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Review by Michael Sims
Johnson has come up with a wonderful idea for a book. He examines the records of seafaring during the Age of Exploration and chronicles the stories about seven islands. The curious point of all this is that, although they were described and even mapped, the islands never existed.
Phantom Islands of the Atlantic will not surprise readers of Donald S. Johnson's recent and highly praised Charting the Sea of Darkness: The Four Voyages of Henry Hudson. We already know that Johnson writes with elegance and authority. He knows the sea not only from history but from personal experience. He has crossed the Atlantic five times in a 27-foot schooner, and he has even written a cruising guide to the coast of Maine.
Johnson launches his new book with an epigraph from C. B. Firestone: "The world of reality wears a rich garb that was woven for it by the world of tradition ages ago." These fabulous lands include the Isle of Demons, islands associated with the legend of Saint Ursula, and the wonderful floating worlds (including one island that was actually a whale) that appear in the medieval accounts of Saint Brendan.
Johnson makes Phantom Islands so interesting partially through the depth of his insight. He understands the yearnings of sailors and cartographers to see through fog to an underlying reality, motivated by the same transcendant aim as science and religion: "But through the centuries one goal remained constant and undiminished in strength: to bring order out of chaos."
Michael Sims's Darwin's Orchestra will be published next March by Henry Holt.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.