Qualla: Pepys Island

Pepys Island: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Look for Pepys Island on a modern chart and you will find only open ocean, a patch of grey water about 230 nautical miles north of the Falklands. Yet for roughly a hundred years it appeared on the maps that the great navigators carried, complete with woods, a sheltered anchorage, and cliffs swarming with seabirds. A pirate put it there in 1683, and it took some of the most accomplished explorers in history more than a century to take it back off.

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Pepys Island: A Pirate Names an Island for a Bureaucrat

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In December 1683 the buccaneer William Ambrose Cowley, sailing the forty-gun Bachelor's Delight on a voyage around the world, recorded an uncharted island near 47 degrees south. He named it for Samuel Pepys, the diarist and Secretary to the Admiralty, the man who ran England's na...

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Pepys Island: The Skeptic Aboard

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Not everyone on the ship was convinced. William Dampier, Cowley's shipmate and himself one of the era's sharpest observers of wind and water, suspected they had simply seen the Sebald Islands, an old name for the Falklands. Cowley half-suspected it too. In the same passage where ...

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Pepys Island: A Century of Fruitless Searching

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Once an island is on a map, ships go looking for it, and a remarkable roster of them did. Lord Anson swept the area on his circumnavigation of the 1740s. Commodore Byron searched in 1764. Captain Cook looked on both his great voyages, as did Bougainville, the naturalist Joseph Ba...

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Pepys Island: Solving a Mistake

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The riddle unraveled in the 1780s, when Cowley's original journal resurfaced and his error became plain. Pepys Island was excluded from the influential map collections of the Byron, Wallis, Carteret, and Cook voyages, and slowly it faded from the charts. Scholars later argued ove...

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Pepys Island: The Ghost on the Map

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Pepys Island belongs to a small, strange company of phantom lands, places like the Aurora Islands and Groclant that lived on charts for generations before quietly vanishing. They are reminders of how knowledge was made in the age of sail: a single tired observation, a compass off...

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