THE NANTUCKET CONNECTION II 2018

THE NANTUCKET CONNECTION II

SUPPLEMENTS TO MALDEN ISLAND’S HISTORY

(4° 01' S. 154° 04' W.) !

- BY -

- STEVE DEHNER -

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THE NANTUCKET CONNECTION II 2018

TWO RE-DISCOVERIES OF MALDEN ISLAND

The official Western discovery of Malden Island (Line Islands, Kiribati) has hitherto been
attributed to Lord George Anson Byron of the British frigate HMS “Blonde”. Byron’s
journal informs us about that sighting and the subsequent landfall by Lieutenant Malden:

July 29th 1825 AM 4.0 light airs inclinable to calms,split the driver. 6.0 hauled the jib
down to repair. 8.0 light airs and fine W [eather]. 8.40 set Jib. 9.0 lowered the main
topsuit to repair the Foot. 11 set do. Exercised a Division of Quarters. Noon Do We tacked
ship. PM Light airs and fine Wr.Employed making sennet.4.0 Do W [eather]. 6.0 Eo
W. 6.10 wore ship, up mainsail 8.0 light airs and fine inclinable to calms. 8.40 In
Driver scrubbed hammocks and washed cloths. Midnt... 1
George Anson Byron (1789 - 1868)

July 30th 1825 AM 4.0 light winds and fine. 6.15 set driver. 7.40 saw the Land from the Mast Head bearing S6E
8.0 light winds and fine, washed the lower Deck. 10.50 up mainsail, In Royals and Flying jib Noon light airs and fine
made sail. Extremes of land from S30E to S51E PM 1.30 up foresail hove to. Sent the Cutter and Whale Boat with
Lieut. Malden to try for a landing. 2.0 Squally W [eather] with rain. In royals and top gallant sail. 2.20 filled,
3.0 tucked ship. 4.0 light airs and cloudy. S.W.Pt of Malden Island SE 1/2 E, 5 or 6 miles, 4.30 Tucked ship.
Made the Boats recall with 2 Guns. 5.20 shortened sail. 7.0. Boats returned, wore until made sail.

However, the captain of whaleship Alexander had already seen it:

March 25th 1825 [...] at 10 AM descried land, It proved to be an Island

seen by the Sarah Ann of London and the Independence of Nantucket Capt
Whippey [...] latitude and longitude of the island in 3-58 S 154-30 W’

March 26th 1825 [...] Under the lee of the Island could not land. Wove
ship and stood to NE by the wind...2

Samuel Bunker (1796 - 1874)

1Captain's Log for the H.M.S. Blonde’s Voyage to the Sandwich Islands, 1824-1825 (June 10th 1824 - Nov. 19th 1825),
held by Huntington Library, San Marino, California, log reference: mssHM 64596.

2Incomplete log [July 17th 1824 - May 8th 1825] of Nantucket whaler "Alexander", capt. Samuel Bunker, kept by first mate
John P. Morris. - her full voyage lasted July 1824 - June 1827. Portrait: courtesy of the Nantucket Historical Association.
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SARAH ANN ISLAND & INDEPENDENCE ISLAND

Three anonymous reports of presumably modern Malden Island rank among a summary of
reported islands, reefs & rocks, i.a. furnished by capt. Joshua Coffin 2d, of the Nantucket
whaler “Ganges”, and can be found in the newspaper Nantucket Inquirer of March 22, 1828:

The co-ordinates of both Sarah Ann and that bottommost Island do. correspond rather well with
those of modern Malden Island - this certainly can’t be said for those of Independence I. but one
can find the ones intended on page 334 of J.W. Norie’s A Complete Set of Nautical Tables of 1836:

The then crew of the HMS “Blonde” can still be

considered the first Western party that ever set
foot on Malden Island, but Byron can, of course,
no longer be deemed its discoverer. With that said I
realize something similar can be said about Samuel
Bunker, for he made mention of no less than two
captains who evidently had seen this island before
him. But who were these two men and when did
they discover Malden Island? And did or didn’t
these mariners see it simultaneously?

[map: J.W. Norie, 1836 - DavidRumsey.com]

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CAPTAIN WHIPPEY OF THE “INDEPENDENCE”

The nantucket whaler Independence I (311 tons) sailed on August 5th, 1823, and returned on
August 7th, 1826 3 - her first of three consecutive trips to and from the whaling grounds
of the Pacific ocean under the command of William Whippey, during which roundtrip he
must have seen the island today known as Malden Island. The logbook of this voyage,
however, appears to have vanished off the face of the earth. Moreover, the shipping news
sections of old newspapers prove too reluctant to reconstruct the ship’s overall itanerary,
and what little I found about her ways proved irrelevant to the discovery of Malden
Island: on April 1st, 1825, Independence limped into the harbor of Honolulu for repairs,
having been on a reef near the society islands with 1000 BBLS 4 ; at July 20th, 1825, she
was at the coast of Japan with 1150 BBLS 5 ; she was at Valparaiso in April, 1826, “out 32
months, full and to sail in 8 days for home” 6 - again, all this is irrelevant information for we
know that Bunker had seen the island before these dates.....let alone captain Wm. Whippey.

THE CAPTAIN OF THE “SARAH ANN” OF LONDON

SARAH ANN:
(source = Lloyd’s Register)*
Master: Capt James Choyce (1820-23)
Capt Phil(l)ips (1823-28)
Capt Green (1828-32)
Tonnage: 233 tons
Construction: 1805 in America
Owners: Farmer (1823-28)
Port of survey: London
Destination: Pacific Ocean

In my unasked opinion, the ship described and the ship which Bunkers log entry alludes to are one
and the same: whaler “Sarah Ann” of London. Knowing what we know about Bunkers sighting of
the island we may single out the only two captains who could have seen the island before him. They
are, undoubtedly, Choyce and Philips. Let’s on the next page see what’s known about the two men.

(* Lloyd’s contains errors as for the years these captains were active on the “Sarah Ann”).

3 Nantucket Inquirer, Nantucket, Ma., January 8th, 1876, p.1. 1875 BBLS (BBLS: barrels of oil, usually sperm whale oil)

4 Nantucket Inquirer, October 31st, 1825, p.3. /New-Bedford Mercury, New Bedford, Ma., November 4th, 1825, p.3./Journal of
Stephen Reynolds Volume 1:1823-1829 edited by Pauline N. King, p.73: reef [ in position] 16° 16' S. 143° 30' W.

5 Nantucket Inquirer, Nantucket, Ma., March 11th, 1826, p.3.

6 Nantucket Inquirer, Nantucket, Ma., July 15th, 1826, p.3.

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MASTER MARINER JAMES CHOYCE

“My last voyage was as master of the ship Sarah,bound to the Pacific Ocean
after whales,and we left England on September 1, 1820.[...] On the 13th [June,
1823] we arrived at Gravesend,where this long and tedious voyage ended after two
years and nine months.” (Source: The Log of a Jack Tar, as published in 1891, 1973)
“Sept'r 1st 1820 I sailed from London as Master of the ship Sarah Ann, on a
whaling voyage to the Pacific Ocean” (Source: autobiographical manuscript of 1825)
! ! ! ! ! -James Choyce-

In his autobiographical manuscript Choyce (1777-1836) claims that on the 2nd of August, 1821, he
had made Easter Island (27° 7ʹ S. 109° 22ʹ W.) 7 and that on the 5th of April (1822) in Latitude 28
degrees South and Longitude 128 degrees West “saw many waterspouts”. These positions are the
most westerly mentioned ones by him throughout his manuscript and it seems that for the most part
of her trip the “Sarah Ann” lingered off the coast of South America. This, in all likelihood, means
that captain Choyce never got near the modern Line Islands territory of Kiribati, and it would
therefore seem more likely that it was Philips [forename unknown to the author], Sarah Ann's next
captain, who had seen the island. About the latter we know that he left Gravesend for the Pacific on
the 9th of September 1823 and did not return till the 14th of February 1826. 8 During this trip he
had sailed from New Zealand on the 10th of January 1825 9 and had touched at Tahiti on the 4th of
April 1825, having on board a William Pascoe Crook (1775-1846), missionary. 10 Although
tempting to interpolate Philips’ presumed discovery of Malden Island between latter dates, little is
known of the remaining whereabouts of the ship in this trip (not to mention the even more obscure
path of Independence) so it’s probably better to refrain from doing so. Alas, without the logs of
Sarah Ann and Independence it will prove difficult, not to say impossible, to ascertain precise dates.

7 This event was omitted from the 1891 published version The Log of a Jack Tar, but can be read in the original 1825
manuscript named “Narrative of Some Adventures Voyages and Travels In Various Parts of the World By A British
Mariner Written by Himself.”

8 A.G.E. Jones, "Ships Employed In The South Seas Trade...", pp. 71, 80.

9 Lloyd's List, Friday May 20th 1825.

10 Missionary Register, 1827, p. 135.

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MISINTERPRETED DISCOVERY?

(Source: Nantucket Inquirer, Saturday, 23 September, 1826)

Edouard A. Stackpole (1953, p.349) paraphrased these

newspaper clippings as follows:

"Captain William Clark, of the Winslow, a New Bedford

whaler, discovered two islands in 1823, which he placed on
his charts in latitude 15 degrees and 22 minutes south and in
longitude 177 degrees and 10 minutes west. He gave these
comparatively isolated bits of land, encircled by a coral
reef, the name Winslow Islands."

I don’t know what made Stackpole change the initial values

of the latitude but I’m quite certain that what Clark had seen
there (yet, by no means discovered) must have been the
modern Futuna and Alofi, indeed seperated 1 mile from one
another and also too close to Capt. Clark’s coordinates to be dismissed as sheer coincidence.

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Now the remaining island Stackpole wrote about: "Another discovery of Captain Clark,
which he called Clark’s Island, he fixed in latitude 3 degrees and 10 minutes south and
longitude 154 degrees 30 minutes west. This is Malden Island, reputed to have been
discovered by Captain Byron in the Blonde on July 29, 1825." In the newspaper clipping
(Stackpole’s only source according to his notes) I, however, read a longitude of 151 degrees
and 30 minutes...you? This, in combination with Capt. Clark’s fitting description of Clarks
Island, namely "about seven miles long and one mile in breadth", convinced me that what
Clark had seen there and then was nothing else than modern Caroline Island, Kiribati. And
if one dares to change the latitude of 3 degrees south into 9 degrees south one will get
reasonably close to an island of which E.H. Bryan Jr. [1942, p.125] stated that it was also
called Clark’s Island in days of old 11 : modern Caroline Island in 9° 56ʹ S. 150° 12ʹ W. A
Dutch periodical of 1837 12 also states “151” but one needs to take into account this image
is a zoomed-in rendering of the original print. If it weren’t, one could not so easily tell the

“1” from a “4”. I think something akin happened in the

case of Stackpole reading his Nantucket Inquirer, and
that he let this island’s latitude prevail over its longitude
- eventually something has to give. Conclusion: since no
log survived of Clark’s voyage we may never know
which island it was that Clark reported as Clark’s Island.

[P.S. Notice the Clark’s Island with Lon. 151° on page 3]

11 The entries for September 7th and 8th, 1840, of the log of the H.M.S. Samarang, capt. James Scott, do mention the name
“Clarks Island” and seem to refer to modern Caroline Island. Journal is held by the Tübingen University Library, Germany.

12 “Verhandelingen en Berigten Betrekkelijk het Zeewezen en de Zeevaartkunde, Volume 1, 1837/1840, p.32”

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WHEN ISLANDS TRAVEL OVERNIGHT

Thanks to Samuel Bunker’s log we now

know that both Independence and Sarah
Ann were merely early reports of one and
the same island: Malden Island (read pp.
2-3). Why, then, is it that Sarah Ann in J.W.
Norie’s 1836 map (right) was placed north
of the equator, whereas Independence was
correctly mapped in the South Pacific? Well,
only because mapper Norie, or someone
else for that matter, accidentally transposed
the latitude, in this case South to North and
only therefor Sarah Anne wound up in the
Northern Hemisphere, in Latitude 4° North
and Longitude 154° West - a mirror image
of where it should have been placed: 4°
South and 154° West. So, aren’t there any
charts known that depict Sarah Ann not in
the North but rather in the South Pacific?
The answer sits somewhere between “yes”
and “no” for Thomas Sterling’s 1833 map
(below) and Samuel Walker’s 1832 map
(bottom right) show a Sarah Island in the vicinity of Malden Island. What are the odds?

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13 “Log of Logs, Vol. 1, p.469, by Ian Nicholson. Joyce = Choyce

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SARAH ANNE, THE GUANO ISLAND

The New York Daily Tribune of

March 8th, 1859 (page 5) printed a
list (dated 5th of March) of Pacific
islands confiscated by the U.S.
under the Guano Act: a sort of
protective umbrella under which
American subjects enjoyed first
right in the skimming off of
precious guano (cumulated bird
droppings) from these flyspecks of
islands, which up until then only
whalers showed interest in, for its
abundance of birds, eggs and fish.
Guano had a multitude of uses,
from the production of gunpowder and matchsticks to its main utilization, fertilizer. We find
Sarah Anne at number 39: notice the northern latitude. Be that as it may, there are no
records known of guano mining (or any other activity) on Sarah Anne, also there are no
descriptions of the island itself, no drawings, let alone a photo...and for good reason,
because we’re dealing with a phantom island, people. Not a shred of evidence of it having
ever existed in the North Pacific I could find. However, not long ago a volunteer of the
Mariner’s Museum of Newport News, Virginia, stumbled upon the following entry of a
diary that had been kept on board of a whaler by the captain’s daughter, Asenath P. Taber:

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“Dec.10th [1854] Sunday We have high winds yet. We passed quite near
! the Sarah Ann & Christmas Islands. We crossed the line Dec 8th”
That whaleship happened to be the “Alice Frazier” of New Bedford, capt. Daniel H. Taber,
which had departed Honolulu on December 3rd, 1854 and had journeyed to Sydney and
Melbourne before returning on the 2nd of September 1855. Strangely, an earlier entry states:

14 Taber, Asenath P., “Diary, December 3, 1854 – September 2, 1855,” Library Gallery, Mariner’s Museum, Newport News,
Virginia, USA.
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“ Dec.8th [1854] Friday

Last night we passed the Christmas I.S. Very high winds.”
Crew member Benjamin F.
Pierce also kept a journal
during this voyage. His
entry for Friday December
8th ends with the ship’s
position: 1° N. 154° 40ʹ W.
Asenath’s assertion that the
“Alice Frazier” had passed
the equator on the 8th and on the night of December the 7th had passed Christmas Island,
seems quite valid, realizing that Christmas Island, or Kiritimati, lies in 1° 52ʹ N. 157° 25ʹ W.
Asenath never stated whether these islands were actually seen by her or the other people on
board, but that no longer matters anyhow, because as was demonstrated earlier in this essay
by means of Samuel Bunker’s logbook entry, this Sarah Anne Island has only ever existed
on some charts and most certainly not as a tangible island in the North Pacific. The original
island, the one reported as Sarah Ann, has simply never ceased to be modern Malden Island!

SARAH ANNE, HAVE YOU SUNK SO

LOW? An early 20th century myth has it that
Sarah Anne Island had silently sunk beneath the
waves in the 19th century. This misbelief arose
during the run-up to the 1937 solar eclipse.
Scientists had deemed her the best place by far
from which to behold the rare event. But, alas,
research vessels couldn’t locate any land in the
vicinity of Sarah Anne Island. Yet, we now
know exactly why, whereas they could only
guess at it. As far as I’m concerned this essay
ends here because the myth has been debunked
sufficiently.

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15 The Salt Lake Tribune” of January 15, 1933, p. 63.

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A HUMBLE SELECTION OF RECOMMENDED READING:

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! ! ! ! THE END

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