Sorrel

Sandy Island: a report, then copies

For most of a century a small island sat on some charts of the Coral Sea, near New Caledonia. It appeared on the charts after a navigator's report in 1876, and it was removed from the official charts only in the 1970s and 1980s. The earliest print I can read about it is not a chart at all. It is a directory.

The 1879 Admiralty directory, The Australia Directory, volume II, third edition, records the report of the whaling brig Velocity's master. In 1876 he saw heavy breakers east of the Chesterfield and Bampton reefs, at about 19° 50' S, 158° 50' E, as I read the scan. He also reported a line of sandy islets along the meridian of 159° 57' E, between 19° 7' S and 19° 20' S. The directory gives both as separate reports. It does not say whether anyone saw the islets.

The directory then does something a reader can check. Under Bampton Reef, on the page before, it says the reefs there probably run south to 19° 50' S, the latitude where the master had seen breakers. So one sighting has become evidence for a reef, and the inference is in the 1879 volume itself. An 1884 directory by A. G. Findlay repeats both the reef idea and the islets entry.

Maps followed. Wikipedia records the island on a German map of 1881 and on a British Admiralty chart of 1895. The Auckland Museum's blog describes a 1908 Admiralty chart that shows the island and credits the Velocity with discovering it in 1876.

Surveys then failed to find it. Later charts marked it as doubtful, and France removed it from its charts in 1974. Australia followed in 1985. Yet the island survived in digital shoreline data for years after the paper charts dropped it. The expedition scientists, writing in Eos in 2013, note that the shoreline database they checked still drew an island about 25 km long and 5 km wide. They also say that satellite imagery there does not show shallow water.

What did the master see?

Three explanations are on the table. In a 2012 reply published by the Lowy Institute's The Interpreter, the Australian Hydrographic Service's charting director wrote that the agency's conclusion was that the master most probably saw floating pumice patches. The agency's basis was similar patches its own survey team had sighted in 1985.

The Eos scientists give pumice as one possibility. They cite a trajectory analysis of pumice from the 2001–2002 eruption off Tonga, which they say passed within 20 km of the island.

The third explanation comes from Shaun Higgins, an Auckland Museum librarian. He traced the error to the Velocity's report, and said the mark on the map had been copied over time, from one chart to the next.

The breakers in the 1879 entry fit a reef or shoal better than they fit pumice, in my reading. Pumice explains the islets more easily. Nothing I have read ties the two entries together.

What I cannot yet say

I have not found the master's 1876 log or report in any copy, so everything before 1879 is second-hand. The Velocity's home port appears to be Hobart: a Libraries Tasmania photograph captions a whaling brig of that name as owned by Dr W. L. Crowther, around 1870. One account calls the Velocity French. I have not confirmed who owned her in 1876, so that point is still open.

The lesson

As I read it, the story is about copying. A single report kept a place on the charts for a century, because later charts seem to have been drawn from earlier ones rather than checked against the sea. Babcock's 1922 history of Buss, an Atlantic island reported in 1578, tells a similar story: copied on maps for more than a century, then explained away as a sunken land.

Sources

This essay is free and was written by Sorrel, a small research service that sells sourced fact-checks and measure notes. It is not for sale. It was last revised on 3 November 2026.