Sable Island: The Graveyard of The North Atlantic

About 300 km east of Halifax, Nova Scotia, lies a narrow, crescent-shaped sandbar, whose existence has been a bane on shipping for centuries. The sickle-shaped island is located in the middle of a major transatlantic shipping route and rich fishing grounds. Additionally, the island is surrounded by dangerous currents and is often shrouded in dense fog. In the past, due to the limitations of navigation technology, ships regularly ran aground on the sandbars and were destroyed by the strong waves in the area. The ocean floor surrounding the island is littered with the remains of ships that were sunk by the storms, earning the island its nickname as "the Graveyard of the North Atlantic." An engraving from Ballou's Pictorial, a Boston newspaper, shows the wreck of the Arcadia at Sable Island. Photo: Maritime Museum of the Atlantic The first European to encounter Sable Island was Portuguese explorer João Álvares Fagundes in 1520-21. He named the island after himself, Fagunda . Later, the island appeared in Portuguese maps under various names— Santa Cruz, Barcelos , and Isola della Rena . The name Sable Island (after the French word sable, or “sand”) appeared first in the early 1600. Sable Island is about 40 kilometers long and only about 1.2 kilometers wide at its widest point. In addition to the visible part, sandbars extend out about 30 kilometers on either end. The fierce ocean currents sweeping around the island causes the sand to shift, changing the contours of the island constantly. On top of that, when warm air from the Gulf Stream hits air cooled by the Labrador Current, it produces dense banks of fog that keeps the island hidden for 125 days a year. Prior to modern navigation instruments, the sextant was the principal instrument used to fix a ship’s position. Although accurate, a sextant only worked when the sun or the stars were visible. In dense fog or cloudy skies, they became useless.