Fonseca Island

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Fonseca Island, also spelled Fonzeca, Fonsequa, or Fonte Seca, and known by other names such as San Bernardo, San Bernaldo, and Galissonière's Rock, is a phantom island said to lie in the Atlantic Ocean at about 12°27′N, 54°48′W, east of Barbados and Tobago.

Discovery of Fonseca is unclear. On Sebastian Cabot’s 1544 world map there is an island named “San Bernardo” northeast of the Orinoco mouth. A similar island appears on a 1599 map by Jodocus Hondius as “y de fonte seca.” The name Fonte Seca likely comes from Portuguese, meaning something like “dry fountain.”

English geographer Richard Hakluyt placed Fonseca at 11°15′N in his 1589 Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries, which led King Charles I to grant the island as a fief to Philip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, though little was known about it.

In the 1630s, the Providence Island Company planned to help settlers from the Massachusetts Bay Colony move to the Caribbean. Fonseca was chosen, but the ship Elisabeth, carrying twenty emigrants, could not find the island and instead went to Providencia Island, Colombia, where the settlers founded a new home. No one had ever set foot on Fonseca.

In 1682, a writer using the initials “J.S.” claimed a storm survivor described Fonseca as inhabited by beautiful, Welsh-speaking women, with male children sent away at an early age and the people moon-worshipping. A later(1708) report about Turkish warship captains landing on Fonseca in 1707 is also considered unreliable.

Fonseca is probably a confusion with Providencia or another Caribbean island. Soundings in 1852 showed there was no island at the supposed location, but Fonseca kept appearing on maps as late as 1866. In 1861, Keith Johnston’s General Atlas places Fonseca southwest of Barbados. Alexander Findlay, in his navigation work of 1853, called it Galissonière's Rock (a vigia) at about 12°20′N, 54°49′W, noting a reported sighting by the Rainbow and later depths of about 2,570 fathoms, suggesting it may have been volcanic. Some accounts link the rock with an 1822 sighting.

Overall, Fonseca was likely one of the Lesser Antilles islands whose position was mischarted due to early navigational errors, rather than a real, present-day island. The location is associated with the coordinates 12°27′N, 54°48′W.