Davis Land
A phantom island, Davis Land was believed to be located in the South Pacific west of South America. While the buccaneer Edward Davis supposedly sighted it in 1687, it was never sighted again. William Dampier believed it may have been the coast of Terra Australis Incognita after Davis informed him of the sighting and subsequently used the possibility as part of his case for what became the Roebuck voyage.
For the next hundred years, various navigators, including John Byron, Samuel Wallis, Philip Carteret and Jean-François de Surville sought the elusive location. However, by the end of the 1770s, after James Cook's three voyages established no sizeable undiscovered land mass in the South Pacific, cartographers began removing Davis Land from their maps. While the phantom island's identity remains unresolved, and it may have been Easter Island, it is equally possible that, like many others before and since, Davis and his crew were deceived by a bank of clouds.
