map of fagunda
Isle of Fagunda. A 17th-century map places it in the North Atlantic. A comprehensive list of phantom islands is quite long, but Fagunda is not on it. That’s because Fagunda is real. The island, basically a single, giant dune and nowadays is known as Sable Island. And yet even under that name it’s an obscure piece of North Atlantic real estate. Contributing to its obscurity are its isolated, eccentric location (160 km out to sea), tiny surface (34 km2) and economic irrelevance. The first European visitor may have been the Portuguese discoverer João Álvares Fagundes, in the 1520s. At the end of the 16th century, a French attempt to establish a convict colony succeeded only in endowing the island with its subsequent name: île de Sable, literally Sand Island. Over the last few centuries, more than 350 vessels were shipwrecked on what became known as the “Graveyard of the Atlantic”. This map shows many of the ships wrecked on the shores of Sable Island, detailing the type of vessel , the year of the wrecking and the ships’ names.
