18. Bouvet Island – the “most remote island in the world” – is so hard to find that it was actually discovered multiple times throughout history
Bouvet Island, located in the South Atlantic Ocean, is an uninhabited island dependency of Norway. Situated just outside the limits of Antarctica, 1,700 kilometers north of the Princess Astrid Coast of Queen Maud Land and 2,600 kilometers south-southwest of South Africa, Bouvet Island, spanning an area of 49 square kilometers, is 93 percent covered by a glacier and houses an ice-filled crater of an ancient volcano in its center. Nicknamed “the most remote island in the world”, Bouvet Island was regarded as sufficiently hard to locate that it was actually discovered multiple times by different people.
First encountered on New Years’ Day in 1739 by French explorer Jean-Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier, after whom the island is today named, his two ships, the Aigle and the Marie, recorded incorrectly the coordinates of the island. Lost for almost a century, with Captain James Cook unable to find it and believing it to be fictitious, the island would not be “discovered” again until 1808 by British whaler James Lindsay. Despite American Benjamin Morrell purporting to be the first to make landfall in 1822, in 1825 George Norris claimed the island for Britain under the name “Liverpool Island”. It would take until 1930 for the issue to be resolved, becoming a Norwegian possession.