page_title: Bouvet Island
section_title: Discovery and early sightings
hierarchical_section_title: Bouvet Island / History / Discovery and early sightings
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Südostküste der Bouvetinsel bei Sonnenaufgang in 8 Seemeilen Entfernung. Handkolorierte Schwarzweiß-Fotografie. Fotografiert auf der Valdivia-Expedition. English: Bouvet Island, southeast side, as seen at sunrise, eight miles distant. Black and white photograph coloured by hand. Photo taken on the German Valdivia expedition. Français&#160;: Île Bouvet - Côte Sud-Est - une terre difficile d'approche. Photographie noir et blanc coloriée à la main. Expédition allemande "Valdivia". Español: Isla Bouvet Costa sudeste,a 8 millas de distancia. Fotografía en blanco y negro coloreada a mano. Foto capturada durante la expedición alemana "Valdivia". Українська: Південно-східне узбережжя острова Буве Norsk bokmål: Bouvetøya, sørøstsiden, sett ved soloppgang, åtte nautiske mils avstand. Svart-hvitt fotografi farget for hånd. Bilde tatt av den tyske Valdivia ekspedisjonen.
context_page_description: Bouvet Island is an uninhabited subantarctic high island and dependency of Norway located in the South Atlantic Ocean at 54°25′S 3°22′E, thus locating it north of and outside the Antarctic Treaty System. It lies at the southern end of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and is the most remote island in the world, approximately 1,700 kilometres north of the Princess Astrid Coast of Queen Maud Land, Antarctica, 1,900 kilometres east of the South Sandwich Islands, 1,600 kilometres south of Gough Island, and 2,600 kilometres south-southwest of the coast of South Africa.
  The island has an area of 49 square kilometres, of which 93 percent is covered by a glacier. The centre of the island is an ice-filled crater of an inactive volcano. Some skerries and one smaller island, Larsøya, lie along the coast. Nyrøysa, created by a rock slide in the late 1950s, is the only easy place to land and is the location of a weather station.
  The island was first spotted on 1 January 1739 by Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier, on a French exploration mission in the South Atlantic with the ships Aigle and Marie.
context_section_description: The island was discovered on 1 January 1739 by Jean-Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier, commander of the French ships Aigle and Marie. Bouvet, who was searching for a presumed large southern continent, spotted the island through the fog and named the cape he saw Cap de la Circoncision. He was not able to land and did not circumnavigate his discovery, thus not clarifying if it was an island or part of a continent. His plotting of its position was inaccurate, leading several expeditions to fail to find the island again. James Cook's second voyage set off from Cape Verde on 22 November 1772 to find Cape Circoncision, but was unable to find the cape.
  The next expedition to spot the island was in 1808 by James Lindsay, captain of the Samuel Enderby & Sons' (SE&S) snow whaler Swan. Swan and another Enderby whaler, Otter were in company when they reached the island and recorded its position, though they were unable to land. Lindsay could confirm that the "cape" was indeed an island. The next expedition to arrive at the island was American Benjamin Morrell and his seal hunting ship Wasp. Morrell, by his own account, found the island without difficulty (with "improbable ease", in the words of historian William Mills) before landing and hunting 196 seals. In his subsequent lengthy description, Morrell does not mention the island's most obvious physical feature, its permanent ice cover. This has caused some commentators to doubt whether he actually visited the island.
  On 10 December 1825, SE&S's George Norris, master of the Sprightly, landed on the island, named it Liverpool Island and claimed it for the British Crown and George IV on 16 December. The next expedition to spot the island was Joseph Fuller and his ship Francis Allyn in 1893, but he was not able to land on the island. German Carl Chun's Valdivia Expedition arrived at the island in 1898. They were not able to land, but dredged the seabed for geological samples. They were also the first to accurately fix the island's position. At least three sealing vessels visited the island between 1822 and 1895. A voyage of exploration in 1927-28 also took seal pelts.
  Norris also spotted a second island in 1825, which he named Thompson Island, which he placed 72 kilometres (45 mi) north-northeast of Liverpool Island. Thompson Island was also reported in 1893 by Fuller, but in 1898 Chun did not report seeing such an island, nor has anyone since. However, Thompson Island continued to appear on maps as late as 1943. A 1967 paper suggested that the island might have disappeared in an undetected volcanic eruption, but in 1997 it was discovered that the ocean is more than 2,400 metres (7,900 ft) deep in the area.
caption: Southeast coast of Bouvet Island in 1898
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