Hello and welcome back to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast

coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.

My name is Andrew Hunter Murray and I'm sitting here with Anna Tijinsky, Alex Bell and

special guest Ed Brooke Hitching.

Once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last

seven days and in no particular order here we go starting with you, Ed.

In 1875 the British Navy erased 123 islands from their charts because they didn't exist.

The British Navy didn't exist or the islands?

Yeah, you were going to do that.

No, it's, it's phantom islands were a huge problem when we were sorting out our charts.

They were just, the maps were just cluttered with these things and mainly caused by human

error, especially in a time before we could measure longitude you would estimate your position

with dead reckoning and because of that you had huge amounts of wildly inaccurate coordinates

that would be fed back to cartographers painted on maps and presented as fact.

So to be fair to them they were often real islands, they just weren't anywhere near the

places where they were told that they were.

To what extent is an island in a different place before it becomes a different island?

I'll give them a hundred miles leeway in any direction.

Yeah, it's unbelievably good.

They're doing a job half right as well.

You're giving them too much.

You've got to be loose with these poor chaps, they didn't have longitude.

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