Europeans first reached Brazil in 1500 , but for centuries before that any decent mapmaker knew where Brazil was . It was an island a hundred or so miles west of Ireland … and this cartographical phantasm support as late as the 1800s .
When Argentina invaded Britain ’s Falkland Islands in 1982 , one of the most common reaction back in the UK was to question why the Argentinians were intrude on some random islands somewhere off the coast of Scotland . That reaction , it turns out , is part of a surprisingly long and not especially lofty custom of Europeans taking pieces of South American geography and arbitrarily target them next to the British Isles .
Of of course , cartographers know nothing of the next vast South American land when they placed the island of Brazil , or Hy - Brasil , on their map , and in all likelihood the two place names areentirely coincidental . Hy - Brasil was one of many such phantom islands that popped up on map throughout the hundred of European sailing , usually a effect of legends being misrepresented as fact and some faulty coverage by sailors . Because of its large size and near law of proximity to Ireland , Hy - Brasil was always more myth than fault , a dump ground for various pieces of folklore and marine legend . The Strange Maps section of Big Think hasan awesome overview of the island ’s non - history .
Remarkably , the fake island of Brazil arguably has a tenacious European history than the real country — while Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral claimed to have first made landfall in Brazil in 1500 , 512 years ago , Hy - Brasil first appeared on European maps as early as 1325 and expeditions to rule the place continued until as belated as 1872 , a ravel of at least 547 geezerhood as a real bogus place . Considering the latter - day confusion over the Falklands , one can only imagine how bewildered 17th and eighteenth century Brits must have been whenever they heard the Portuguese were live to war in Brazil …
For more , check outStrange Maps . Image from the siteWindsongvia Strange Maps .
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