Sable Island

Original post: This [bottom] is a screencap of the Google Maps view of a somewhat obscure but quite interesting island. Rather than post the interesting bits right away, I thought I'd offer the image as a geography quiz to see if any readers can identify it. Some clues:

• It's basically a sandbar, but has been stable for at least 500 years.
• The dimensions are about 40 km length and 1.5 km width.
• Hundreds of ships have visited it... and not returned home.

I'll post an update in a couple days with a photo and more information.

Update: This is Sable Island, southeast of Nova Scotia, Canada. I had thought people might search maps looking for the little "smiley" island, but as Nik points out in the Comments, I should have obfuscated a bit more by omitting (or changing) the Googleable clues.

I first encountered Sable Island at one of my favorite websites - Strange Maps - where they posted the shipwreck map (above) from the Nova Scotia Museum and some relevant history:

The first European visitor may have been the Portuguese discoverer João Álvares Fagundes, in the 1520s (hence its early name). 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.

Only sealers, shipwrecked sailors and salvagers made their homes on Sable Island, impermanent ones at best. The salvagers must have had some pretty good times – 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 (ship, bark, schooner, brig, brigantine, steamer), the year of the wrecking (1802 to 1946, even though the earliest wreck is attested as dating from 1583) and the ships’ names. These include many that are just too fantastic not to repeat here: the Black Duck, the Margarita, the Farto, the Vampire, the Esperanto, the Stranger, the Sadie Knickle (sounds like a lost Beatles track, that one) and (my favourite) the Bob Logic.

Above the map I have a photo that enlarges to fullscreen with a click, showing the bleak landscape, and the flat topography that would have rendered the island almost invisible to ancient mariners. Interestingly, the island does support 300 feral horses, along with the expected marine mammals and seabirds. You can read more about the island at Wiki and the links there.

What most intrigues me is the location. The top photo is a lower-scale screencap* from Google Maps, showing Sable Island's location with a green arrow, right on the edge of the continental shelf and "miles from nowhere" (to borrow a phrase from Cat Stevens). It's easy to see how a ship sailing at night or with an inattentive or uninformed captain would wind up on the island and be beyond hopes of rescue. What treasure there must be in the waters surrounding the island (treasure in the sense of historic items rather than $, since these would likely have been fishing boats heading for the Grand Banks, not Spanish galleons).

But (and here I venture into speculation), if even earlier, prehistoric, sailors did - as some serious scholars believe - venture from Europe or the Mediterranean up the St. Lawrence to the copper deposits in present day Michigan, and then back east to trade the copper that gave rise to the great Bronze Age, then some of their vessels - perhaps laden with copper oxhides - might also rest in the sands around Sable Island. That would be a fascinating discovery, and would be smoking-gun-proof of pre-Viking contact of the Old World with the New.

*In the screencap, note also the branching darker blue traversing the Gulf of St. Lawrence. I'm sure that must be the submerged bed of a river that drained the area during the Ice Ages, when ocean levels were lower.

Photo credits for widescreen view and map of shipwrecks.