Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies (2 page)

So let’s go on a journey—to the ends of the earth and the other side of the street, as far as we need to go to get away from the familiar and the routine. Good or bad, scary or wonderful, we need unruly places that defy expectations. If we can’t find them we’ll create them. Our topophilia can never be extinguished or sated.

We are headed for uncharted territory, to places found on few maps and sometimes on none. They are both extraordinary and real. This is a book of floating islands, dead cities, and hidden kingdoms. We begin with raw territory, exploring lost places that have been chanced upon or uncovered, before heading in the direction of places that have been more consciously fashioned. It’s not a smooth trajectory, for nearly all of the places we will encounter are paradoxical and hard to define, but it does allow us to encounter a world of startling profusion. As we will quickly discover, this is not the same thing as offering up a rose-tinted planet of happy lands. Authentic topophilia can never be satisfied with a diet of sunny villages. The most fascinating places are often also the most disturbing, entrapping, and appalling. They are also often temporary. In ten years’ time most of the places we will be exploring will look very different; many will not be there at all. But just as biophilia doesn’t lessen because we know that nature is often horrible and that all life is transitory, genuine topophilia knows that our bond with place isn’t about finding the geographical equivalent of kittens and puppies. This is a fierce love. It is a dark enchantment. It goes deep and demands our attention.

The forty-seven places that make up this book are here because they each, in a different way, forced me to rethink what I knew about place. They have not been chosen for being merely outlandish or spectacular but for possessing the power to provoke and disorient. Although they range from the most exotic and grandest projects to modest corners of my own hometown, they are all equally capable of stimulating and reshaping our geographical imagination. Together they conspire to make the world seem a stranger place where discovery and adventure are still possible, both nearby and far away.

Note: Where possible, I have added Google Earth coordinates for the approximate center or location of each place. These coordinates are consistent with each other but cannot be claimed to be exact, in part because they may change each time Google Earth is updated. No coordinates have been given for historical places or places that are mobile.

19° 12′ 44″ S, 159° 56′ 21″ E

The discovery of the nonexistence of places is an intriguing byway in the history of exploration. The most recent example came in 2012 when an Australian survey vessel visited Sandy Island, seven hundred miles east of Queensland, and found that it was not there. This despite the fact that a stretched-out oval fifteen miles long and about three miles wide had been on the map for almost as long as people had been charting these seas.

Breakers and sandy islets were first sighted here by a whaling ship called the
Velocity
in 1876. A few years later Sandy Island got a mention in an Australian naval directory. In 1908 its inclusion on a British Admiralty map of the area lent it even more legitimacy. But its dotted outline on this chart shows that it was being identified as a potential hazard and hinted that it needed further exploration. Four years earlier, in 1904, the
New York Times
had covered the story of an American cruiser, the USS
Tacoma
, that had been sent to verify “Hundreds of Illusions Charted as Land” within the “American Group,” a chain of islands supposedly located midway between the United States and Hawaii. Their existence was given weight by the claim of Captain John DeGreaves, “science advisor” to King Kamehameha of Hawaii, that he had picnicked on one of them in the company of the famous “Spanish dancer” and mistress of King Ludwig I, Lola Montez.

Unfortunately both the islands and the picnic turned out to have been wishful thinking on the part of the captain. The
New York Times
story explained why, aside from tall tales, the oceans were still littered with cartographic blunders. “Long dark patches or bright, yellowish patches, which at a distance give the mariner the impression of shoals,” “a rip tide mistaken for breakers,” and even the back of a floating whale have been enough to start a new myth. In lonely parts of the sea, where information is at a premium and corroboration or refutation rare, the thinnest evidence “will live for a time on a chart with the embarrassing letters ‘E.D.’ opposite the entry, meaning its existence is doubted.”

Because land is looked and hoped for by sailors, the faintest signs have been seized upon. Far from being doubted, Sandy Island’s credentials became ever more watertight. Having been inked in on an authoritative chart, it acquired the status of a known fact and its myth was transmitted deep into the twentieth century and beyond. It was included in maps produced by the National Geographic Society and
The Times
of London, and no one complained or even noticed. It was also, apparently, captured by the satellites that many imagine are the sole feeders for Google Earth. Dr. Maria Seton, who led the Australian survey team, explained to journalists that although the island is on Google Earth as well as other maps, navigation charts show the water to be 1,400 meters deep in the same spot: “so we went to check and there was no island. We’re really puzzled. It’s quite bizarre.”

On November 26, 2012, Google Earth blacked out Sandy Island and later stitched over the spot with generic sea. Today on Google Earth the place where Sandy Island once was is crowded with dozens of photos uploaded by map browsers. Unable to resist the creative possibilities, they have scattered the ex-island with images of clashing dinosaurs, moody urban back streets, and fantastical temples.

The story of the disappearance of Sandy Island was a minor global sensation. If Sandy Island doesn’t exist, then how can we be certain about other places? The sudden deletion of Sandy Island forces us to realize that our view of the world still occasionally relies on unverified reports from far away. The modern map purports to give us all easy access to an exhaustive and panoptic God’s-eye view of the world. But it turns out that ventures such as Google Earth are not just using satellite photographs. They rely on a composite of sources, some of which are out-of-date maps.

Even before 2012 some people already knew that Sandy Island didn’t quite live up to its name. It lies in the terrestrial waters that extend hundreds of miles around the French “special collectivity” of New Caledonia. But some decades ago Île de Sable, the French name for Sandy Island, was quietly dropped from French maps, and it doesn’t feature on a French hydrographical office chart drawn up in 1982. A 1967 map of the area produced in the USSR also doesn’t include it. What is clear is that not everyone is using the same sources. However, this does not imply that the French or Soviets have been consistently better informed than everyone else. The 2010 Michelin map of the world includes Île de Sable, and the news of its nonexistence was as much a surprise to the French public as it was to the rest of the world. Following the Australian nondiscovery of Sandy Island,
Le Figaro
announced, on December 3, 2012, that “Le mystère de l’île fantôme est résolu.”

But this isn’t just a technical story about mismatching geographical data. Why should it matter to anyone that a sandy strip thousands of miles away, somewhere hardly anyone had ever heard of before, turns out not to be there?

It matters because today, although we live with the expectation that the world is fully visible and exhaustively known, we also want and need places that allow our thoughts to roam unimpeded. The hidden and remarkable places are havens for the geographical imagination, redoubts against the increasingly if not exhaustively all-seeing chart that has been built up over the past two hundred years. The 1908 inclusion of Sandy Island on an Admiralty chart was a clumsy error, a mistake not typical of the period. Far from dotting the globe with fabulous islands, the naval powers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries remorselessly tracked down any and all such rumors and either confirmed or disproved them. As a result, the 1875 revised Admiralty Pacific chart discarded 123 unreal islands. The
New York Times
story from 1904 led to the confirmed nonexistence of a cluster of islands south of Tasmania called the Royal Company Islands. After vessels were sent to investigate, these islands, like so many before them, were removed from the map. The American ships were doing their bit for modernity: eliminating doubt, attaining panoptic knowledge. Yet modernity also gives us the self-questioning and self-doubting consciousness that permits us to understand that we lose something in its attainment. As the clutter of outrageous, fantastical photographs that today occupy Sandy Island’s place on Google Earth suggests, Sandy Island’s disappearance established it as a rebel base for the imagination, an innocent and an upstart that managed to escape the vast technologies of omni-knowledge.

The story of Sandy Island might suggest the need for a survey of undiscovered islands, places once thought to be real but later found not to be. However, it turns out it’s already a crowded market. From early titles like William Babcock’s
Legendary Islands of the Atlantic
(1922) to comparatively recent studies such as oceanographer Henry Stommel’s
Lost Islands: The Story of Islands That Have Vanished from Nautical Charts
and Patrick Nunn’s
Vanished Islands and Hidden Continents of the Pacific
, we have an extensive catalogue of the world’s nonexistent islands. Some of these studies focus on mariners’ mistakes, of which there seem to have been plenty. Others, like Patrick Nunn’s, combine the legendary with the scientific. Nunn’s interest is in how indigenous legends of lost islands found in many Pacific island communities fit into and inform the environmental history of the area. It turns out that “legendary islands” can sometimes be explained by reference to changing sea levels and seismic activity. Ancient topographical changes are recorded in local myth and lore. A similar link has been made in other parts of the world, most famously in the legend of Atlantis.

Interest in phantom places like Sandy Island is growing. In part this is because such “nondiscoveries” are now so scarce: it is unlikely that many more islands of any size will be “unfound.” But there are still plenty of shifting and potentially doubtful phenomena out there, including cartographic “facts” like the shapes of nations, borders, mountains, and rivers, that will continue to disturb our geographical certainties. The truth is, we want to have a world that is not totally known and that has the capacity to surprise us. As our information sources improve and become ever more complete, the need to create and conjure new places that are defiantly off the map also grows.

St. Petersburg wasn’t forgotten when it was renamed Leningrad in 1924. It had already changed its name once, to the more Russian-sounding Petrograd, in 1914. But one of its sons, the poet Joseph Brodsky, thought it would always be Petersburg. In his 1979 “Guide to a Renamed City,” he observed that its citizens carried on calling it “Peter” and that “Peter I’s spirit is still much more palpable here than the flavor of the new epoch.” Twelve years later the city became St. Petersburg once more. But Leningrad too will not go quietly. It may have been taken off the map, but that doesn’t mean it’s gone.