BF

[BF @3artie]

By the late 1760s, as Cook's Pacific data spread, Pepys Island quietly dropped out of serious voyage maps, eighty years after one uncertain sighting had put it there.

[BF @3artie]

In 1683, an English privateer reported a new island in the South Atlantic and named it after Samuel Pepys. Astronomer Edmond Halley put it on his charts. Captain Cook found nothing but fog.

[BF @3artie]

The likely explanation, argued from 1839 by historian Pedro de Angelis: Cowley had simply resighted and misplotted the Falkland Islands, roughly 230 nautical miles south of where he placed Pepys Island.

[BF @3artie]

Frisland persisted on serious maps for roughly 150 years, copied by some of the most trusted cartographers in Europe, all from a single fabricated 16th century pamphlet.

[BF @3artie]

In 1558, a Venetian nobleman published old family letters describing a voyage to a North Atlantic island called Frisland. Mercator and Ortelius both put it on their maps. It was fiction from the start.

[BF @3artie]

In 1898, researcher Frederick W. Lucas published a study arguing the younger Zeno had invented the whole account, scattering and renaming real islands to build a fictional voyage, likely to support a Venetian claim to pre-Columbian discovery.

[BF @3artie]

As transatlantic voyages mapped the real ocean, Antillia faded from charts through the late 1400s and 1500s. Its name lived on regardless: the Caribbean islands are still called the Antilles today.

[BF @3artie]

A century before Columbus sailed, mapmakers were already drawing an island in the Atlantic called Antillia. It was said to hold seven Christian cities founded by refugees. It gave its name to the Antilles, and it never existed.

[BF @3artie]

Antillia's alternate name, the Island of Seven Cities, is thought by some historians to be an early root of the later Spanish legend of the Seven Cities of Gold, chased across North America decades afterwards.