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Finding the Philippines' Lost Atlantis: The Mystery of San Juan

 

For over three centuries, accurate maps of the Philippines showed a massive island named "San Juan" off the coast of Mindanao. Then, it vanished. Was it a cartographer's error, a massive conspiracy, or a geological catastrophe?

In this documentary, we investigate one of the strangest mysteries in Southeast Asian history. We retrace the voyage of the pirate-explorer William Dampier, analyze the ancient Murillo Velarde map, and dive into the "Romblon Triangle" to find the truth.

From the discovery of the Butuan Ivory Seal to the sinking of the MV Doña Paz, the ocean holds secrets that link our pre-colonial past to this phantom landmass. Did the island sink? Was it actually Siargao disguised by a clerical error in a 1665 board game? Or was San Juan never there at all?

In this video, we cover:

The 17th-century maps that prove San Juan "existed."

The theory of the "Board Game Conspiracy" (Antonio Pucini).

Geological evidence of massive underwater earthquakes.

The discovery of the Mindoro Obsidian tools and ancient trade routes.

The dark history of the Romblon Triangle.

Join us as we rewrite history and scan the horizon for the lost island of San Juan.

 

 

 

There isn't a specific modern board game titled "San Juan Siargao," but there is a popular game named San Juan, and an historical board game from 1665 that linked the "lost island" of San Juan to the real island of Siargao. 

 

 

The Historical "San Juan" and Siargao Connection

You might be interested in the historical context of the "San Juan" island, especially given your recent interest in Antonio Puccini's games. The mystery of the phantom island of San Juan, which appeared on many old maps, was actually solved by a cartographic board game developed by Antonio Puccini in 1665. 

 

• Antonio Puccini's Game: This "race-to-finish" game used a map where tokens were moved to reach Venice.
•  
• Siargao's appearance: In this game, the square featuring the Philippines correctly identified the "lost island" of San Juan as San Sio (Siargao), the island off the northeast coast of Mindanao. This information, found in a board game, was not taken seriously at the time, and the geographical error persisted in maps for over 200 years. 

 

 

Video

 

The Mysterious “Lost Island” of San Juan

 

One of the most intriguing mysteries of our country’s geographic history involves a ‘vanished’ island off the northeastern tip of Mindanao.

 

Known as the island of San Juan (St. John), it was shown in ancient maps—larger than Bohol, maybe as big as Panay—completely detached from the massive Mindanao mainland. San Juan frequently occurred in over a dozen 16th to early 18th century maps. It was known to the Portuguese as the island of San: Joā through a 1537 portolan chart made by cartographer Gaspar Vargas.

 

In 1570, Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius featured “Ilhas de S. Johan” in his work Asiae Nova Descriptio, identifying it as a town of Cebu.Five years later, it was reborn as a single, separate island off the northeastern coast of Mindanao, a depiction also shown in the 1601 map of Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas printed in Madrid—“Historia General de los Hechos de Los Castellanos en las Islas y Tierra Firme del Mar Oceano.”

 

For two centuries, the enigmatic island was represented in maps done by Sir Robert Dudley (1646, Dell’Arcano del Mare, Florence), Dutchman Jan Janssonius (1656), and Vincenzo Coronelli (1690). Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, the French cartographer who made maps of the Philippines in the 18th century, also included the island of San Juan in 1750.

 

However, Christopher Middleton, a naval officer and cartographer, went one step further by including a print of the inhabitants of San Juan in his opus, “A New and Complete System of Geography,” a circa 1777-1780 series done on all the people of the world. There were 24 plates, and the Philippines was represented by these San Juan natives more than the average oriental height, dark and curly-haired, amidst a backdrop of palms and fruit trees.

 

Despite how well-documented the island of San Juan had been, it was not present in the celebrated 1734 map drawn by Jesuit cartographer Murillo Velarde (the same map used to contest the Chinese claim on Scarborough Shoal), nor does he make mention of it.In subsequent maps, the island of San Juan was completely erased from the Philippine map. It was last seen on an 18th-century British map by Herman Moll and last heard of from the friar-chroniclers Buzaeta and Bravo at about the same time.

 

This led to many conjectures—from fanciful to fantastic—to explain the island’s sudden disappearance.

 

As late as 1969, antique map collector and artist Federico Aguilar Alcuaz theorized that it could have shared the same fate as the lost Atlantis, perhaps shaken by an earthquake or swallowed by the sea.Writer E. Aguilar Cruz disputed this, saying that an island the size of San Juan could not have sunk without violence, whose rumble should have been remembered and recorded in history.

 

Perhaps, others contend, that it was the Agusan River, which old cartographers have drawn, dividing Mindanao and San Juan. The river must have silted through the years, thus, reattaching San Juan to Mindanao and making mapmakers realize that San Juan was not an island but part of a peninsula.

 

But why is it that, even as the old names of the other islands have remained, the name San Juan is completely unknown in the Surigao area, where it was approximately situated in modern-day Mindanao?

 

The great Filipino historian Carlos Quirino, in the second edition of his book “Philippine Cartography,” insisted that San Juan was just an imaginary island first drawn by Herrera in 1601, a mistake subsequently copied by Sanson, Tirion, Coronelli, Hondius, Janssonius, du Val, Dudley, and others, in their maps.

 

The mystery of San Juan was solved by a cartographic board game developed by Antonio Pucini in 1665. The race-to-finish game consisted of squares where tokens were slid to reach a final destination–Venice. One of the squares featured the Philippines, where San Juan was replaced with San Sio (San Siargao), correctly identifying the island, which indeed lies on the northeast coast of Mindanao.

 

The name Siargao could have been confused with San:Joā. But because a board game was an unlikely place to shed light on a geographic mistake, this information was not taken seriously, and so the San Juan enigma persisted for more than two hundred years.

 

It was not until the more accurate Jesuit maps were drawn that things became clearer. These maps were based on information from inhabitants of Islas Carolinas (Caroline Islands), which placed the western Micronesian island groups of Palau and Sonsorol off the northeast corner of Mindanao. These are likely the original San Juan, inadvertently appended by mapmakers to the Philippines.

 

Of the two, Sonsorol seems to have a better fit. A Genoese navigator, Antonio Galvão, stated that San Juan consisted of two islands—as does Sonsorol. San Juan was said to lie at a latitude about 5-6º north, consistent with Sonsorol’s position.

 

 

References

 

Abesamis, Ma. Elena, “Real or Imagined: The Lost Island of San Juan,” The Sunday Time Magazine, 25 May 1969, pp. 22-24.

 

Suarez, Thomas. “The Curious Case of the Island of St. John.” Early Mapping of Southeast Asia: The Epic Story of Seafarers, Adventurers, and Cartographers Who First Mapped the Regions Between China and India. Periplus Editions (HK) Limited. 1999. pp. 172-173.

 

Fell, R.T., Images of Asia: Early Maps of South-East Asia, Oxford University Press. 2nd edition.1991.

 

Carte des Isles Philippines, Jacques Nicolas Bellin, c. 1760, part 2.

 

Filipiknow

 

-Crispin Ponce

 

 

Velarde map - Wikipedia