For more than a century, the best navigators in the world argued about whether this place was real. Eighteenth-century charts marked a Cloates Island somewhere off the west coast of Australia, but no two charts agreed on where, and some plotted it more than 1,600 kilometres from solid ground. In 1809 the influential hydrographer James Horsburgh wrote the verdict that stuck: "Cloates Island very probably has no real existence." Horsburgh was half right. There was no island - but there was a headland, and it had simply been mismapped into legend.
The confusion began with a name and a guess. The point may take its name from a sailor called Nash, thought to be English, commanding a Flemish ship - the House of Austria, bound from Ostend to China - who recorded a long stretch of coast and estimated it at "32 leagues." Cartographers turned his coastline into an island and then could not agree where to put it. Guthrie's 1785 world map placed Cloates Island far out in the Indian Ocean. Decades of doubt followed, until in 1827 the surveyor Phillip Parker King made the sober correction: it was no island at all, but a peninsula attached to the mainland. Even then, the phantom lingered on charts for years.
The cartographic muddle was not harmless. Uncertainty about this stretch of water may have helped doom the Portuguese navy dispatch vessel Correio da Azia, bound for Macau in 1816, which ran aground on Ningaloo Reef, was abandoned, and sank. In 1887 the steamer SS Perth - formerly the Penola - was wrecked near the cape. The reef that makes Ningaloo a wonder for snorkellers today was, for sailing ships running this coast on imperfect charts, a hard and unforgiving edge.
In 1912 the Western Australian government granted a Norwegian company a licence to hunt whales, and the bay just south of the point - Norwegian Bay - became the site of the first modern shore whaling station in the state. The operation was industrial in a way the old hand-thrown harpoons never were: steam-powered chaser boats armed with exploding harpoon guns. Between 1913 and 1916 the station killed more than 4,000 whales, rendering them into oil and fertiliser. A poor season and the pressures of the First World War forced it to close in 1916. It stirred to life again in the early 1930s, servicing Norwegian factory ships, before the Second World War shut it down for good.
Above the wrecks and the try-pots stands the reason ships finally learned to trust this coast. A lighthouse was built in 1910 from local limestone on Cloates Hill, the modest rise that lifts 41 metres above the sea. It was one of five lights raised with Commonwealth funding in the years before the federal government took over Australia's lighthouses. Automated and left unmanned in 1933, then badly damaged in the mid-1930s, the original tower was abandoned to the weather. Its ruins are now listed on the Western Australian heritage register - a stone marker on a point that the world once insisted was not there.
Point Cloates sits on the Ningaloo coast of Western Australia at about 22.72 degrees S, 113.67 degrees E, roughly 100 km south-southwest of North West Cape. From the air it reads as a low, pale headland where the long line of Ningaloo Reef meets the shore, with Cloates Hill and the lighthouse marking the tip. The nearest airport is Learmonth (YPLM/LEA) near Exmouth to the north; Carnarvon (YCAR) lies to the south. The surrounding reef is hazardous to shipping but a useful coastal waypoint from altitude. Clearest flying weather is the dry season, roughly April to October.