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The 1782 map of a phantom island that took me 3 years to disprove
I had an old nautical chart from a flea market in Norfolk that showed an island called Buss Island in the North Atlantic, marked as 'verified' in gold ink. For years I kept it framed, thinking it was some lost land that just sank or something. Last month I finally dug into the Royal Navy logs online and found it was a cartographer's error from 1578, copied by every mapmaker for 200 years because nobody wanted to be the first to cross it out. The fun part is that it appeared on official charts until 1820, and there were even two fake 'sightings' that kept it alive. Now I'm hunting for other phantom islands, and I found way more than I expected, like Sandy Island near New Caledonia that was on Google Maps until 2012. Anyone else collect maps with fake geography that's been debunked, or do you prefer the ones that are still technically unverified?
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