Lost Islands: The Story of Islands That Have Vanished from Nautical Charts

xxi, 146 pp. Arranged by location, this collection of tales combines historical and geographic interests with fascinating anecdotal material. Stommel describes how these little pin-pricks of land got on to the charts, who 'discovered' them, who expunged them, and why some were so long-lived. It is a chronicle of poor navigation, misprints, falsification, optical illusion, wild whalers' tales, wistful hopes, and of a few real islands which rose and fell beneath the waves. The book contains two (reproductions of) 19th century fold-out Admiralty charts of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, where most of the islands mentioned in the text are 'located.'