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I finally found the missing island from my 1748 map and it took 11 months
So I picked up this beat up map at an estate sale in Albany last spring, French made around 1748, showing the coast of what is now Maine. There's this little island drawn just off the coast that I could not match to anything on a modern chart. I spent months going down rabbit holes, checking old survey notes, comparing handwriting styles, even emailing a librarian in Portland who probably got sick of me. Then last month I found a footnote in an 1804 maritime log that mentioned a small island that got washed away in a storm in the 1770s. So here's my debate question: do we count a vanished island as still being on the map, or was the mapmaker just sloppy? My gut says the map is right and the sea took it, but a buddy of mine swears every weird speck on these old maps is just a mistake. What do you all go with when a place clearly existed once but doesn't anymore?
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angela8905h ago
Your buddy is wrong and you're right. Old mapmakers were actually pretty careful, they just drew what was there at the time, and islands wash away all the time. There's a whole thing in the Chesapeake where people lost islands to storms and erosion back in the 1800s and those maps turned out to be dead on. A footnote in an 1804 log backing you up is way better evidence than "well it looks weird." So yeah, count it. The map was right, the sea just won.
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