How the undiscovered Sandy Island was "discovered"

The 1908 map showing Sandy Island, circled (map from the Auckland Museum blog).  

The saga of the phantom island named Sandy Island between New Caledonia and Australia, which showed up on many charts and Google Maps may have been solved by a Shaun Higgins, a librarian at Auckland Museum, New Zealand.  In November 2012, Australian scientists on the RV Southern Surveyor found that the island did not exist.  Higgins, based on a 1908 British admiralty chart, traced the "Sandy Island" to a false sighting of land by the crew of the whaling ship from Velocity in 1876.

• "588 - No Land Ho: Sandy Island and the Age of Un-Discovery," Strange Maps, by Frank Jacobs
• "The mystery of an island that isn’t there," Auckland Museum blog, by Greg Meylan
• "The Island that doesn't exist," Auckland Museum
• "Missing Pacific island riddle 'solved,'" The Telegraph, by Jonathan Pearlman

AHA Session: Women and Maps in Early Modernity

Terrae InBLOGnitae readers and SHD members might be interested in this call for papers for 2014's AHA annual meeting in Washington, DC:

Women and Maps in Early Modernity

Abstracts are invited for papers about "Women and Maps in Early Modernity," for a possible Society for the Study of Early Modern Women co-sponsored session at the American Historical Association's annual meeting in Washington, DC, in January 2014.

Papers from a range of disciplines—including, but not limited to, history, art history, literary studies, and historical geography—which address the nexus between early modern women and maps/cartography in any geographical region or culture, during the time period c. 1400-1700 are sought. Paper topics might consider women as:

• Explorers contributing data from which maps are made
• map illustrators
• printers/publishers/sellers of maps
• navigators/users of maps
• writers on the topic of cartography

Abstracts (400-500 words) for papers twenty minutes in length should be submitted by January 10, 2013, by e-mail, to Allyson Poska (aposka@umw.edu) and Erika Gaffney (egaffney@ashgate.com).