Bacalao

Bacalao (or Bacalhau, Bachalaos, Bacalhaos, Baccalieu, Baccalar ) is a phantom island which was listed on several maps of the 16th century. Probably sightings of the island of Newfoundland were the trigger for the entry of Bacalao on the charts. For the first time the name appeared on a map in 1508, reports on such an island but there were before.

Already in 1474 gave the Portuguese King Alfonso V lands on the Azores island of Terceira in the Portuguese navigator João Vaz Corte-Real, whose discovery of " Terra Nova do Bacalao " ( New land of stockfish ). Bartolomé de Las Casas wrote about Portuguese voyages of discovery to the land Bacalao ( Terra do Bacalhau ). This led to speculation that Corte-Real America already discovered some decades before Columbus.

One theory about the origin of the name assumes that fishermen fished from the Iberian Peninsula in the 15th century Newfoundland and cod to stockfish (Spanish or Portuguese Bacalhau Bacalao ) were processed. The speculation about Bacalao so add two new conjectures about the "true discoverer of America " added.

Musical precipitation found the island in The Cliffs of Baccalieu, a folk song by Jack Withers, in which it is about a ship that comes before " Bacalao " in a storm.