How I Tried to Buy a Phantom Island from The Hudson's Bay Company

The recent news that The Hudson’s Bay Company in Canada is closing all its stores and has sold its brand names to a competitor, reminded me of my attempt to buy a non-existent island from the Company. Their plaque proudly boasts it was founded on 2 May 1670, when it was given charters by Charles II to explore lands in the North Atlantic, and exclusive rights to trade with these. By modern times it had developed into a chain of department stores selling household goods, hardware and soft furnishings, among other things.

I have long been interested in islands sighted, thought once to exist and marked on maps, but which we now know were navigational mistakes or fantasies. As I have noted before, there are a small number of charming and fascinating books on this theme, including Raymond Ramsay's No Longer On the Map (1972), Henry Stommel's Lost Islands: The Story of Islands That Have Vanished from Nautical Charts (1984) and Donald S Johnson's Phantom Islands of the Atlantic (1994).

One of these islands, supposed to be somewhere in the North Atlantic between Ireland and Iceland, was named Buss Island. This was sighted variously close to Rockall or further out, south of Greenland, and on several occasions. A Martin Frobisher expedition to find the North West Passage reported seeing it in 1578 from their ship Emanuel, a type of vessel known as a “buss”, hence the name.  

A captain of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Thomas Shepherd of the Golden Lion, claimed to have landed there in 1671. Taking no chances against rival powers, or rival merchants, the Company soon secured the rights to Buss Island from the king: and these rights had never been relinquished, though it was removed from maps in the early 19^th century. Explanations for its appearance include sunken islands, icebergs, mirages in mist and outright invention to justify further voyages.

In 2003 I wrote to the then current incarnation of the Company as follows: ‘This is a rather unusual query. In 1675 the Company was granted a Charter to an island that did not, in fact, exist: Buss Island, which had been mistakenly sighted by earlier mariners. I would like to acquire these rights from you, purely as a piece of whimsy, and because I am writing a novel based on the story. I know this may seem a somewhat out-of-the-ordinary inquiry . . .’

The idea had come to me after reading Margaret Elphinstone’s Hy Brasil (2002), about an imaginary version of this long-fabled island said to exist in the Atlantic. The author had kindly allowed me to issue stamps for her fictional version of the island, and I had in mind a similar plan for Buss Island. It was a shame it did not have a more romantic name: Emanuel, Frobisher’s, Shepherd’s or Golden Lion Island would have been much better. Perhaps I could re-name it. The novel I was writing, or rather thinking about, never got any further, although the idea of lost islands remains an alluring theme. 

The reply I received from the Company’s Manager of Heritage Services, was somewhat bemused but tolerant and quite interested. It read: ‘Yours is indeed an unusual request! Usually people who want to buy something from us are very interested in the tangible aspect of what they will obtain . . .  I am curious: where did you learn about Buss Island, and that Hbc "owned" it? The ready mention to it we found is in the Peter C. Newman book "A Company of Adventurers" but it certainly is not the only source talking about this island. I have initiated a discussion within the company - imaginary or not the island is, there are still administrative procedures to follow - and, can I share the fun we are all having over this? Newman mentions that the only surviving trace of Hbc ownership of Buss island is in the Northamptonshire Records Office: have you had the privilege of seeing it? . . . I would welcome any additional information you could pass on to me, it would be very much appreciated.’

The proof of the company’s rights to Buss Island to which this reply refers was a supplementary charter of which the only copy was in the Records Office named. This was in fact in my home county, which seemed a nice coincidence, and I knew this archive quite well since I had delved there when researching the holy wells of the shire, but I was unaware then of the important charter. Understandably, the charter was only available to view in person and by appointment, and I was then no longer near Northamptonshire. The Company did, however, draw my attention to an article in Beaver Magazine, entitled "Mythical land of Buss" by Alice M. Johnson, in the December 1942 issue, p.43-47, which reproduces an image of the charter.

I replied to this message on 7 March 2003, explaining ‘I heard about Buss Island in a book called "Phantom Islands of the Atlantic" by Donald S. Johnson (Goose Lane Editions, New Brunswick, 1994, and Souvenir Press, England, 1997). According to this (pps 72-3), HBC were granted a charter by Charles II bestowing ownership of the island and all the trading, mining rights, etc, in 1675. But in fact the island never existed: it was the result of navigational and sighting errors by mariners. There is an entire chapter in Johnson's book about the non-existent island.’

Sensing that even a non-existent island might have the potential to be what is called an incorporeal asset, and the Company, now alerted, might be reluctant to part with it, I made a bid instead for more fantastical licences. ‘It's very good of you to respond so well to what must seem a very peculiar request. May I just leave another thought with you? If for nostalgic or other reasons the Company could not see its way to "selling" the island, perhaps we could devise some fanciful rights in the island that the Company could grant to me - such as, for example, the rights to any dragons’ eggs or serpent farming or silver mines!’

Well, no doubt the Company had plenty of other pressing business and it was good-humoured of them to indulge me thus far. In due course I received a brief and evidently final reply thanking me again for re-acquainting them with Buss Island but adding that the Company had decided not to dispose of any of its rights. There was, I recall, during the correspondence, a vague idea that they might somehow make use of the island in their heritage brands, but I am not aware that anything ever came of this. I wonder whether the new owners know about the island? Perhaps I should put in another bid for those dragons’ eggs . . .

(Mark Valentine)

Picture: Map of Buss Island by John Seller (1671).

An Essay on Flecker - T.E. Lawrence

  

The poet James Elroy Flecker, author of ‘The Golden Journey to Samarkand’ and many other fine verses, served briefly as a diplomat in the Near East around 1911 before ill health forced him to retire. Here, however, he struck up a notable friendship with T.E. Lawrence and in 1925, a hundred years ago, the latter wrote a draft of an essay on him, intended for publication in a periodical. Flecker was at the height of his posthumous fame then, following the lavish London production of his verse drama Hassan, from 1923 onwards: and an earlier drama, Don Juan, was first published in 1925.

Lawrence recalled visiting Flecker at the British Vice-Consulate in Beyrouth (Beirut), where they discovered a mutual interest in literature and in languages. Lawrence noticed a copy of the anthology Georgian Poetry, and Flecker admitted he was in it, commenting that it was “jolly useful. Shows how much better a poet I am than my contemporaries.” 

Lawrence paid tribute to Flecker’s poetry, calling him “the sweetest singer of our generation”, and also noted that the flamboyant Flecker was a serious student and scholar of verse: “he was wrapped up in poetics, making a wide, exact, skilful study of how other men had written.” The piece was unfinished and peters out into fragmentary notes.

The essay was not published at that time but two highly limited editions were later issued to protect copyright. As with anything else by Lawrence, particularly rarities, these are now highly collectable. The first edition was issued by The Corvinus Press in May 1937, the imprint of the bibliophile and private press enthusiast George Seymour, Viscount Carlow, a friend of Lawrence: the two shared these enthusiasms. It was in an edition of 30 copies only and intended purely for private circulation. The press also published Lawrence’s Two Arabic Folk Tales (1939).

A second copyright edition was published in the USA in 1937 by Doubleday Doran in a stated edition of 56 copies, although Lawrence’s brother and literary executor A.W. Lawrence thought there might in fact have been up to 70. It is not uncommon for limited editions to have a few extra copies that are hors de commerce, for file, replacement or administrative purposes.

I was a young enthusiast of both Flecker and Lawrence and wrote an essay on Flecker, ‘The Singer of Samarkand’, for Book & Magazine Collector 251, revised and collected in A Country Still All Mystery (2017). In February 1988, I noted that T. E. Lawrence’s work had come out of copyright under the then 50 year rule in the UK, but that it was shortly to go back into copyright with the introduction of the new 70 year rule as part of European Union harmonisation.

I therefore rushed out an edition of An Essay on Flecker under my own Mark Valentine imprint. I had earlier used this for booklets by Joel Lane, John Gale and John Howard.

In the essay, Lawrence reports Flecker’s description of an Italian bombardment of Beirut, when the poet became embroiled in a riot because he and another diplomat were mistaken by the local populace for Italians, and had to be rescued by a Turkish policeman. This hero was rewarded by the Russian service with fifty pounds, whereas, Flecker noted bitterly, the British Embassy only sent him a silver cigarette case. He knew his worth better than that, Lawrence observes. 

Flecker had himself written a largely overlooked account of this episode, ‘Forgotten Warfare’, so I added this to Lawrence’s essay, the first time I think the link had been made.

Nicholas Blinko provided a cover portrait of Flecker, a version of the photograph above, but capturing his later worn, lean figure as well as the dandyish pose. I issued the A5 centre-stapled booklet in sand-yellow covers in an edition (as I recall) of 100 copies.

It was, alas, I have to confess, merely a flimsy photocopied affair, partly for speed and partly because that was all I could afford. If I had then been better acquainted with the private press world, I might have approached one of those and produced a more worthy publication. Still, it did at least bring the essay back into print for a bit, the Flecker essay was a useful additional sidelight, and Nick’s artwork was a great evocation of the poet. And even this edition can be quite collectable. 

(Mark Valentine)

The Return of Pan

Mark Beech at Egaeus Press has just announced The Return of Pan, a new edition of his sought-after anthology Soliloquy for Pan, first published ten years ago. This includes fiction by D.P. Watt, Reggie Oliver, John Gale, R.B. Russell, Roseanne Rabinowitz, and my own short story 'In Cypress Shades'. Also included is 'Summer Enchantment', an exquisite arcadian poem by a young interwar writer, Harry FitzGerald, with my brief afterword about him and his work.

The new edition includes all the original contents, with fresh illustrations, and is enhanced by an additional story specially commissioned from Benjamin Tweddell, a wonderfully adept writer of supernatural and esoteric mysteries. The book is in active preparation and full publication details are to follow.

(Mark Valentine)

Whistle and I'll Come to You - Death And Vanilla

Swedish band Death And Vanilla have just released a 'livescore' for Jonathan Miller's television dramatisation of an M.R. James story, Whistle and I'll Come To You, as a limited edition white vinyl record and as a digital download. It is in effect an imagined new soundtrack to the classic 1968 BBC ghost story. 

The ambient, atmospheric music has a melancholy, wistful (and whistlefull) tone, and includes eerie naturalistic effects of the winds, sands and sea. The group's inspirations include "60s sci-fi soundtracks, the [BBC] Radiophonic Workshop" and retro-futurism, placing them in the Ghost Box and hauntology mode. Their interpretation certainly complements Miller's low-key, grainy photography, use of near- silence and murmurs, and subtle invocation of the sinister. 

(Mark Valentine)

The Centenary of ‘The Street of Queer Houses’ by Vernon Knowles

 

This month marks the centenary of the UK edition of The Street of Queer Houses, the first collection of short stories by the Australian author Vernon Knowles. It was published in different editions (with different contents) in New York in 1924 and London in 1925.

It seems likely that his models were the fantasies of Lord Dunsany, the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde, the poetry and perhaps some early stories of de la Mare, the paradoxical romances of G.K. Chesterton, whom we know he also met, and possibly a pinch or so of the sardonic Saki. His tales demonstrate an imagination as rich as these, if a literary craft not yet perfected: but for a young man in his mid-twenties, the collection is still impressive.

The title story reads like a strange allegory—an architect builds homes that suit people’s character and occupation, and at first the Street seems rich and interesting: but sudden, sometimes absurd, strokes of misfortune disturb the quaint harmony. ‘The Three Gods’ is set on the fictional ‘eastern coast of Ragana’, where there is a city of beautiful gardens and jewelled castles, like those fair cities of Dunsany to which we know a doom will come. The King is troubled by a dream; his High Priest interprets it, correctly in one sense, and the city’s three great stone gods (with the Dunsanian names of Bina, Zooma and Tana) are set upon a hill to guard the realm. But the doom in the dream, and the city’s destiny, cannot be thwarted.

Other stories, including ‘The House of Yesterdays’ (dedicated to Walter de la Mare), ‘The Pendant’, ‘The Broken Statue’ and ‘The Mask’, tell how supernatural intervention in the affairs of mortals can be elicited from witches, magicians or gods, but always end with unexpected results. These are ironic parables, whose message is that mortality, loss and decay are our ultimate lot, and we do better to accept them than to try to delay or oppose them. There are also two brief fantasies about authors engaging with their own creations—‘The Author Who Entered His Ms’ and ‘A Matter of Characterisation’—which read like plot ideas briefly sketched, and might have worked better with fuller development.

All of the tales are succinct but somewhat distant in the telling, with a remorseless sense of inevitability, like folk or fairy tales. E.F. Bleiler (The Guide to Supernatural Fiction, 1983), one of the few to notice the collection, called the stories ‘rather weak, amateurish affairs . . . mostly short, undeveloped allegories.’ That is perhaps harsh, but it does convey some of the limitations of the form and style Knowles adopted.

Vernon Knowles was born in Adelaide on 17th April 1899, the youngest of four children of Major Frank Lyndon Knowles, a military paymaster, and his wife Annie. His father was born in Birmingham, England, but had moved to Australia about 1886: his mother had once had artistic ambitions, but had forsaken these for her family.

Despite his deep affection for the country around his home town, Vernon Knowles seems very early to have determined to make his way in England. He visited there in 1921-2, made some literary contacts, and (after a brief return home), went back in 1923. Although he returned to Australia on occasions, England was to become his home for the rest of his life.

A second book of short stories, Here and Otherwhere, followed at the end of 1926 and seems to be written with more assurance and insouciance than the first. The tales are not so bare, the ideas are worked through a little further, and they are slyer and more consciously crafted. They still read like parables or allegories, and are briskly conveyed (with little dwelling upon atmosphere or character), but we are again struck by the fecundity of ideas.

The seven stories in Knowles’ third collection, Silver Nutmegs (1927), are embellished by excellent bold black & white illustrations by Eric Knight, with angular art-deco weirdness in similar style to the work of Wyndham Lewis or Beresford Egan. But this volume seems (like the others) to have met only modest success. Perhaps the temper of the times was not right for such work: Dunsany had given up his tales in this vein almost completely after the Great War.

Whether it was the author or his publisher that was discouraged, no new collection followed for some time. There was one more selection, Two and Two Make Five (1935), which brings together three tales from Silver Nutmegs, and five from Here and Otherwhere, with four previously uncollected works. The publisher called them ‘fairy tales for grown-ups’ and suggested that in a world of advanced science—Einstein, J.W. Dunne’s experiments with time—they should be regarded as ‘tales of the super-real rather than the supernatural’. The strongest new story, ‘The Curious Activities of Basil Thorpenden’, bears that claim out by presenting a set of wonders as the Wellsian experiments of an inventor—though really we are still in the domain of Dunsanyian dreams.

Knowles also published poems and a few novels, and a slim volume of boyhood autobiography, Eternity in an Hour, in 1932. In this, his frank celebration of strangeness and delight in his South Australian upbringing draws the reader in more successfully than the more artificial tone of his tales. We share in the ardour of his response to natural beauty and the intensity of his allegiance to other boys and the excitement of games, adventures and explorations.

Certain recurring themes are seen in his stories: searching for wonder from within a humdrum world, the separation of selves, the sinister twists that come from wishes. They are familiar in the field and suggest an author who has a vision to express that he has not quite fully made his own. But even so, his best and strangest tales—perhaps ‘The Ladder’, ‘Thorpenden’, ‘The Shop in the Off-Street’ and ‘A Set of Chinese Boxes’—are bold and beguiling enough to demand our attention, sufficiently distinctive for us to appreciate the unusual sensibility at work in them. 

(Mark Valentine)

Note: condensed, amended and adapted from part of my essay ‘“Under This Strange Grey Sky” – The Fantasies of Vernon Knowles’ (Haunted By Books, 2005)

Image: Endpaper design in The Street of Queer Houses.