The next oldest instance, perhaps, is supplied by Ruysch’s map of 1508,[289] an inscription on which avers that an island in the sea about midway between Iceland and Greenland had been totally destroyed by combustion in the year 1456. We do not know his authority for this startling announcement. The spot is where one would naturally look for Gunnbjörn’s skerries of the older Icelandic writings; and no one can find them now, unless they were, after all, but projecting points of the eastern Greenland coast. Also Iceland is at times tremendously eruptive; and this islet, or these islets, would not be far away. The assertion is not in itself incredible, but there seems no corroboration.
The Discovery of Buss
The “Sunken Island of Buss” presents a suggestion of engulfment on a more extensive scale. The whole episode is of rather recent date, Buss being the latest born of mythical or illusory islands, unless we except Negra’s Rock and other alleged and unproven apparitions of land on a very small scale, which may not have wholly ceased even yet. Buss is, at any rate, the one moderately large phantom map island the time and occasion of whose origin are securely recorded. For, as narrated by Best and published in Hakluyt’s compilation, on Frobisher’s third voyage (1578), one of his vessels, a buss, or small strong fishing craft, of Bridgewater, named Emmanuel, made the discovery. In his words:
The Buss of Bridgewater, as she came homeward, to the southeastward of Frisland, discovered a great island in the latitude of 57 degrees and a half, which was never yet found before, and sailed three days along the coast, the land seeming to be fruitful, full of woods, and a champaign country.[290]
Best must have had his information at second or third hand, with liberal play of fancy in the final touches on the part of his informant or himself. His was the first account published, but not long afterward appeared that of an eyewitness, “Thomas Wiars, a passenger in the Emmanuel, otherwise called the Busse of Bridgewater,” repeated in Miller Christy’s admirable little treatise on the subject.[291] Wiars says they fell with Frisland (probably a part of Greenland) on September 8 and on September 12 reached this new island, coasted it for parts of two days, and considered it 25 leagues long. There was much ice near it. He gives no suggestion of fertility, woods, or fields.
Fig. 24—Map of Buss Island from John Seller’s “English Pilot,” probably 1673. (After Miller Christy’s photographic facsimile.)
Its Disappearance from the Map
The only other witnesses to the visual existence of the island, so far as recorded, were James Hall (probably by honest mistake) in 1606 and Thomas Shepherd (gravely distrusted) in 1671.[292] Nevertheless an impressive insular figure grew up in the maps, bearing the name “Buss” to commemorate the vessel that first found it. In some instances it was made a very large island indeed. Shepherd’s map, reproduced herewith ([Fig. 24]), was accompanied by a brief descriptive narrative which may be attributed to a fancy for yarning, with no strong curb of conscience on the fancy. Buss remained an accepted figure of geography for considerably more than a century.
Quite naturally, however, the efforts of reliable searchers failed to find this island again, for it was not really there. A theory of cataclysm seemed more acceptable than to discard outright what so many maps, books, and traditions had attested. Van Keulen’s chart of 1745[293] led the way with the inscription “The submerged land of Buss is nowadays nothing but surf a quarter of a mile long with rough sea. Most likely it was originally the great island of Frisland.” So the name “Sunken Land of Buss” passed into general use with geographic sanction. After much disturbance of mariners’ and cartographers’ minds not only the phantom island but its legacy, the supposed line of breakers and dangers, vanished altogether from the records. There is no “Buss” to be found on maps after about the middle of the nineteenth century, though the preceding hundred years had been prolific in them. Probably we must suppose a later date for the cessation of current mention of the sunken land of that name, in recognition of what, according to belief, once had been but existed (above water) no longer.