such as, how did the islands came to be? When did cartographers erase them? Who named them? He explores the islands in seven chapters dedicated to, among other topics, “Islands of Life and Death” (supernatural regions in myth that divide the dead from the living), and “Recent Un-Discoveries,” which brings his discoveries into the 21st century, when technological advances in archeology expose the bald-faced lies of the past. Coupled with Scott’s colorful illustrations, this book will delight armchair travelers and readers of Atlas Obscura. Color illus.