Saint Paul's Rocks: a bibliographical review of the natural history of a Mid-Atlantic Island

Abstract

Saint Paul's Rocks (Penedos de Sao e Sao Paulo) are a remote group of barren, uninhabited islets on the mid-Atlantic ridge (0°55'N 29°2l'W);they lie 100 km north of the equator, 960 km north-east of Cabo de Sao Roque, Brazil and 1890 km south-west of Senegal, West Africa. The group of rocks, which belong to Brazil, are only 400 m across at their greatest extent. They were discovered by accident in 1511 when one of a convoy of six ships led by Dom Garcia de Noronha, sailing from Brazil to the island of Sao Tome, struck the Rocks during the night. The ship, Sao Pedro, was lost and the Rocks named after her (Barros, 1561: 157; 1777: 162; 1945: 317). The Rocks first appeared on a chart of Jorge Reinelmade c. 1519, where their name was abbreviated to 'S31 P°'; some later cartographers evidently thought that the abbreviation was of Sao Paulo (Mercator uses this name on his world chart of 1538). Since then the names Sao and Sao Paulo have been used interchangeably by cartographers and seamen, eventually being amalgamated as Penedos de Sao e Sao Paulo. FitzRoy (1839: 56-57), captain of H.M.S. Beagle, refers to the Rocks as Paul Rocks, or Periedo de San Pedro and later as Paul (or St. Peter). The commonly used English