It was bound to happen. Bermuda has again made international headlines this week for one colossal reason: it is not Barbuda.

With the military brouhaha going on off Venezuela, the Reuters news agency reported that as part of the United States’s “blockade” of oil tankers, the US Coast Guard had sought to intercept the empty supertanker Bella 1, which was subsequently said to be “drifting northeast of Bermuda in the Caribbean”.

Other news outlets, including The Guardian, also reported that the ship was near Bermuda before quietly correcting their coverage to state that it was “northeast of the Caribbean”, disappointing those who sought for the island to return to its blockade-running past.

Being wide of the mark by 1,715 kilometres (about 1,066 miles) may have caused momentary embarrassment, and the error could be ascribed to a combination of the islands’ somewhat similar pronunciations and people learning Caribbean geography through the Beach Boys song Kokomo.

Almost miraculously, none of the erroneous reports claimed that the ship was in the Bermuda Triangle, demonstrating a rare degree of restraint.

Tensions have run high in the region over President Donald Trump’s stand-off with Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan leader, accompanied by a growing US naval presence in the Caribbean.

Three oil tankers have been targeted by US authorities for what Mr Trump has described as underhanded and illegal deals with Venezuela.

The Bella 1, the third such ship, refused to stop when it was challenged by the Coast Guard on Monday, and was pursued into the Atlantic.

This is not the first time the international media has mixed up Bermuda with Barbuda.

In September 2017, it was estimated that more than 3,000 trips to Bermuda were cancelled after The New York Times, the BBC and NBC News confused the two islands in their coverage of Hurricane Irma’s devastating impact on Barbuda.