About Time

SPEAKER_1 (0:04)

Welcome to Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeart Radio and Grim and Mild.

Aaron Mahnke (0:12)

Our world is full of the unexplainable. And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

For a better part of the last century, if you were to look at a map of the Coral Sea, you would notice just there, midway between the coast of Australia and the French territory of New Caledonia, a small island, roughly the size of Manhattan. The island was on nautical charts, Google Earth, in nearly any atlas too. Long ago, it was named Sandy Island and that name stuck.

But in all the recent years, it remained on the map no one ever visited. Not a human set foot on its beaches, for that matter, and neither did any creature. No birds, no rats, no crabs. None could, in fact, because Sandy Island, well, it never existed. Labeled Ile de Sablés on French charts, its whereabouts were first recorded as early as the 19th century, and even after it was faithfully reproduced on maps, databases, charts for the next 100 years or so. You see, cartographers of the era would gather data not only from maps that came before, but also from sailors and explorers. It was impossible to produce a perfect map. And when one mistake was made and copied enough times, well, it became something of an inheritance to subsequent mapmakers. And over generations, that small error became gospel. It's not as if nobody ever noticed its absence or that it seemed to exist everywhere but in reality. In fact, in 1974, the French Naval and Oceanographic Service removed the island from its own charts. But that change did not make its way onto other maps. In April of 2000, a group of amateur radio enthusiasts were on a trip called D-Expedition. This is a sort of trip to distant locales to set up shortwave radios where there aren't any. And on this particular trip, travelers noted that the island had appeared on some maps, but not others. And, spoiler alert, they did not set up a radio there.

Even then, the island persisted on many maps, including those of Google, the National Geographic Society, even the CIA. And then, in November of 2012, a team of scientists from the University of Sydney were sailing the Coral Sea, conducting research on plate tectonics when their instruments alerted them that there was land ahead. But in the spot where the charts placed a 15-mile-long sandy beach, they found nothing but deep blue water.

Aboard the Southern Surveyor, this team measured depths of roughly 1400 meters where the island should have been. When they returned home and told the tale, the media jumped on the story, and cartographers everywhere rushed to correct the mistake. Within days, the British Oceanographic Data Center issued a rare statement that they were correcting their maps, and Google, Nat Geo, and others removed the phantom item from theirs. It quickly became subject to fringe conspiracy theories, too. But there it was. Sandy Island had officially been undiscovered. So how did this island that didn't exist ever get onto maps at all? And how did it manage to stay on so many of them long after the technology to easily disprove it existed? Well, map historians believe they've traced it back to an Admiralty chart from 1908, which is currently housed at the Auckland War Memorial Museum, which exists to honor soldiers from New Zealand who died during the First World War. And this single map, they believe, could have begun the long chain of inaccuracies. Sandy Island existed for over a century on the map. It says less about the fallibility of old sailors than it does about the perils of institutional trust. The island was never a lie. It was an honest mistake made by a single navigator followed by a chain of unquestioned citations and reprintings. Nobody, it seems, thought to double check the original source. And in the end, it took a modern research vessel sailing deliberately to those coordinates to finally set right a century-old mistake. All they had to do was simply go and see it for themselves.

Time may seem like one of life's only constants. A ticking clock is steady, unchangeable, and it marches on at predictable intervals no matter where you are in the world. But in the 1800s, well, time moved differently. In July of 1876, a Canadian engineer named Sanford Fleming was traveling through Ireland. He had consulted a travel guide and was planning to take a train from the town of Bundoran to Londonderry at 5:35 p.m. He arrived at the station 20 minutes early with plenty of time to catch his train, but the platform was completely empty.