One of several islands that appeared and reappeared in the navigation charts through the 19th century, Bouvet Island is named for Pierre des Loziers Bouvet, the pioneer explorer of the Antarctic, who reported seeing the island in 1738 and noted its location at approximately 1,500 miles southwest of the Cape of Good Hope. He described the isolated bit of land as being approximately five miles across and covered by a glacier. However, in both 1772 and 1775, when Captain James Cook returned to the area, he was unable to locate the island. It was not until 1808 that two vessels hunting seals came across what seemed to be Bouvet. In 1822, an American, Captain Benjamin Morrell, reported that he had landed on the island and killed a number of seals. Then, in 1825, not only did other ships land at Bouvet, but one of them, commanded by Captain George Norris, reported sighting another island northeast of Bouvet, which he named Thompson Island, and four smaller islands around it.
The area of the sea where Bouvet was supposedly located was outside the more popular sea lanes, and thus few ever visited Bouvet. In 1843, a British ship sent to the region with Bouvet on its schedule of stops failed to find any land. Two years later, to settle the matter finally, a second ship was sent, but again no land was sighted. It was agreed that Bouvet and the other islands must be phantoms. They were promptly removed from the sea charts. Thus the situation remained until Bouvet reappeared to the crews of the Golden West (1878), the Delia Church (1882), the Francis Allen (1893), and the Valdivvia (1898). The Captain of the Francis Allen even made several sketches of Thompson Island.