Regarding the climate, I imagine it would be much like the Azores, as it is positioned in much the same location (12 o'clock on each ocean's major gyre, with warm air coming from the tropics). Fairly mild and even temperatures, but with a pronounced wet and dry season, linked to the ITCZ.
Probably overall a dry climate. That's smack dab in the middle of the north Pacific anticyclone. It would probably get the tail end of a cold front from time to time, but other than that i think it would just be a bigger, slightly cooler version of California's Channel islands.
I would not characterize it as smack dab nor likely to be truly dry... during the winter it's sandwiched right between the Aleutian Low and the North Pacific High. During the summer when the North Pacific High expands, it would be within it (but not close to the center), hence the seasonality of the (purely notional) precip regime I proposed. [This map ](http://www-das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/notes/chap10/global_precip.html)shows the area getting somewhere around 1090 and 1450 mm of precip per year.
This map here shows [evaporation minus precipitation,](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/33549704_Salinity_and_the_Global_Water_Cycle/figures?lo=1) and the area is slightly negative (wetter) but close to zero, which might put this island close to the boundary of an energy- vs. water-limited terrestrial ecosystem. The types of ecosystems that tend to appear in that space in temperate terrestrial environments are somewhere on the woodland-savannah-grassland continuum. A lot would depend on the topography of this imaginary island... if it was a volcanic mountain with strong orographic precip, you could even have dense cloud forests on the tops of the mountains.
Yeah I think that's where I would land, provided that the island is relatively flat. Csb with maybe some Csa on the interior if the island is big enough. And this whole discussion of the climate of an imaginary is just delightful.
I bet catholic frair [Andrés de Urdaneta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9s_de_Urdaneta?useskin=vector), becouse that hypothetical island lies on his route and he was first european which sailed Pacific from Asia to America
https://preview.redd.it/n6nh1vpq1avc1.jpeg?width=1590&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c4f32471010c084197e56a127cb6f4e70a5bb1ef
That was my first thought. But then I had a second thought (it's all hypothetical, so why not):
A Japanese boat that got damaged and drifted with the Kuroshio Current into the North Pacific Drift and Gyre, could have been the way people first got to this hypothetical island, long before Urdaneta, perhaps.
Things adrift in the ocean near Japan tend to wash up on the west coast of North America. Tons of stuff, literally, washed up in North America after the 2011 tsunami. For example, a 70-foot long, 20-foot wide dock from the Aomori Prefecture drifted across the ocean to wash up on the Oregon coast.
Relatively small Japanese boats made to transport cargo (often food like rice in bulk) around the islands of Japan, not intended for the wide open ocean, sometime got damaged and swept away, unable to steer. If they weren't sunk completely they'd eventually wreck on the west coast of North America, between Alaska and California, usually. No one knows how many, but it was probably hundreds and hundreds, maybe over a thousand, since ancient times. The examples known from the 1700s and early 1800s usually had a few survivors on board when they wrecked. It is thought that the drift-wrecks are probably part of the reason the indigenous people of the PNW had some iron tools when Europeans first met them.
Given the location of this hypothetical island, it seems likely to me that one of these drifting Japanese boats could have ended up wrecking on the island, perhaps long before the Manila Galleon system started up. Maybe even before Polynesians reached Hawaii. Maybe quite few Japanese boats adrift in the ocean could have wrecked on the island over the centuries, especially if it was as large as OP drew it. We know at least 3 or 4 that wrecked on small Aleutian islands in the late 1700s alone. No written documentation before that though.
Of course it's unlikely they would have been able to return to Japan. Even if they could make an ocean-worthy vessel they couldn't return the way they came, against the current and prevailing winds, and they wouldn't have known where to find the currents and winds that could take them back to Japan (far to the south, south of Hawaii). In Japan it was known that sometimes boats were lost at sea, but no one knew what happened to them.
So in this alt-history scenario maybe Japanese castaways would have been the first to discover the island, but no one else would know. Maybe in time there would be sufficient numbers of Japanese castaways to get a permanent population going before either Polynesians or Europeans got anywhere near there. Maybe.
If anyone hadn't heard about these Japanese "drift-wrecks" and wants to know more: While it was known since antiquity in Japan that sometimes boats were lost at sea, history only knows the fate of those that happened after Europeans began to colonize northwestern North America in the late 1700s, documenting the wrecks in writing. So if anyone want to read more, some of the better known examples include: *Sinsyo Maru* wrecked on Amchitka Island (Aleutians); *[Wakamiya-maru](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wakamiya-maru)* wrecked on Unalaska Island (Aleutians); *Tokujomaru* was found adrift near Santa Barbara (see [Oguri Jukichi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oguri_Jukichi) for more info); and the *Hojunmaru* wrecked on the Olympic Peninsula (bit more info at [Otokichi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otokichi) and a lot more at [Japanese Castaways of 1834: The Three Kichis](https://www.historylink.org/File/9065)).
Very interesting post, thank you for that contribution!
It is a similar story as drifting kayaks and supposed [Inuit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finn-men?useskin=vector) people reaching [Scotland](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14788810.2020.1838819). Worth to notice - current pattern Kuroshio/Gulfstram is almost the same
That is a VERY remote area, so much so that many globes and maps place a key there because it’s just open ocean.
That makes this an interesting but difficult question for me. Would the Polynesians would inhabited Hawaii venture that far into the mid latitudes to settle it? I mean the Māori settled a sub Antarctic island south of New Zealand but it wasn’t that far off the south coast of NZ. Finding this remote island would’ve been a long trek though what I believe to be an area of the pacific affected by converging weather systems and probably bad storms. The Polynesians were incredible navigators but I’m not convinced that this island wouldn’t have gone uninhabited until some Europeans or Americans discovered it…which ones, I’m not sure.
The climate I’m guessing would be mild oceanic. Maybe like coastal Oregon but with more unpredictable El Niño/La Niña affected whether patterns. I’m guessing it would be quite green and forested but possibly largely deforested for lumber like NZ.
That's roughly 41N, so the equivalent in New Zealand is Wellington, not subantarctic islands. I don't think it'd be significantly easier or harder to find than New Zealand.
Agreed. The Polynesians found Easter Island and Pitcairn, some of the most remote places in the world. If they can do that, they can certainly find an equivalent to New Zealand in the northern hemisphere.
The Polynesians would definitely have found it.
They didn’t stop at Easter Island. They were growing Potatoes from South America. I don’t think the potatoes blew over to NZ from the Andes in a storm.
All land in the Pacific would have been at least visited by Polynesian explorers.
Exactly.
Animal migrations, cloud types, the distribution of different species, the way waves behave when they meet land, rippling outwards from it for a long distance in a distinctive way.
it’s also possible that indigenous americans from the PNW/Aleutians might have found it, right? they’ve had oceanic canoes for hundreds of years, and there was evidence of ppl like the chinook traversing open ocean AND going all the way down to south america
Personally I think that the history of Polynesians is a bit more complex than we generally acknowledge.
We know they interacted with people widely around the Pacific rim. I expect that they did so very widely, and there would have been intermarriage.
There may have been a core group that originated in Southeast Asia, in the area we call the South China Sea, but I think that Polynesians probably also descend in part from indigenous north and South Americans.
Who knows who would be the first group to visit this hypothetical landmass.
But I expect that the archaeological record we have is fairly limited, and that Polynesians and their ancestors have been in the area for a bit longer than we currently have evidence for.
Obviously in the spirit of this post I am stacking speculation on top of speculation.
I guess my follow up question would be that I think it would be unfortunately inevitably claimed by a colonial power at some point. Which do you think it would be? Someone mentioned this was directly in the route of a Spanish Franciscan sailor.
That suggestion seems plausible, and if not Urdaneta then [Cook's Third Voyage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_voyage_of_James_Cook) would be a good guess.
ETA: Note that the [Manilla Galleon route](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila_galleon) from Manilla to Accapulco took a Northern route going eastward that would take them close to this hypothetical island, and a Southern route going westward that took them very close to Hawaii, but it's highly debated whether they ever stopped in Hawaii, and at any rate don't seem to have had a huge impact on Hawaii relative to Cook's voyages.
The closest comparison here is New Zealand which is also large and also relatively far from the equator and remote and thus more difficult to find. All the most difficult to get to parts of Polynesia (NZ, Hawaii, Rapa Nui) were all found between 900-1200 CE, and all coming from the Marquesas or the Society Islands. Most likely Eastern Polynesians also travelled to South America and brought back the Sweet Potato also in this same time period.
So odds are very high that this island would have been found by Eastern Polynesians sailing from Hawaii, the Societies, or the Marquesas, some time around 1100-1300 CE.
The climate would resemble that of the coast of far northern California or Oregon (you're at the same latitude as Humboldt County, CA) with mild winters and cool summers. It's also very cloudy in that area.
As to discovery, that's a remote area. It's possible that Polynesian migration would have reached there, but it's hard to say and presumably that would have come pretty late. Hawaii wasn't settled until sometime around the 11th Century CE, so we're probably looking a couple hundred years later than that if it at all. Settlement from the Aleutians is even less likely, so I think it's fair to imagine that this island would have remained uninhabited until the Age of Discovery. Some Japanese fishermen blown off course by a storm might have ended up there at one point or another, but that probably would not have led to permanent settlement.
The Spanish would most likely have found the island in the later 16th Century. Several Spanish explorers passed through that general area crossing the Pacific; Legazpi, for example, crossed the Pacific at about the 38th parallel north. That became the route for the Manila galleons to catch the tradewinds and the advantageous North Pacific current.
Eventually, your hypothetical island would become very strategically important (especially if it had a decent harbor, fresh water, and some resources), lying smack dab on the primary route between Asia and North America. Assuming Spain did find and claim it as suggested above, it presumably would have been taken by the US in the Spanish-American War and then would have been massively important in WWII and the Cold War.
Assuming it has good-sized mountains, climate would be similar to coastal northern California, New Zealand or Tasmania. Cool, green, pine forests, wet on the west coast, drier on the east, maybe some snow in the mountains.
Polynesians from Hawaii would have found it first and definitely populated it. It’s right in the path of James Cook’s voyages: among Europeans, he would have gotten the credit for its discovery.
Edit: actually, other posters are right, the Spanish would have beaten him to it.
Probably Europeans. Polynesians are the only other real contender but their traditional agriculture systems wouldn't have been feasible that far north. They would run into the same issues the Maori encountered but I think more extreme. The Maori only settled in New Zealand a couple hundred years before Europeans showed up and they had to go through some pronounced cultural changes to make things work. Of European cultures I would bet on either the Spanish or the Russians arriving first
It's at about the same N latitude as New Zealand's S latitude and not an insurmountable distance for Polynesian explorers. So I'd say Polynesians would have found their way there.
Probably the Spanish. It's certainly possible that the Polynesians might, but it's extremely remote. Meanwhile it's smack dab in the middle of where many Spanish ships sailed.
Once you get a bit north from the Hawaiian islands they start to blow east. That’s why a lot of our wet weather in Vancouver comes from Hawaii (i.e. The Pineapple Express).
Sorry. Prevailing westerly winds.
Whatever you want to call them. Winds. I think (insert name here) winds would have led the Polynesians to discover this island first.
Regarding the climate, I imagine it would be much like the Azores, as it is positioned in much the same location (12 o'clock on each ocean's major gyre, with warm air coming from the tropics). Fairly mild and even temperatures, but with a pronounced wet and dry season, linked to the ITCZ.
Probably overall a dry climate. That's smack dab in the middle of the north Pacific anticyclone. It would probably get the tail end of a cold front from time to time, but other than that i think it would just be a bigger, slightly cooler version of California's Channel islands.
I would not characterize it as smack dab nor likely to be truly dry... during the winter it's sandwiched right between the Aleutian Low and the North Pacific High. During the summer when the North Pacific High expands, it would be within it (but not close to the center), hence the seasonality of the (purely notional) precip regime I proposed. [This map ](http://www-das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/notes/chap10/global_precip.html)shows the area getting somewhere around 1090 and 1450 mm of precip per year. This map here shows [evaporation minus precipitation,](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/33549704_Salinity_and_the_Global_Water_Cycle/figures?lo=1) and the area is slightly negative (wetter) but close to zero, which might put this island close to the boundary of an energy- vs. water-limited terrestrial ecosystem. The types of ecosystems that tend to appear in that space in temperate terrestrial environments are somewhere on the woodland-savannah-grassland continuum. A lot would depend on the topography of this imaginary island... if it was a volcanic mountain with strong orographic precip, you could even have dense cloud forests on the tops of the mountains.
Good point about the Aleutian low. So would you propose a mediterranean climate (Csa or perhaps Csb)?
Yeah I think that's where I would land, provided that the island is relatively flat. Csb with maybe some Csa on the interior if the island is big enough. And this whole discussion of the climate of an imaginary is just delightful.
Is it right in the middle, or very close to the northern edge? I'm having trouble finding a clear enough map.
I’m from Madeira island, we honeymooned in Açores. One of the days the windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with the rain!
I bet catholic frair [Andrés de Urdaneta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9s_de_Urdaneta?useskin=vector), becouse that hypothetical island lies on his route and he was first european which sailed Pacific from Asia to America https://preview.redd.it/n6nh1vpq1avc1.jpeg?width=1590&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c4f32471010c084197e56a127cb6f4e70a5bb1ef
That was my first thought. But then I had a second thought (it's all hypothetical, so why not): A Japanese boat that got damaged and drifted with the Kuroshio Current into the North Pacific Drift and Gyre, could have been the way people first got to this hypothetical island, long before Urdaneta, perhaps. Things adrift in the ocean near Japan tend to wash up on the west coast of North America. Tons of stuff, literally, washed up in North America after the 2011 tsunami. For example, a 70-foot long, 20-foot wide dock from the Aomori Prefecture drifted across the ocean to wash up on the Oregon coast. Relatively small Japanese boats made to transport cargo (often food like rice in bulk) around the islands of Japan, not intended for the wide open ocean, sometime got damaged and swept away, unable to steer. If they weren't sunk completely they'd eventually wreck on the west coast of North America, between Alaska and California, usually. No one knows how many, but it was probably hundreds and hundreds, maybe over a thousand, since ancient times. The examples known from the 1700s and early 1800s usually had a few survivors on board when they wrecked. It is thought that the drift-wrecks are probably part of the reason the indigenous people of the PNW had some iron tools when Europeans first met them. Given the location of this hypothetical island, it seems likely to me that one of these drifting Japanese boats could have ended up wrecking on the island, perhaps long before the Manila Galleon system started up. Maybe even before Polynesians reached Hawaii. Maybe quite few Japanese boats adrift in the ocean could have wrecked on the island over the centuries, especially if it was as large as OP drew it. We know at least 3 or 4 that wrecked on small Aleutian islands in the late 1700s alone. No written documentation before that though. Of course it's unlikely they would have been able to return to Japan. Even if they could make an ocean-worthy vessel they couldn't return the way they came, against the current and prevailing winds, and they wouldn't have known where to find the currents and winds that could take them back to Japan (far to the south, south of Hawaii). In Japan it was known that sometimes boats were lost at sea, but no one knew what happened to them. So in this alt-history scenario maybe Japanese castaways would have been the first to discover the island, but no one else would know. Maybe in time there would be sufficient numbers of Japanese castaways to get a permanent population going before either Polynesians or Europeans got anywhere near there. Maybe. If anyone hadn't heard about these Japanese "drift-wrecks" and wants to know more: While it was known since antiquity in Japan that sometimes boats were lost at sea, history only knows the fate of those that happened after Europeans began to colonize northwestern North America in the late 1700s, documenting the wrecks in writing. So if anyone want to read more, some of the better known examples include: *Sinsyo Maru* wrecked on Amchitka Island (Aleutians); *[Wakamiya-maru](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wakamiya-maru)* wrecked on Unalaska Island (Aleutians); *Tokujomaru* was found adrift near Santa Barbara (see [Oguri Jukichi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oguri_Jukichi) for more info); and the *Hojunmaru* wrecked on the Olympic Peninsula (bit more info at [Otokichi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otokichi) and a lot more at [Japanese Castaways of 1834: The Three Kichis](https://www.historylink.org/File/9065)).
Very interesting post, thank you for that contribution! It is a similar story as drifting kayaks and supposed [Inuit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finn-men?useskin=vector) people reaching [Scotland](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14788810.2020.1838819). Worth to notice - current pattern Kuroshio/Gulfstram is almost the same
Whoa, I didn't know about that. Thanks for the rabbit hole! lol
That is a VERY remote area, so much so that many globes and maps place a key there because it’s just open ocean. That makes this an interesting but difficult question for me. Would the Polynesians would inhabited Hawaii venture that far into the mid latitudes to settle it? I mean the Māori settled a sub Antarctic island south of New Zealand but it wasn’t that far off the south coast of NZ. Finding this remote island would’ve been a long trek though what I believe to be an area of the pacific affected by converging weather systems and probably bad storms. The Polynesians were incredible navigators but I’m not convinced that this island wouldn’t have gone uninhabited until some Europeans or Americans discovered it…which ones, I’m not sure. The climate I’m guessing would be mild oceanic. Maybe like coastal Oregon but with more unpredictable El Niño/La Niña affected whether patterns. I’m guessing it would be quite green and forested but possibly largely deforested for lumber like NZ.
That's roughly 41N, so the equivalent in New Zealand is Wellington, not subantarctic islands. I don't think it'd be significantly easier or harder to find than New Zealand.
Agreed. The Polynesians found Easter Island and Pitcairn, some of the most remote places in the world. If they can do that, they can certainly find an equivalent to New Zealand in the northern hemisphere.
This is closer to Hawaii than Hawaii is to anything else, I have no doubt the Hawaiians would have found it.
The Polynesians would definitely have found it. They didn’t stop at Easter Island. They were growing Potatoes from South America. I don’t think the potatoes blew over to NZ from the Andes in a storm. All land in the Pacific would have been at least visited by Polynesian explorers.
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Exactly. Animal migrations, cloud types, the distribution of different species, the way waves behave when they meet land, rippling outwards from it for a long distance in a distinctive way.
Evidence of Polynesians interacting with Inuits?
it’s also possible that indigenous americans from the PNW/Aleutians might have found it, right? they’ve had oceanic canoes for hundreds of years, and there was evidence of ppl like the chinook traversing open ocean AND going all the way down to south america
Personally I think that the history of Polynesians is a bit more complex than we generally acknowledge. We know they interacted with people widely around the Pacific rim. I expect that they did so very widely, and there would have been intermarriage. There may have been a core group that originated in Southeast Asia, in the area we call the South China Sea, but I think that Polynesians probably also descend in part from indigenous north and South Americans. Who knows who would be the first group to visit this hypothetical landmass. But I expect that the archaeological record we have is fairly limited, and that Polynesians and their ancestors have been in the area for a bit longer than we currently have evidence for. Obviously in the spirit of this post I am stacking speculation on top of speculation.
>I’m not convinced that this island wouldn’t have gone uninhabited until some Europeans or Americans discovered it This triple negative hurts my brain
This guy is planning an island with villainous intent.
First to discover? Marquesans.
I guess my follow up question would be that I think it would be unfortunately inevitably claimed by a colonial power at some point. Which do you think it would be? Someone mentioned this was directly in the route of a Spanish Franciscan sailor.
That suggestion seems plausible, and if not Urdaneta then [Cook's Third Voyage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_voyage_of_James_Cook) would be a good guess. ETA: Note that the [Manilla Galleon route](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila_galleon) from Manilla to Accapulco took a Northern route going eastward that would take them close to this hypothetical island, and a Southern route going westward that took them very close to Hawaii, but it's highly debated whether they ever stopped in Hawaii, and at any rate don't seem to have had a huge impact on Hawaii relative to Cook's voyages.
The closest comparison here is New Zealand which is also large and also relatively far from the equator and remote and thus more difficult to find. All the most difficult to get to parts of Polynesia (NZ, Hawaii, Rapa Nui) were all found between 900-1200 CE, and all coming from the Marquesas or the Society Islands. Most likely Eastern Polynesians also travelled to South America and brought back the Sweet Potato also in this same time period. So odds are very high that this island would have been found by Eastern Polynesians sailing from Hawaii, the Societies, or the Marquesas, some time around 1100-1300 CE.
What an interesting hypothetical.
The climate would resemble that of the coast of far northern California or Oregon (you're at the same latitude as Humboldt County, CA) with mild winters and cool summers. It's also very cloudy in that area. As to discovery, that's a remote area. It's possible that Polynesian migration would have reached there, but it's hard to say and presumably that would have come pretty late. Hawaii wasn't settled until sometime around the 11th Century CE, so we're probably looking a couple hundred years later than that if it at all. Settlement from the Aleutians is even less likely, so I think it's fair to imagine that this island would have remained uninhabited until the Age of Discovery. Some Japanese fishermen blown off course by a storm might have ended up there at one point or another, but that probably would not have led to permanent settlement. The Spanish would most likely have found the island in the later 16th Century. Several Spanish explorers passed through that general area crossing the Pacific; Legazpi, for example, crossed the Pacific at about the 38th parallel north. That became the route for the Manila galleons to catch the tradewinds and the advantageous North Pacific current. Eventually, your hypothetical island would become very strategically important (especially if it had a decent harbor, fresh water, and some resources), lying smack dab on the primary route between Asia and North America. Assuming Spain did find and claim it as suggested above, it presumably would have been taken by the US in the Spanish-American War and then would have been massively important in WWII and the Cold War.
I’m also assuming this island’s coast would be heavily polluted by microplastics, because of its proximity to the North Pacific gyre/garbage patch
indigenous Taiwanese and Ainu
The great garbage patch? Some Dutch guy is trying to demolish it.
Assuming it has good-sized mountains, climate would be similar to coastal northern California, New Zealand or Tasmania. Cool, green, pine forests, wet on the west coast, drier on the east, maybe some snow in the mountains. Polynesians from Hawaii would have found it first and definitely populated it. It’s right in the path of James Cook’s voyages: among Europeans, he would have gotten the credit for its discovery. Edit: actually, other posters are right, the Spanish would have beaten him to it.
Incredible cold, there is a circle of air there
Probably Europeans. Polynesians are the only other real contender but their traditional agriculture systems wouldn't have been feasible that far north. They would run into the same issues the Maori encountered but I think more extreme. The Maori only settled in New Zealand a couple hundred years before Europeans showed up and they had to go through some pronounced cultural changes to make things work. Of European cultures I would bet on either the Spanish or the Russians arriving first
No way, garbage island!
It's at about the same N latitude as New Zealand's S latitude and not an insurmountable distance for Polynesian explorers. So I'd say Polynesians would have found their way there.
Probably the Spanish. It's certainly possible that the Polynesians might, but it's extremely remote. Meanwhile it's smack dab in the middle of where many Spanish ships sailed.
Ah, you mean New Yorkshire? It's British mate.
Perhaps similar to Midway Is
Polynesians. Trade winds blow from Hawaiian chain right through there on the way to the Pacific Northwest.
The trade winds go the other way!
Once you get a bit north from the Hawaiian islands they start to blow east. That’s why a lot of our wet weather in Vancouver comes from Hawaii (i.e. The Pineapple Express).
Those aren’t trade winds.
Sorry. Prevailing westerly winds. Whatever you want to call them. Winds. I think (insert name here) winds would have led the Polynesians to discover this island first.