ATLAS OF REMOTE ISLANDS
Southern Thule
South Sandwich Islands (United Kingdom)
Atlantic Ocean
59° 27' S | 27° 18' W
36 km2 | uninhabited
THE ROMANS called the very edge of their flat world Thule. So where does it lie? At the outermost of all borders. In the Arctic Circle. Just before the end of the world is nailed down with boards, the last post in the known world is an island in the far north, where the sea is so wild and forbidding that no one wants to travel there, a day's journey away from where the seas flow into each other. // Commander Cook’s second voyage takes him south. His mission is to finally find Terra Australis, the mighty supposed continent that stretches immeasurably wide across the world map, a huge land mass with a temperate climate, rich in natural resources and with civilized people: a place that is world famous but as yet undiscovered. // In January 1775, his Resolution voyages into the Antarctic Ocean for the fourth time. But once again, enormous stretches of pack ice and ice floes force them to turn back; everyone on board is glad when, just a few miles past the Goth parallel, they steer north again. The sailors have had enough of the wet, foggy conditions and the bitter cold, of working the icy masts and rigging, of constant frostbite and rheumatic pains; some are so exhausted they have fallen into day-long faints. // Suddenly they come upon a frozen land with black cliffs, precipitous and full of hollows: cormorants live up high, while unruly waves crash round below. Thick cloud covers its mountains – only one snowy peak rises far above it, looking at least two miles high. Five nautical miles later, they see another mountain, the southern edge of this barren land, perhaps the northernmost tip of the continent they are searching for, which – so much is certain now – will never be of much use: it is a land of firn and ice ruins that never melt, gloomy, cold and full of horrors. Shrouded in thick darkness, they abandon this part of the world to the mercies of Nature. Here is the new Thule, the other end of the known world.
Courtesy of Judith Schalansky and mareverlag, ©2009 mareverlag, Hamburg; ISBN 978-3-86648-683-6
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The crews on board the racing yachts of the Ocean Race whiz past the world's most remote islands without ever setting foot on them. Would they like to land there one day?
In her "Atlas of Remote Islands", Judith Schalansky takes us to islands "where I have never been and never will be". The author tells the absurdly unfathomable stories of these isles in a way that only reality can imagine.
Judith Schalansky has designed several of her books herself and received design awards for them. Both her "Atlas der abgelegenen Inseln" and "Der Hals der Giraffe" were honoured with the 1st Prize of the Stiftung Buchkunst. in 2021, her book "Verzeichnis einiger Verluste" was longlisted for the International Booker Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award. Judith Schalansky's books have been translated into more than 25 languages.
© mareverlag, Hamburg
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