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March 1882, The S.S. Jesmond
(1>In March 1882, unlike many alleged sightings of Atlantean ruins before that time, it was well reported in a ship's log and also in the press. It concerned an encounter of a steamship with a uncharted island in heavily traveled sea lanes and the unusual material that was found there by the ship's captain and his crew.
The vessel was named the S.S. Jesmond, a British merchant ship of 1495 tons bound for New Orleans with a cargo of dried fruits from its last port of call in Messina, Sicily. The Jesmond was captained by David Robson, holder of master's certificate 27911 in the Queen's Merchant Marine.
The Jesmond passed through the staringhts of Gibraltar on March 1, 1882, and sailed into the open sea. When the ship reached the position 31° 25' N, 28° 40' W, about 200 miles west of Madeira and about the same distance south of the Azores, it was noted that the ocean had become unusually muddy and that the vessel was passing through enourmous shoals of dead fish, as if some sudden disease or underwater explosion had killed them by the millions. Just before the encountering the fish banks, Captain Robson noticed smoke on the horizon which he presumed came from another ship.
On the following day the fish shoals were even thicker and the smoke on the horizon seemed to be comming from the mountains on an island directly to the west, where, according to the charts, there was no land for thousands of miles. As the Jesmond approached the vicinity of the island, Captain Robson threw out an anchor at about twelve miles offshore to find out whether or not this uncharted island was surrounded by reefs. Even though the charts indicated an area depth of several thousand fathoms, the anchor hit bottom at only seven fathoms.
When Robson went ashore with a landing party they found themselves to be on a large island with no vegetation, no trees, no sandy beaches, bare of all life as if it had just risen from the ocean. The shore they landed on was covered with volcanic debris. As there were no trees, the party could clearly see a plateau beginning several miles away and smoking mountains beyond that.
The landing party rather gingerly headed toward the interior in direction of the mountains, but found that progress was interrupted by a series of deep chasms. To get to the interior would have taken days. They returned to their landing point and examined a broken cliff, part of which seemed to have been split into a mass of loose gravel as if it had recently been subjected to great force.
One of the sailors found an unusual arrowhead in the broken rock, a discovery that led the captain to send for picks adn shovels form the ship so that the crew could dig into the gravel. According to what he told a reporter from the Times Picayune in New Orleans, where he later docked, he and his crew uncovered "crumblig remains" of"massive walls." A variety of artifacts uncovered by diging near the walls for better part of two days included "bronze swords, rings, mallets, carvings of head figures of birds and animals, and two vases or jars with fragments of bone, and one cranium almost entire..." and "what appeared to be a mummy enclosed in a stone case... encrusted with volcanic deposit so as to be scarecely distinguished form the rock itself." At the end of the following day, much of which was spent getting the rock sarcophagus aboard the Jesmond, Robson now worried about unceratin weather, decided to abandon his exploration of the island and resume his course.
Several reporters examined Robson's unusual finds and were infomormed by him that he planned to present the artifacts to the British Museum. Unfortunately for Atlantian research, however, the log of the Jesmond was destroyed during the London blitz of September 1940, along with the offices of the Jesmond's owners. There is no record at the British Museum of their having received Robson's collection. Although it is possible that the artifacts are files in the capacious attics and basements common to all museums. Nor was the island ever heard of again, existing only in the sworn testimony of the captain and crew of the Jesmond.
There is, however, some corroboration of the
incident:
Captain Robson was not alone in reporting the sighting of the
mysterious island. Captain James Newdick of the steam schooner
Westbourne, sailing from Marselles to New York during the same
period, reported on arrival in New York having sighted the island
at 25º 30' N, 24º W. Newdick's report appeared in the New York
Post, April 1, 1882. If the coordinates given by both captains
were correct, the mystery island would have measured 20 X 30
miles in area. The volcanic activity that brought an island of
this size to the surface would have killed, probably through
heating the oceanic water, an enormous quantity of fish, just as
Captain Robson reported.
The miles of dead fish, fanning out from the area first reported by Robson, were also commented on by a number of other ship captains and appeared in a variety of newspapers including The New York Times. <1)
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