1885:
The island of Amrum within the North Sea is still untroubled by any tourism, while there are already some seaside resorts on the neighbour islands Föhr and Sylt since a fairly long time. At Föhr, lying in the east of Amrum halfway to the continent, the seaside resort Wyk was founded in 1819. At Sylt, lying in the north of Amrum, the foundation of the seaside resort Westerland was in 1856.

The south corner of Amrum is still unoccupied. The existing villages Norddorf, Nebel, Süddorf and Steenodde are connected by simple field paths. The connection to the "outside world" consists of a little harbour at Steenodde.

The island consists of the solid kernel, having a border of dunes at the west side, then a forest stripe, and heath and fields in the east, as well as of the "Kniepsand", a bank of sand, which is attached to the west side of the island kernel, and which has a width of partly more than 1 km. While the island kernel essentially keeps its contours over the decades, the Kniepsand gets strongly changed by the elements (storm tides and tidal currents).

The illustrations of the Amrum island, which are shown here, are all based on a NASA satellite picture from around 2000. The drawings of the Kniepsand's contours, which have been continuously altered over the years, are based on a historic postcard image from 1906, on the drawings from the books about the "Amrumer Inselbahn" from Heinz-H. Schöning and Georg Quedens (it seems that these contours are valid for the era of the 1930s or 1940s) as well as on several topographic and touristic maps from 1976 to 2003.