Latest possible uncharted island

Where is the place and time for a fictional island to be discovered as late as possible? I want at least several square miles, and I want it inhabitable...not forty degrees below zero.
Could it be as late as the publication of Gulliver's Travels?
 
Where is the place and time for a fictional island to be discovered as late as possible? I want at least several square miles, and I want it inhabitable...not forty degrees below zero.
Could it be as late as the publication of Gulliver's Travels?

A fictional island?
 
Probably somewhere in the South Pacific well away from any shipping lanes and aerial routes, say west-southwesterly of Chile but north of the Roaring Forties.
 
I'm pretty sure there were islands in the South Pacific that were not reached until the mid-19th century, and in the early 20th in the polar regions. Plus, you could always cheat and have a submarine eruption result in a new island emerging, unless you want it to be more than a naked rock.
 
I'm pretty sure there were islands in the South Pacific that were not reached until the mid-19th century, and in the early 20th in the polar regions. Plus, you could always cheat and have a submarine eruption result in a new island emerging, unless you want it to be more than a naked rock.

Non fictional islands and you have Pitcairn which wasn't discovered until the Bounty mutineers and not visited again for a long time after
 
Norfolk Island, a self-governing Australian territory between Australia and New Zealand, was uninhabited when Captain James Cook stumbled upon it in the late 18th Century. This was several decades after the publication of Gulliver's Travels. The island holds a population of over two thousand people today.

Norfolk did apparently host a Polynesian settlement several centuries before its rediscovery, but their society vanished long before its first European visitors. They did leave behind some imported remnants of their colonization, including banana trees, New Zealand flax plants, and Polynesian rats.

If you're looking for something completely virgin, there's nearby Lord Howe Island, which today has a population of several hundred and doesn't seem to have ever been discovered by anyone before the late 18th Century (its discoverers were, in fact, on the way to found a penal colony on Norfolk).
 
Non fictional islands and you have Pitcairn which wasn't discovered until the Bounty mutineers and not visited again for a long time after

The Pitcairn Islands were visited by a Spanish expedition in the early 1600s, actually, and there were Polynesian settlers living there before that (though they'd vanished two centuries prior).
 
Yes, towards end of the 18th Century if you want a more comfortable habitable piece of real estate. As was said, probably Pitcairn and Lord Howe's. With one exception. One of the many islands that make up Tierra del Fuego. Although inhabited, if the OP means "known to the West", there were islands in this archipelago that weren't set foot on or charted until well into the 19th Century.
 
Non fictional islands and you have Pitcairn which wasn't discovered until the Bounty mutineers and not visited again for a long time after

My first though was Clipperton island which wasn't claimed by France until the 1850s although I checked again and apparently it was first visited already in 1711.

Franz Josef Land is the last I can think about, discovered 1873. I also though about Bouvet island but like Clipperton, although it wasn't formally claimed by its current owner (Norway!) until the 1920s, it had been known to be there since a century before.

So yeah, 19th century might be the latest.
 
If it's an island unknown to the Western World but hosting an indigenous population that you're looking for, Easter Island was only first visited by Europeans in 1722, four years or so before Gulliver's Travels was first published (and after Swift had begun conceptualizing and writing it). It's very possible that it could have avoided European detection for quite some time longer, perhaps half a century or more (it wasn't revisited until the 1770s).
 
Probably some of the Arctic or Antarctic ones. Hell, some of the Antarctic ones are still being charted today - there are several Bulgarian place names on an Antarctic island visited by a Bulgarian expedition a few years ago. Yeah, most of the mountains still aren't even named there.
 
I assume you mean one, like King Kong's Skull Island, that somehow escaped discovery/settlement by westerners.

I'd go with the Big Ape and say that by the 1930's any island large enough to support an indigenous human population would have been found.
 
I assume you mean one, like King Kong's Skull Island, that somehow escaped discovery/settlement by westerners.

I'd go with the Big Ape and say that by the 1930's any island large enough to support an indigenous human population would have been found.

Maybe not Tracey Island:D
 
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