The Project Gutenberg eBook, Legendary Islands of the Atlantic, by William Henry Babcock

Transcriber’s Note

Larger versions of most illustrations may be seen by right-clicking them and selecting an option to view them separately, or by double-tapping and/or stretching them.

LEGENDARY ISLANDS
OF THE ATLANTIC

AMERICAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
RESEARCH SERIES NO. 8
W. L. G. Joerg, Editor

LEGENDARY ISLANDS
OF THE ATLANTIC
A Study in Medieval Geography

BY
WILLIAM H. BABCOCK
Author of “Early Norse Visits to North America”

NEW YORK
AMERICAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
1922

COPYRIGHT, 1922
BY
THE AMERICAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
OF NEW YORK

THE CONDE NAST PRESS
GREENWICH, CONN.

CONTENTS

The following chapters are reprinted, with modifications, from the Geographical Review: III, Vol. 8, 1919; V, Vol. 7, 1919; VI, Vol. 9, 1920; VIII, Vol. 4, 1917; X, Vol. 9, 1920; XI, Vol. 5, 1918.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

(All illustrations, except Figs. 1, 15, and 23, are reproductions of medieval maps. The source is indicated in a general way in each title; the precise reference will be found in the text where the map is first discussed.)

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

We cannot tell at what early era the men of the eastern Mediterranean first ventured through the Strait of Gibraltar out on the open ocean, nor even when they first allowed their fancies free rein to follow the same path and picture islands in the great western mystery. Probably both events came about not long after these men developed enough proficiency in navigation to reach the western limit of the Mediterranean. We are equally in lack of positive knowledge as to what seafaring nation led the way.

The weight of authority favors the Phoenicians, but there are some indications in the more archaic of the Greek myths that the Hellenic or pre-Hellenic people of the Minoan period were promptly in the field. These bequests of an olden time are most efficiently exploited, in the matter-of-fact and very credulous “Historical Library” of Diodorus Siculus,[1] about the time of Julius Caesar, who feels himself fully equipped with information as to the far-ranging campaigns of Hercules, Perseus, and other worthies. His identifications of tribes, persons, and places find an echo which may be called modern in Hakluyt’s map of 1587,[2] illustrating Peter Martyr, which shows the Cape Verde Islands as Hesperides and Gorgades vel Medusiae. But this, though curious, is, of course, irrelevant as corroboration. Diodorus himself was a long way from his material in point of time, but from him we may at least possibly catch some glimmer of the origin of the mythical narratives, some refraction of the events that suggested them.

Early Accounts of Big Ships

Small coasting, and incidentally sea-ranging, vessels must be of great antiquity, for the record of great ships capable of carrying hundreds of men and prolonging their voyages for years extends very far back indeed. We may recall the Scriptural item incidentally given of the fleets of Hiram, King of Tyre, and Solomon, King of Israel: “For the king had at sea a navy of Tharshish with the navy of Hiram: once in three years came the navy of Tharshish, bringing gold, and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks.”[3] Tharshish is generally understood to have been Tartessus by the Guadalquivir beyond the western end of the Mediterranean. The elements of these exotic cargoes indicate, rather, traffic across the eastern seas. No doubt “ship of Tharshish” had come (like the term East Indiaman) to have a secondary meaning, distinguishing, wherever used, a special type of great vessel of ample capacity and equipment, named from the long voyage westward to Spain, in which it was first conspicuously engaged. But this would carry back we know not how many centuries the era of huge ships sailing from Phoenicia toward the Atlantic and seemingly able to go anywhere; with the certainty that lesser craft had long anticipated them on the nearer laps of the journey at least.

Corroboration is found in the utterances of a Chinese observer, later in date but apparently dealing with a continuing size and condition. “There is a great sea [the Mediterranean], and to the west of this sea there are countless countries, but Mu-lan-p’i [Mediterranean Spain] is the one country which is visited by the big ships.... Putting to sea from T’o-pan-ti [the Suez of today] ... after sailing due west for full an hundred days, one reaches this country. A single one of these (big) ships of theirs carries several thousand men, and on board they have stores of wine and provisions, as well as weaving looms. If one speaks of big ships, there are none so big at those of Mu-lan-p’i.”[4]

This statement is credited to only a hundred years before Marco Polo. One naturally suspects some exaggeration. But a parallel account, nearly as expansive and very circumstantial, is given in the same work concerning giant vessels sailing in the opposite direction some six hundred years earlier. It begins: “The ships that sail the Southern Sea and south of it are like houses. When their sails are spread they are like great clouds in the sky.” Professor Holmes, drawing attention to these passages (which he quotes), very justly observes, “who shall say that the mastery of the sea known to have been attained in the Orient 500 A. D. had not been achieved long prior to that date?”[5]

The Atlantis Legend

We may be safe in styling Atlantis (Ch. II) the earliest mythical island of which we have any knowledge or suggestion, since Plato’s narrative, written more than 400 years before Christ, puts the time of its destruction over 9,000 years earlier still. It seems pretty certain that there never was any such mighty and splendid island empire contending against Athens and later ruined by earthquakes and engulfed by the ocean. Atlantis may fairly be set down as a figment of dignified philosophic romance, owing its birth partly to various legendary hints and reports of seismic and volcanic action but much more to the glorious achievements of Athens in the Persian War and the apparent need of explaining a supposed shallow part of the Atlantic known to be obstructed and now named the Sargasso Sea. Perhaps Plato never intended that any one should take it as literally true, but his story undoubtedly influenced maritime expectations and legends during medieval centuries. It cannot be said that any map unequivocally shows Atlantis; but it may be that this is because Atlantis vanished once for all in the climax of the recital.

Phoenician Exploration

It may be that Phoenician exploration in Atlantic waters was well developed before 1100 B. C., when the Phoenicians are alleged to have founded Cadiz on the ocean front of southern Spain; but its development at any rate could not have been greatly retarded after that. The new city promptly grew into one of the notable marts of the world, able during a long period to fit out her own fleets and extend her commerce anywhere. It is greatly to be regretted that we have no record of her discoveries. Carthage, a younger but still ancient Tyrian colony, farther from the scene of western action, was not less enterprising and in time quite eclipsed her; but at last she fell utterly, as did Tyre itself, whereas Cadiz, though no longer eminent, continues to exist. However, in her prime Carthage ranged the seas pretty widely; according to Diodorus Siculus, she was much at home in Madeira,[6] and her coins have been found off the shore of distant Corvo of the Azores. But it cannot be said that any of the Phoenician cities, older or newer, has left any traces of exploration among Atlantic islands other than these or added any mythical islands to maps or legends, unless through successors translating into another language. The crowning achievement of the Phoenicians, so far as we know, was the circumnavigation of Africa by mariners in the service of Pharaoh Necho some 700 years before Christ. This would naturally have brought them en route into contact with the Canary and Cape Verde Islands, and they would be likely to pass on to the Egyptians and Greeks a report of the attributes of those islands partly embodied in names that might adhere.

The Greeks and Romans

We know that the Greeks of Pythias’ time coasted as far north as Britain and probably Scandinavia and had most likely made the acquaintance still earlier of the Fortunate Islands (two or more of the Canary group), similarly following downward the African shore. Long afterward the Roman Pliny knew Madeira and her consorts as the Purple Islands; Sertorius contemplated a possible refuge in them or other Atlantic island neighbors; and Plutarch wrote confidently of an island far west of Britain and a great continent beyond the sea where Saturn slept. Other almost prophetic utterances of the kind have been culled from classical authors, but they have mostly the air of speculation. It cannot be said that the Greeks or Romans devoted much energy to the remoter reaches of the ocean.

Irish Sea-Roving

Ireland was never subject to Rome, though influenced by Roman trade and culture. From prehistoric times the Irish had done some sea roving, as their Imrama, or sea sagas, attest; and this roving was greatly stimulated in the first few centuries of conversion to Christianity by an abounding access of religious zeal. Irish monks seem to have settled in Iceland before the end of the eighth century and even to have sailed well beyond it. There are good reasons for believing that they had visited most of the islands of the eastern Atlantic archipelagoes. We cannot suppose that this rather reckless persistency ended there in such a period of expansion. It is quite possible that we owe to this trait the Island of Brazil, in the latitude of southern Ireland, as an American souvenir on so many medieval maps (Ch. IV). It is certain that the “Navigatio” of St. Brendan scattered St. Brandan Islands, real or fanciful, over the ocean wastes of a credulous cartography (Ch. III).

The Norsemen

A little later Scandinavians followed along the northern route, finding convenient stopping points in the Faroes and Iceland, discovered Greenland, and planted two settlements on its southwestern shore in the last quarter of the tenth century (Ch. VII). Some of their ruins, a less number of inscriptions, and many fragmentary relics and residua are found, so that we can form a good idea of their manner of life. Such as it was, it endured more than four hundred years. To contemporary and slightly later geography Greenland appeared most often as a far-flung promontory of Europe, jutting down on the western side of the great water; but sometimes it was thought of as an oceanic island, with greater or less shifting of location, and seems to be responsible for divers mythical Green Islands of various maps and languages.

Less than a quarter of a century after their first landing the Norse Greenlanders became aware of a more temperate coast line to the southwest, the better part of which they called Vinland, or Wineland, but all of which we now name America. Perhaps Leif Ericsson brought the first report of it as the result of an accidental landfall close to the year 1000 A. D. Not long afterward, Thorfinn Karlsefni with three ships and 160 people attempted to colonize a part of the region. The venture failed, owing chiefly to the hostility of the Indians at the most favorable point. The visitors, however, made the acquaintance of the typical American Atlantic shore line of beach and sand dune which stretches from Cape Cod to the tip of Florida with one or two slight interruptions and one or two fragmentary minor northward extensions. The Norsemen or some predecessor had observed and named the three great zones of territory which must always have existed. Among investigators there has been general concurrence as to their discovery of Labrador and Newfoundland, to which most would add Cape Breton Island and more or less of the coast beyond. It has appeared to me that they made their chief abode in the New World on the shore of Passamaquoddy Bay behind Grand Manan Island and Grand Manan Channel, with the racing ocean streams of the mouth of the Bay of Fundy; and that they found this site inclement in winter and tried to remove to a land-locked bay of southern New England but were baffled and withdrew. My reasons have been pretty fully set forth in “Early Norse Visits to North America.”[7] For the present it is enough to say that the discovered regions seem sometimes to have been thought of as a continuous coast line, sometimes as separate islands more or less at sea. But they did not get upon the maps in any shape until several centuries later.

Moorish Voyages

The Moors who conquered Spain took up the task of Atlantic exploration from that coast after a time. Its islands appear in divers of the Arabic maps. In particular we know through Edrisi,[8] the most celebrated name of Arabic geography, of the extraordinary voyage of the Moorish Magrurin of Lisbon, who set out at some undefined time before the middle of the twelfth century to cross the Sea of Darkness and Mystery. They touched upon the Isle of Sheep and other islands which were or were to become notable in sea mythology. Perhaps these islands were real, but they are not capable of certain identification now. These Moorish adventurers seem to have reached the Sargasso Sea and to have changed their course in order to avoid its impediments, attaining finally what may have been one of the Canary Islands, where they suffered a short imprisonment and whence, after release, they followed the coast of Africa homeward. Edrisi about 1154 wrought a world map in silver (long lost) for King Robert of Sicily and also wrote a famous geography illustrated by a world map and separate sectional or climatic maps. He devotes some space to Atlantic islands and their legends, shows a few of them, and believes in twenty-seven thousand; but the very few copies of his work which remain were made at different periods and in different nations, and their maps disagree surprisingly; so that it is not practicable to restore with certainty what he originally depicted. He seems to have had at least some acquaintance with the authentic island groups from the Cape Verde Islands to the Azores and Britain. The fantastic legends he appends to some of them do not seem to have greatly affected the prevailing European lore of that kind.

Italian Exploration

The Italians of the thirteenth century undertook similar explorations and temporarily occupied at least one of the Canary Islands, Lanzarote, which still bears, corrupted, the name of its Genoese invader, Lancelota Maloessel, of about 1470. On early fourteenth-century maps and some later ones the cross of Genoa is conspicuously marked on this island in commemoration of the exploit. It was probably at this period that Italian names were applied to most of the Azores and to other islands of the eastern groups. A few of these names still persist, for example, Porto Santo and Corvo; but others, after the rediscovery, gave way to Portuguese equivalents or substitutes. Thus Legname was translated into Madeira, and Li Conigi (Rabbit Island) became more prettily Flores (Island of Flowers). About 1285 the Genoese also sent out an expedition[9] “to seek the east by way of the west” under the brothers Vivaldi, who promptly vanished with all their men. Long afterward another expedition picked up on the African coast one who claimed to be a survivor; and it is probable that the Genoese expedition attempted to sail around Africa but came upon disaster before it was far on its way. The thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italians undoubtedly added many islands to the maps or secured their places there; but we have no evidence that they passed westward beyond the middle of the Atlantic.

Bretons and Basques

The Bretons shared in the Irish monk voyages, their Saint Malo appearing in tradition sometimes as a companion of Saint Brendan, sometimes as an imitator or competitor. Also their fishermen, with the Basques, from an early time had pushed out into remote regions of the sea. The Pizigani map of 1367[10] ([Fig. 2]) represents a Breton voyage of adventure and disaster near one of les îles fantastiques, appearing for the first time thereon. Their presence on the American shore in the years shortly following Cabot’s discovery is commemorated by Cape Breton Island.

The Zeno Story

It has been alleged that two Venetian brothers, Antonio and Nicolò Zeno, in the service of an earl of the northern islands, took part with him about 1400 A. D. in certain explorations westward, he being incited thereto by the report of a fisherman, who claimed to have spent many years as a castaway and captive in regions southwest of Greenland. The Zeno narrative, dealt with later (Ch. IX), was accompanied by a map ([Fig. 19]), which exercised a great influence during a long period on all maps that succeeded it, adding several islands never before heard of. Both map and narrative are recognized as spurious or at best so corrupted by misunderstandings and transformed by rough treatment and a post-Columbian attempt at reconstruction as to be wholly unreliable. It is, indeed, possible that a fisherman of the Faroes made an involuntary sojourn in Newfoundland and elsewhere in America from about 1375 or 1380 onward and that his story induced the ruler of certain northern islands to sail westward and investigate. But both features are very dubious, and at any rate nothing was accomplished except the confusion of geography.

Portuguese Discovery

This brings us down to the rise of Portuguese nautical endeavor, which seems to have begun earlier than has generally been supposed but became most conspicuous under the direction of Prince Henry the Navigator. Its achievements included the rediscovery of Madeira and the Azores, which in many quarters had been forgotten, the exploration of the African coast, the accidental discovery or rediscovery of South American Brazil by Cabral, and the voyage of Vasco da Gama to India around the Cape of Good Hope. Perhaps we might insert in the list the discovery of Antillia. At any rate, it got on the map with a Portuguese name in the first half of the fifteenth century, and several other islands accompanied it. They all certainly seem to be American and West Indian.

Columbus, Vespucius, and Cabot

Incidentally the Portuguese activity stimulated the enthusiasm of Columbus, guided his plans, and contributed to the eminent success of his great undertaking. In Antillia it provided a first goal, which he believed to be nearer than it really was. He fully meant to attain it and probably really did so, but without recognizing Antillia in Cuba or Hispaniola, for he thought he had missed it on the way and left it far behind. Vignaud insists that Columbus did not aim at Asia until after he actually reached the West Indies but sought to attain Antillia only.[11] However this may be, there is no doubt that he found in the island a notable prompting to his supreme adventure.

The discoveries of Columbus, Vespucius, and Cabot, with their immediate followers, heralded the opening of an effective knowledge of the western world and the ocean world to the centers of civilization. Thereafter the delineation of new islands did not cease but for a long time rather multiplied; yet they had little significance or importance, being chiefly the products of fancy, optical illusion, or error in reckoning. One of the latest worth considering is the island of Buss (Ch. XII), reported where there is no land by a separated vessel of Frobisher’s expedition near the end of the sixteenth century. Afterward it was known as the Sunken Land of Bus, or Buss, to the grave concern of mariners.

We are reasonably secure against such imposition now, though perhaps it is not yet impossible. The old mythical or apocryphal islands, too, are gone from standard maps and most others, though you may yet find in cartographic work of little authority one or two of the more tenacious specimens making a final stand.

CHAPTER II
ATLANTIS

About 2,300 years ago Plato wrote of a great and populous island empire in the outer (Atlantic) ocean, which had warred against Athens more than 9,000 years before his time and been suddenly engulfed by a natural cataclysm. According to his statement of the case this prodigious phenomenon, with all the splendor of national achievement that shortly preceded it, had been quite forgotten by the Athenians; but the tradition was recorded in the sacred books of the priests of Sais at the head of the Nile delta and was related by these Egyptians to Solon of Athens when he visited them apparently somewhere near 550 B. C. Solon embodied it, or began to embody it, in a poem (all trace of which is lost) and also related it to Dropides, his friend. It is probably to be understood that he further communicated it to this friend in some written form, for we find Critias in a dialogue with Socrates represented by Plato as declaring: “My great-grandfather, Dropides, had the original writing, which is still in my possession.”[12] If so, it has vanished.

Elements of Fact and Fancy in Plato’s Tale of Atlantis

It is evident that the Atlantis tale must be treated either as mainly historical, with presumably some distortions and exaggerations, or as fiction necessarily based in some measure (like all else of its kind) on living or antiquated facts. Certainly no one will go the length of accepting it as wholly true as it stands. But, even eliminating all reference to the god Poseidon and his plentiful demigod progeny, we are left with divers essential features which credulity can hardly swallow. Atlantis is too obviously an earlier and equally colossal Persia, western instead of eastern, overrunning the Mediterranean until checked by the intrepid stand of the great Athenian republic. The supreme authentic glory of Athens was the overthrow of Xerxes and his generals. Had this been otherwise we must believe that we should not have heard of the baffled invasion by Atlantis. Again, we are asked to accept Athens, contrary to all other information, as a dominant military state more than 9,500 years before Christ, when presumably its people, if existent, were exceedingly primitive and unformidable. Moreover, the sudden submergence of so vast a region as the imagined Atlantis would be an event without parallel in human annals, besides being pretty certain to leave marks on the rest of the world which could be recognized even now.

The hypothesis of fiction seems reasonably well established. We must remember that Plato did not habitually confine himself to bare facts. His favorite method of exposition was by reporting alleged dialogues between Socrates and various persons—dialogues which no one could have remembered accurately in their entirety. It is recognized that in arrangement, characters, and utterance he has contrived to convey his own theories and conceptions as well as those of his revered teacher and leader, so that it is often impossible to say whether we should credit certain views or statements mainly to Plato or to Socrates. Possessed by his meditations, he would even present as an instructive example and incitement a fancied picture of an elaborate system of social and political organization, chiefly the product of his own brain. He did this in the “Republic” and apparently had planned a larger partly parallel work of the kind in the triology of which the “Timaeus” and the fragmentary “Critias” are the first part and the unfinished second. A writer (Lewis Campbell) in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, article “Plato,” states the case very clearly.

What should have followed this [the Timaeus], but is only commenced in the fragment of the Critias, would have been the story, not of a fall, but of the triumph of reason in humanity.... Not only the Timaeus, but the unfinished whole of which it forms the introduction, is professedly an imaginative creation. For the legend of prehistoric Athens and of Atlantis, whereof Critias was to relate what belonged to internal policy and Hermocrates the conduct of the war, would have been no other than a prose poem, a “mythological lie,” composed in the spirit of the Republic, and in the form of a fictitious narrative.[13]

Jowett takes substantially the same view in his introduction to the “Critias,” indicating surprise at the innocent, literal, matter-of-fact way in which the former existence and destruction of great Atlantis have generally been accepted as sober declarations of fact and accounted for in divers fashions accordingly. Nor is this estimate of the Atlantis tale as primarily a romance of enlightenment and uplifting a merely modern theory. Plutarch, in a passage quoted by Schuller, lays more stress on Plato’s tendency to adorn the subject, treating Atlantis as a delightful spot in some fair field unoccupied, than on ennobling imagination, and avers the described magnificence to be “such as no other story, fable, or poem ever had.”[14] But this, whether wholly adequate or no, surely emphasizes the recognition of romance. Plutarch adds a word of regret that Plato began the “delightful” story late in life and died before the work was completed. The precise motive of the fiction is only of minor importance to our present inquiry. It seems hardly possible that the development of the composition in the remaining two parts of the trilogy could have given it a more authentic historical cast. As the matter stands Atlantis is rather succinctly reported in the “Timaeus,” more fully and with mythological and architectural adornments in the later “Critias” till it breaks off in the middle of a sentence; but the two accounts are consistent. It seems a clear case of evolution suddenly arrested but allowing us fairly to infer the character of the whole from the parts that remain.

If there were any corroboration of the tale, it would count on the historical side; but it seems to be agreed that Greek literature and art before Plato do not supply this in any unequivocal and reliable form. Certain hints or contributory items will be dealt with below, but they do not affect the character of the story as a whole nor tend to establish the reality of its main features.

We do not need to ascribe to Plato all the fancy and invention in the story. The romancing may have been done in part by the priests of Sais or by Solon or by Dropides or by Critias; or possibly all these may have contributed successive strata of fancy, crowned by Plato. Practically we have to treat the tale as beginning with him. Its circumstantiality and air of realism have sometimes been taken as credentials of accuracy; but they are not beyond the ordinary skill of a man of letters, and Plato was much more than equal to the task.

Significant Passages from the Tale

The Atlantis narrative has been so often translated and copied, at least as to its more significant parts, that one hesitates to quote again; but there are certain items to which attention should be drawn, and brief extracts are the best means of effecting this. The following passages are from the Smithsonian translation of Termier’s remarkable paper on Atlantis reproduced by that institution. It differs verbally from the translation by Dr. Jowett but not in the broader features. Of the two quotations the first is from the “Critias.” It is briefer than the other, though forming part of a more elaborate and extended account of the island. Taking his appointed part in the dialogue, Critias says:

According to the Egyptian tradition a common war arose 9,000 years ago between the nations on this side of the Pillars of Hercules and the nations coming from beyond. On one side it was Athens; on the other the Kings of Atlantis. We have already said that this island was larger than Asia and Africa, but that it became submerged following an earthquake and that its place is no longer met with except as a sand bar which stops navigators and renders the sea impassable.[15]

Termier quotes also from the “Timaeus” dialogue (Critias is repeating the statement of the Egyptian priests):

The records inform us of the destruction by Athens of a singularly powerful army, an army which came from the Atlantic Ocean and which had the effrontery to invade Europe and Asia; for this sea was then navigable, and beyond the strait which you call the Pillars of Hercules there was an island larger than Libya and even Asia. From this island one could easily pass to other islands, and from them to the entire continent which surrounds the interior sea.... In the Island Atlantis reigned kings of amazing power. They had under their dominion the entire island, as well as several other islands and some parts of the continent. Besides, on the hither side of the strait, they were still reigning over Libya as far as Egypt and over Europe as far as the Tyrrhenian. All this power was once upon a time united in order by a single blow to subjugate our country, your own, and all the peoples living on the hither side of the strait. It was then that the strength and courage of Athens blazed forth. By the valor of her soldiers and their superiority in the military art, Athens was supreme among the Hellenes; but, the latter having been forced to abandon her, alone she braved the frightful danger, stopped the invasion, piled victory upon victory, preserved from slavery nations still free, and restored to complete independence all those who, like ourselves, live on this side of the Pillars of Hercules. Later, with great earthquakes and inundations, in a single day and one fatal night, all who had been warriors against you were swallowed up. The Island of Atlantis disappeared beneath the sea. Since that time the sea in these quarters has become unnavigable; vessels can not pass there because of the sands which extend over the site of the buried isle.[16]

We have said that all fiction has some root in reality. Even a myth is commonly an attempted explanation of some mysterious natural phenomenon or distorted narrative of obscure, nearly forgotten happenings. Intentional fiction, try as it may, cannot keep quite clear of facts. We turn, then, to those salient features of the above excerpts which may in a measure stand for real past events or puzzling conditions supposed to continue. Beside the prehistoric grandeur and triumph of Athens, already dealt with, these are to be noted: the Atlantean invasion of the Mediterranean; the vastness of the outer island which sent forth these armies; its submergence; and the alleged continued obstruction to navigation in that quarter.

Atlantean Invasion of the Mediterranean

There seem to have been some rumors afloat of very early hostilities between dwellers on the shores of the Mediterranean and those beyond the Pillars of Hercules. That geographical name bears witness to the supposed exertion of Greek dominant power at the very gateway of the Atlantic, and the legend connecting this demigod with Cadiz carries his activities a little farther out on the veritable ocean front. The rationalizing Diodorus, writing in the first century before Christ but dealing freely with traditions from a very much earlier time, presents Hercules as a great military commander, who, having set up his memorial pillars, proceeded to overrun and conquer Iberia (the present Spain and Portugal), passing thence to Liguria and thence to Italy after the manner of Hannibal, much nearer to Diodorus and even better known.[17] It is evident that the earlier part of this campaign must include warfare beyond the Pillars on at least the Lusitanian Atlantic front. Furthermore, we are introduced to the western Amazons, who had their center of power on the Island Hesperia between Mount Atlas and the ocean and invaded both the inland mountaineers and their seaboard neighbors, the Gorgons—also feminine, if no great beauties.[18] The poor Gorgons were subjugated but long afterward developed power again under Queen Medusa, only to be disastrously overcome by the great Greek general, Perseus. Both the Gorgons and the western Amazons seem to have had their abodes on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean south of the Strait of Gibraltar, along the front of what we now call Morocco and the region south of it. We cannot say how much of these tales belongs to Diodorus; but he certainly did not invent the whole of them and is not likely to have contrived their most distinctive features. The myth of Perseus, like that of Theseus and the Minotaur, meant something dimly and distantly historic. We think we partly understand the latter after the excavations in Crete. Similarly, the flights and feats of Perseus, as given in mythology, may be another way of saying that he made swift voyages far afield and descended on his enemies with deadly execution.

These tales as we have them from Diodorus do not represent the Atlantic coast dwellers as invading the Mediterranean; but some such incursions would naturally follow, by way of retaliation, the strenuous proceedings attributed to eastern-Mediterranean commanders, if, indeed, they did not precede and provoke them. We need not picture a host of Atlantides pouring through between the Pillars; but piratical descents of outer seafaring people were probable enough and might be on a rather large scale—subject, of course, to exaggeration by rumor. Nor would any of the threatened people be likely to distinguish closely between forces from a mainland coast and those from some outlying island. The enemy might well embody both elements.

Location and Size of Atlantis

The location of Atlantis, according to Plato, is fairly clear. It was in the ocean, “then navigable,” beyond the Pillars of Hercules; also beyond certain other islands, which served it as stepping-stones to the continental mass surrounding the Mediterranean. This effectually disposes of all pretensions in behalf of Crete or any other island or region of the inner sea. Atlantis must also have lain pretty far out in the ocean, to allow space for the intervening islands, which may well have been, at least in part, the Canary Islands or other surviving members of the eastern Atlantic archipelagoes; still it could not have been too distant to prohibit the transfer of large forces when means of transportation were slow and scant. This rules out America, apart from the fact that America (like Crete) still exists, whereas Atlantis foundered, and the further fact that America is continental, while Atlantis is described as merely a large island. Besides, what evidence is there that America could send forth armies or navies for the invasion of Europe? Neither the Incas nor the Aztecs nor the Mayas were capable of such aggressions, and we know of nothing greater in this part of the world before the very modern development of the white man’s power.

As to the size of Atlantis, it is not quite clear whether we are to compare it with Mediterranean Africa and Asia Minor individually or collectively. Probably Plato merely meant to indicate a great area without any exact conception of its extent. If we think of an island as large as France and Spain we shall probably not miss the mark very widely. The site of the mid-Atlantic Sargasso Sea would be about the location indicated.

Improbability of the Existence of Such an Island

Now, was there any such great island and populous magnificent kingdom in mid-Atlantic or anywhere in the Atlantic Ocean about 11,400 years ago? If not absolutely impossible, it seems at least very unlikely. Through the mouth of Critias Plato tells how the people of Atlantis employed themselves in constructing their temples and palaces, harbors and docks, a great palace which they continued to ornament through many generations, canals and bridges, walls and towns, numerous statues of gold, fountains both cold and hot, baths, and a great multitude of houses.[19]

Such advance in civilization, such elaboration of organization, such splendor and power would certainly have overflowed abundantly on the islands intervening between Atlantis and the continental shore. It is not written that these all shared the same fate; and in point of fact the Azores, Madeira and her consorts, the Canary Islands, and the Cape Verde group are still in evidence. Some of them must have been within fairly easy reach of Atlantis if Atlantis existed. There is no indication that they have been newly created or have come up from below since that time. Even allowing for great exaggeration and assuming only a large and efficient population in a vast insular territory without the ascribed superfluity of magnificence, such a people would surely have left some kind of lasting memorial or relic beyond their own borders. Nothing of the kind has ever been found either in these islands of the eastern Atlantic archipelagoes or elsewhere in that part of the earth.

The advocates of a real Atlantis try to pile up proofs of a great land mass existing at some time in the Atlantic Ocean, a logical proceeding so far as it goes but one that falls short of its mark, for the land may have ascended and descended again ages before the reputed Atlantis period. It is of no avail to demonstrate its presence in the Miocene, Pliocene, or Pleistocene epoch, or, indeed, at any time prior to the development of a well organized civilization among men, or, as Plato apparently reasons, between 11,000 and 12,000 years ago. Also what is wanted is evidence of the great island Atlantis, not of the former seaward extension of some existing continent nor of any land bridge spanning the ocean. It is true that such conditions might serve as distant preliminaries for the production of Atlantis Island by the breaking down and submergence of the intervening land; but this only multiplies the cataclysms to be demonstrated and can have no real relevance in the absence of proof of the island itself. The geologic and geographic phenomena of pre-human ages are beside the question. The tale to be investigated is of a flourishing insular growth of artificial human society on a large scale, not so very many thousands of years ago, evidently removed from all tradition of engulfment and hence dreading it not at all but sending forth its conquering armies until the final defeat and annihilating cataclysm.

Termier’s Theory of an Ancient Atlantic Continental Mass

Nevertheless, inquiries as to an ancient Atlantic continental mass have an interest. We may cite a few of the recent outgivings. Termier tells us of an east-and-west arrangement of elevated lands across the Atlantic in earlier ages, as opposed to the present north-and-south system of islands and raised folds. By the former there was

a very ancient continental bond between northern Europe and North America and ... another continental bond, also very ancient, between the massive Africa and South America.... Thus the region of the Atlantic, until an era of ruin which began we know not when, but the end of which was the Tertiary, was occupied by a continental mass, bounded on the south by a chain of mountains, and which was all submerged long before the collapse of those volcanic lands of which the Azores seem to be the last vestiges. In place of the South Atlantic Ocean there was, likewise, for many thousands of centuries a great continent now very deeply engulfed beneath the sea.[20]

Later he refers to

collapses ... at the close of the Miocene, in the folded Mediterranean zone and in the two continental areas, continuing up to the final annihilation of the two continents ... then, in the bottom of the immense maritime domain resulting from these subsidences, the appearance of a new design whose general direction is north and south.... The extreme mobility of the Atlantic region ... the certainty of the occurrence of immense depressions when islands and even continents have disappeared; the certainty that some of these depressions date as from yesterday, are of Quaternary age, and that consequently they might have been seen by man; the certainty that some of them have been sudden, or at least very rapid. See how much there is to encourage those who still hold out for Plato’s narrative. Geologically speaking, the Platonian history of Atlantis is highly probable.[21]

Floral and Faunal Evidence of Connection with Europe and Africa

Professor Schuchert, reviewing the paper of Termier above quoted, agrees in part and partly disagrees. He says:

The Azores are true volcanic and oceanic islands, and it is almost certain that they never had land connections with the continents on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. If there is any truth in Plato’s thrilling account, we must look for Atlantis off the western coast of Africa, and here we find that five of the Cape Verde Islands and three of the Canaries have rocks that are unmistakably like those common to the continents. Taking into consideration also the living plants and animals of these islands, many of which are of European-Mediterranean affinities of late Tertiary time, we see that the evidence appears to indicate clearly that the Cape Verde and Canary Islands are fragments of a greater Africa.... What evidence there may be to show that this fracturing and breaking down of western Africa took place as suddenly as related by Plato or that it occurred about 10,000 years ago is as yet unknown to geologists.[22]

Termier puts in evidence as biological corroboration the researches of Louis Germain, especially in the mollusca, which have convinced him of the continental origin of this fauna in the four archipelagoes, the Azores, Madeira, the Canaries, and Cape Verde. He also notes a few species still living in the Azores and the Canaries, though extinct in Europe, but found as fossils in Pliocene rocks of Portugal. He deduces from this a connection between the islands and the Iberian Peninsula down to some period during the Pliocene.[23]

Dr. Scharff has devoted some space and assiduous effort to similar considerations. He reviews the insular flora and fauna, pointing out that some of the forms common to the islands, or some of them, and a now distant continent could hardly have reached there over sea. He comes to the following conclusion: “I believe they [the islands] were still connected, in early Pleistocene times, with the continents of Europe and Africa, at a time when man had already made his appearance in western Europe, and was able to reach the islands by land.”[24]

He also points out that the Azores Islands were first known and named for their hawks, which feed largely on small mammalia, that presumably would have come thither overland, and also points out that some of the islands were named in Italian on old maps Rabbit Island, Goat Island, etc., before the Portuguese rediscovery in the fifteenth century.[25] Those names (on several fifteenth-century maps St. Mary’s is Louo, Lovo, or Luovo—“Wolf Island,” cf. Portuguese lobo) are certainly interesting, but they may have been given for some supposed resemblance of outline or other fancy. There is this in favor of Dr. Scharff’s supposition: the name Corvo in its original form Corvis Marinis (Island of the Sea Crows) appears to have been prompted by the abundance of birds of a particular species—possibly cormorants, possibly black skimmers—and not by any typical bird form of the island itself. Also Pico, now named for its peak, was called the Isle of the Doves, and wild doves or pigeons are said to abound still on its mountain side. But, if we assume by analogy that Li Conigi (Rabbit Island) and Capraria (Goat Island) were so named by reason of the pre-Portuguese wild rabbits and goats, these may be the donations of earlier visitants or settlers—Italian, Carthaginians, or what not. We cannot well believe that wolves were voluntarily brought by man to Lovo (Lobo), now St. Mary’s; but here there may have been some mistake, as of dogs run wild or some play of imitative fancy, as before indicated. In any case these archaic island names are a long way from being convincing evidence of former land connection with any continent, still less of the former existence of Atlantis.

More recently Navarro, in an argument mainly geological, has also called attention to the continental character of some species of the fauna and flora of the eastern Atlantic islands, with the same implications as his predecessors.[26] But there seems to be little real addition to the evidence of this nature; and no one has made it more apposite to the existence of Atlantis Island 12,000 or so years ago.

Evidence of Submergence

The great final catastrophe of Atlantis would surely write its record on the rocks both of the sea bed and the continental land masses. As to the ocean bottom it would be the natural repository for vitreous and other rocky products of volcanic and seismic action occurring above it. Termier relates what he considers very significant indications at a point 500 miles north of the Azores at a depth of 1,700 fathoms, where the grappling irons of a cable-mending ship dragged for several days over a mountainous surface of peaks and pinnacles, bringing up “little mineral splinters” evidently “detached from a bare rock, an actual outcropping sharp-edged and angular.” These fragments were all of a non-crystalline vitreous lava called tachylyte, which “could solidify into this condition only under atmospheric pressure.” He infers that the territory in question was covered with lava flows while it was still above water and subsequently descended to its present depth; also from the general condition of the rock surface that the caving in followed very closely on the emission of the lavas and that this collapse was sudden. He thinks, therefore, “that the entire region north of the Azores and perhaps the very region of the Azores, of which they may be only the visible ruins, was very recently submerged, probably during the epoch which the geologists call the present.” He believes also that like results would follow a “detailed dredging to the south and the southwest of these islands.”[27]

It will be observed that the whole of this very tempting edifice is built on the declared impossibility of tachylyte forming on the sea bottom under heavy water pressure. But Professor Schuchert insists that: “It is not pressure so much as it is a quick loss of temperature that brings about the vitreous structure in lava. In other words, vitreous lava apparently can be formed as well in the ocean depths as on the lands. What the cable layers got was probably the superficial glassy crust of probable subterranean lava flows.”[28] If that be so, there is, of course, no need to infer a descent of territory into the depths in that region of the mid-Atlantic. This tachylyte matter seems enveloped in uncertainty.

On the other hand, it is well known that volcanic outbursts and earthquakes have been rather frequent and alarming even in modern times among the islands of the eastern Atlantic archipelagoes, especially the Canaries and the lowest and middle groups of the Azores. In some instances the nearest mainland also has suffered, as notably on “Lisbon-earthquake day,” and the various occasions of disturbances cited by Navarro. Also, there is the memorable instance of a small island that was thrust upward from the depths before the eyes of a British naval ship’s crew and remained in sight for several days. Changes of a distinctly non-volcanic character have also occurred, as when an appreciable slice of cliff wall broke away from Flores and sank, raising a great wave which did damage, with loss of life on Corvo, some nine miles away. Moreover, Corvo was once considerably larger than it is now in comparison with this neighbor, Flores (or Li Conigi), if we may trust to the general testimony of fourteenth-century and fifteenth-century maps. But all these shiftings and transformations for a long time past have been local and usually rather narrowly restricted. It does not follow that no depressions or elevations of greater extent have suddenly occurred in times before men regularly made permanent records; yet it must be owned that the belief in any very large sunken Atlantis derives no direct support from what we actually know of volcanic and seismic action in that region in historic centuries.

Relation of the Submarine Banks of the North Atlantic to the Problem

There remain to be considered a small array of undersurface insular items which seem germane to our inquiry. Sir John Murray tells us that:

Another remarkable feature of the North Atlantic is the series of submerged cones or oceanic shoals made known off the northwest coast of Africa between the Canary Islands and the Spanish peninsula, of which we may mention: the “Coral Patch” in lat. 34° 57′ N., long. 11° 57′ W., covered by 302 fathoms; the “Dacia Bank” in lat. 31° 9′ N., long. 13° 34′ W., covered by 47 fathoms; the “Seine Bank” in lat. 33° 47′ N., long. 14° 1′ W., covered by 81 fathoms; the “Concepcion Bank” in lat. 30° N. and long. 13° W., covered by 88 fathoms; the “Josephine Bank” in lat. 37° N., long. 14° W., covered by 82 fathoms; the “Gettysburg Bank” in lat. 36° N., long. 12 W., covered by 34 fathoms.[29]

All of these subaqueous mountain-top lands or hidden elevated plateaus are conspicuously nearer the ocean surface than the real depths of the sea—so much nearer that they inevitably raise the suspicion of having been above that surface within the knowledge and memory of man. It is notorious that coasts rise and fall all over the world in what may be called the normal non-spasmodic action of the strata, and sometimes the movement in one direction—upward or downward—seems to have persisted through many centuries. If we assume that Gettysburg Bank has been continuously descending at the not extravagant rate of two feet in a century, then it was a considerable island above water about the period dealt with by the priests of Sais. Apparently the rising of Labrador and Newfoundland since the last recession and dispersion of the great ice sheet has been even more. Here the elements of exact comparison in time and conditions are lacking; nevertheless, the reported uplift of more than 500 feet in one quarter and nearly 700 in another is impressive as showing what the old earth may do in steady endeavor. It must be borne in mind, too, that a sudden acceleration of the descent of Gettysburg Bank and its consorts may well have occurred at any stage in so feverishly seismic an area. All considered, it seems far from impossible that some of these banks may have been visible and even habitable at some time when men had attained a moderate degree of civilization. But they would not be of any vast extent.

Facts and Legends As to Submergences in Historic Times

Westropp has made an interesting and important disclosure of the legends of submerged lands with villages, churches, etc., all around the coasts of Ireland. In some instances they are believed to be magically visible again above the surface in certain conditions; in others the spires and walls of a fine city may at times, it is thought, be still seen through clear water. Nearly, if not quite, every one of them coincides with a shoal or bank of no great depth, the upjutting teeth of rocks, or a barren fragmentary islet—vestiges perhaps of something more conspicuous, extended, and alluring. Westropp says: “When we examine the sea bed, we see that it is not impossible (save Brasil and the land between Teelin and the Stags of Broadhaven) that islands may have existed within traditional memory at all the alleged sites.”[30] In some cases considerable inroads of the ocean are perfectly well known to have occurred within relatively recent historic centuries. The same on a large scale is certainly true of Holland—witness Haarlem Lake and the Zuyder Zee. Other countries, perhaps most countries, might be called as witnesses.

In these considerations of known facts and legends still repeated we are dealing mostly with events of periods not excessively remote, but the same laws must have been at work and the same phenomena occurring in earlier millenniums.

If there were men to observe, the legend would follow the subsidence; and Phoenician or other voyagers would naturally bear it back to the Eastern Mediterranean, to Plato or the sources from which Plato derived it.

In any such case the submergence would most likely be exaggerated and made a great catastrophe, but there were special reasons why the exaggeration should be enormous in this particular story. It is the office of a myth or legend to explain. We see that in Plato’s time the Atlantic Ocean was believed, in part at least, to be no longer navigable, and with some modifications this idea persisted far down into the Middle Ages, involving at least a conviction of abnormal obstacles hardly to be overcome. The account of Critias is: “Since that time the sea in those quarters has become unnavigable; vessels cannot pass there because of the sands which extend over the site of the buried isle.” This item differs from the other features of the narration put into his mouth by Plato, in that it related to a present and continuing condition and in a way challenged investigation—which would have to be at a distant and ill-known region but was not really impracticable. It must be evident that Plato would not have written thus unless he relied on the established general repute of that part of the ocean for difficulty of navigation.

Reports of Obstruction to Navigation in Early Times

We get further light on this matter of obstruction from the Periplus of Scylax of Caryanda, the greater part of which must have been written before the time of Alexander the Great. Probably we may put down the passage as approximately of Plato’s own period. He begins on the European coast at the Strait of Gibraltar, makes the circuit of the Mediterranean, and ends at Cerne, an island of the African Atlantic coast, “which island, it is stated, is twelve days’ coasting beyond the Pillars of Hercules, where the parts are no longer navigable because of shoals, of mud, and of seaweed.”[31] “The seaweed has the width of a palm and is sharp towards the points, so as to prick.”[32]

Similarly, when Himilco, parting from Hanno, sailed northward on the Atlantic about 500 B. C., he found weeds, shallows, calms, and dangers, according to the poet Avienus, who professes to repeat his account long afterward and is quoted by Nansen, with doubts inclining to acceptance. It reads:

No breeze drives the ship forward, so dead is the sluggish wind of this idle sea. He [Himilco] also adds that there is much seaweed among the waves, and that it often holds the ship back like bushes. Nevertheless, he says that the sea has no great depth, and that the surface of the earth is barely covered by a little water. The monsters of the sea move continually hither and thither, and the wild beasts swim among the sluggish and slowly creeping ships.[33]

Avienus also has the following:

Farther to the west from these Pillars there is boundless sea. Himilco relates that ... none has sailed ships over these waters, because propelling winds are lacking ... likewise because darkness screens the light of day with a sort of clothing, and because a fog always conceals the sea.[34]

Fig. 1—Map of the Sargasso Sea showing its relation to the Azores, to illustrate its possible bearing on the medieval belief in the existence of lands or islands beyond. Scale 1:72,000,000. (The map is also intended to help in locating the various existing islands of the North Atlantic.)

Aristotle, as cited by Nansen, tells us in his “Meteorologica” that the sea beyond the Pillars of Hercules was muddy and shallow and little stirred by the winds.[35] In early life Aristotle was a pupil of Plato, and, though he afterward developed a widely different method and outlook, it is likely that their information as to this matter was in common, being supplied perhaps by Phoenician and other seamen.

In the passage quoted from Scylax and the first excerpt from Avienus the courses referred to are apparently too near the mainland shore to approach that prodigious accumulation of eddy-borne weeds in dead water which has long given to a great space of mid-Atlantic the name of the Sargasso Sea. But they show that huge seaweeds were very early associated with obstruction to navigation in seafaring minds and popular fancy. Perhaps they may also have suggested shallows as affording beds of nourishment for so enormous an output of vegetation. It would not readily occur to the early seagoing observers that the greatest of these entangling creations floated in masses quite free, though we now know this to be the case. In any event, it is evident that some imperfect knowledge of conditions far west of the Pillars of Hercules had made its way to Greece. Somewhere in that ocean of obscurity and mystery there was a vast dead and stagnant sea, presumably shallow, a sea to be shunned. Gigantic entrapping weeds and wallowing sea monsters freely distributed were recognized, too, as among the standing terrors of the Atlantic.

The Sargasso Sea As the Ancient Atlantis

It would be idle and wearying to follow such utterances through the rather numerous centuries that have elapsed since those early times. When the Magrurin or deluded explorers of Lisbon, at some undefined time between the early eighth century and the middle of the twelfth attempted, according to Edrisi, to cross the great westward Sea of Darkness they encountered an impassable tract of ocean and had to change their course, apparently reaching one of the Canary Islands. Later the map of the Pizigani brothers of 1367[36] ([Fig. 2]) contains in words and a saintly figure of warning a solemn protest against attempting to sail the unnavigable ocean tract beyond the Azores. As will be seen by a modern map ([Fig. 1]), this area includes the vast realm of the Sargasso—a waste of weed, shifting its borders with the seasons but constant in its characteristics in some parts and always to be found by little seeking—one of the permanent conspicuous features of earth’s surface.[37] It is described by a writer in the Encyclopaedia Britannica as nearly equal to Europe in area, a statement hardly warranted unless by including all outlying tatters and fringes of Gulf weed floating free.[38]

It is one of the topics that tempt and have always tempted exaggeration and misunderstandings. The effect on a bright mind of current nautical yarns concerning it is shown by Janvier’s “In the Sargasso Sea,” a narrative almost as extravagant as Plato’s tale of Atlantis, in its own quite different way. One of the more moderate preliminary passages may be cited:

And to that same place, he added, the stream carried all that was caught in its current—like the spar and plank floating near us, so that the sea was covered with a thick tangle of the weed in which were held fast fragments of wreckage and stuff washed overboard and logs adrift from far southern shores, until in its central part the mass was so dense that no ship could sail through it nor could a steamer traverse it because of the fouling of her screws.[39]

He admits this theory of formation was inaccurate but later refers to “the dense wreck-filled center of the Sargasso Sea” and makes his castaway hero declare:

What I looked at was the host of wrecked ships, the dross of wave and tempest which through four centuries has been gathering slowly and still more slowly wasting in the central fastnesses of the Sargasso Sea.[40]

Sir John Murray naturally gives a more moderate and scientific account, explaining:

The famous Gulf Weed characteristic of the Sargasso Sea in the North Atlantic belongs to the brown algae. It is named Sargassum bacciferum, and is easily recognized by its small berry-like bladders.... It is supposed that the older patches gradually lose their power of floating, and perish by sinking in deep water.... The floating masses of Gulf Weed are believed to be continually replenished by additional supplies torn from the coasts by waves and carried by currents until they accumulate in the great Atlantic whirl which surrounds the Sargasso Sea. They become covered with white patches of polyzoa and serpulae, and quite a large number of other animals (small fishes, crabs, prawns, molluscs, etc.) live on these masses of weed in the Sargasso Sea, all exhibiting remarkable adaptive coloring, although none of them belong properly to the open ocean.[41]

Finally we have from the Hydrographic Office the official naval and scientific statement of the case. In the little treatise already referred to, Lieutenant Soley tells us that the southeast branch of the Gulf Stream “runs in the direction of the Azores, where it is deflected by the cold upwelling stream from the north and runs into the center of the Atlantic Basin, where it is lost in the dead water of the Sargasso Sea.”[42] As to just what this is the office answers:

Through the dynamical forces arising from the earth’s rotation which cause moving masses in the northern hemisphere to be deflected toward the right-hand side of their path, the algae that are borne by the Gulf Stream from the tropical seas find their way toward the inner edge of the circulatory drift which moves in a clockwise direction around the central part of the North Atlantic Ocean. In this central part the flow of the surface waters is not steady in any direction, and hence the floating seaweed tends to accumulate there. This accumulation is perhaps most observable in the triangular region marked out by the Azores, the Canaries and the Cape Verde Islands, but much seaweed is also found to the westward of the middle part of this region in an elongated area extending to the 70th meridian.

The abundance of seaweed in the Sargasso Sea fluctuates much with the variation of the agencies which account for its presence, but this Office does not possess any authentic records to show that it has ever materially impeded vessels.[43]

Perhaps these statements are influenced by present or recent conditions. It is obvious that giant ropelike seaweeds in masses would more than materially impede the action of the galley oars, which were the main reliance in time of calm of the ancient and medieval navigators. Also it is hardly to be believed that small sailing vessels could freely drive through them with an ordinary wind. If the weeds were so unobstructive, why all these complaints and warnings out of remote centuries? In the days of powerful steamships and when the skippers of sailing vessels have learned what area of sea it is best to avoid, there may well be a lack of formal reports of impediment; but it certainly looks as though there were some basis for the long established ill repute of the Sargasso Sea.

Summary

For the genesis of Atlantis we have then, first, the great idealist philosopher Plato minded to compose an instructive pseudo-historical romance of statesmanship and war and actually making a beginning of the task; and, secondly, the fragmentary cues and suggestive data which came to him out of tradition and mariners’ tales, perhaps in part through Solon and intervening transmitters, in part more directly to himself. Of this material we may name foremost the vague knowledge of vast impeded regions in the Atlantic believed to be shallow and requiring a physical explanation; then rumors of cataclysms and sunken lands in the same ocean; then legends of ancient hostilities between dwellers beyond the Pillars of Hercules and the peoples about the Mediterranean; and finally the reflection of the Persian war on the shadowy ancient past of Athens—Athens the defender and victor, Athens the Queen of the Sea.

Every solution of the Atlantis problem must be conjectural. The above is offered simply as the best conjecture to which I can see my way.

CHAPTER III
ST. BRENDAN’S EXPLORATIONS AND ISLANDS

The Lismore Version of the Saint’s Adventures

The fifteenth-century Book of Lismore, compiled from much older materials, tells us that St. Brenainn (evidently St. Brendan, the navigator)

desired to leave his land and his country, his parents and his fatherland, and he urgently besought the Lord to give him a land secret, hidden, secure, delightful, separated from men. Now after he had slept on that night, he heard the voice of the angel from heaven, who said to him, “Arise, O Brenainn,” saith he, “for God hath given thee what thou soughtest, even the Land of Promise” ... and he goes alone to Sliab Daidche and he saw the mighty intolerable ocean on every side, and then he beheld the beautiful noble island, with trains of angels (rising) from it.[44]

Thus far, in the rather redundant style of such literature, from the Life of Brenainn in the Lives of the Saints of this old manuscript. After a century and a half of disappearance this manuscript was accidentally discovered in 1814, in a walled-up recess, by workmen engaged on repairs.

Mr. Westropp holds that this Lismore version is the “simplest and probably the earliest;”[45] but its full-blown development of certain marvels (such as the spending of every Easter for at least five years on the back of a vast sea monster as a substitute for an island) may well awaken a question as to the validity of this conjecture.

However, the suggestion of the voyage by a dream seems likely enough, and his mood was in keeping with the anchorite enthusiasm of his time. Of course he promptly set forth to find his “promised land;” at first, in a hide-covered craft, with failure in spite of long endeavor; afterward, by advice of a holy woman, in a large wooden vessel, built in Connaught and manned by sixty religious men, with final success.

Another Version

Another version gives the credit of the first incitement to a purely human visitor, a friendly abbot, St. Brendan’s aim being to reach an island “just under Mount Atlas.” Here a holy predecessor, Mernoc by name, long vanished from among men, was believed to have hidden himself in “the first home of Adam and Eve.” To all readers this was a fairly precise location for the earthly paradise. The great Atlas chain forms a conspicuous feature of medieval maps, running down to sea (as it does in reality) near Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, the innermost of the Canaries, which seem like detached, nearly submerged, summits of the range.

This narrative is longer and more detailed than that of the Book of Lismore and gives more plentiful indications of voyaging, especially toward the end, in southern seas. In its picture of volcanic fires it recalls occasional outbursts of Teneriffe and its neighbors. “They saw a hill all on fire, and the fire stood on each side of the hill like a wall, all burning.” A visit is also recorded to a neighboring land, apparently continental, which the adventurers penetrated for forty days’ travel to the banks of a magical river, whence they brought away “fruit and jewels.” This may well be meant for Africa, obviously quite near these Fortunate Islands.

Attempts to Explain the Origin of the Brendan Narratives

It has been intimated that the narratives of “St. Brendan’s Navigation” may have originated in misunderstood tales of his early sea wanderings around the coasts of Ireland seeking for a monastery site. He was successful in this at least, being best known (excepting as a discoverer) for the great religious establishment at Clonfert, not the first which he founded in the sixth century but the most widely known and the greatest.

Another explanation casts doubts upon his real existence and supposes the story of the discoveries to have arisen by confusion of language with the well-known pagan “Voyage of Bran,” perhaps the earliest of the ancient Irish Imrama, or sea sagas.

It has also been said that the origin of the Brendan narratives may be found in “a ninth-century sermon elaborated up to its present form by the eleventh century.”[46] A ninth-century manuscript is said to be in the Vatican library.

A Norman French Version

A Norman French translation was turned into Norman French verse by some trouvère of the court for the benefit of King Henry Beauclerc and his Queen Adelais early in the twelfth century and partly translated metrically into English for Blackwood’s Magazine in 1836. It avers that the saint set sail for an

Isle beyond the sea

Where wild winds ne’er held revelry,

But fulfilled are the balmy skies

With spicy gales from Paradise;

These gales that waft the scent of flowers

That fade not, and the sunny hours

Speed on, nor night, nor shadow know.[47]

They sail westward fifteen days from Ireland; then in a month’s calm drift to a rock, where they find a palace with food and where Satan visits them but does no harm. They next voyage seven months, in a direction not stated, and find an island with immense sheep; but, when they are about to cook one, the island begins to sink and reveals itself as a “beast.” They reach another island where the birds are repentant fallen angels. From this they journey six months to an island with a monastery founded by St. Alben. They sail thence till calm falls on them and the sea becomes like a marsh; but they reach an island where are fish made poisonous by feeding on metallic ores. A white bird warns them. They keep Pentecost on a great sea monster, remaining seven weeks. Then they journey to where the sea sleeps and cold runs through their veins. A sea serpent pursues them, breathing fire. Answering the saint’s prayer, another monster fights and kills the first one. Similarly a dragon delivers them from a griffin. They see a great and bright jeweled crystal temple (probably an iceberg). They land on shores of smoke, flame, blast, and evil stench. A demon flourishes before them, flies overhead, and plunges into the sea. They find an island of flame and smoke, a mountain covered with clouds, and the entrance to hell. Beyond this they find Judas tormented. Next they find an island with a white-haired hermit, who directs them to the promised island, where another and altogether wonderful holy man awaits them, of whom more anon.

In this version, as in others, there are passages—such as the mention of extreme cold and the account of a great floating structure of crystal—which imply a northward course for their voyage in some one of its stages. So greatly was Humboldt impressed by this and by the insistence on the Isle of Sheep, which he identified with the Faroes, that he restricted in theory the saint’s navigation to high latitudes.[48]

The Probable Basis of Fact

But it is noticeable that every version gives St. Brendan the task of finding a remote island, which was always warm and lovely, and chronicles the attainment of this delight, though he finds other delectable islands near it or by the way. The metrical description before quoted is surely explicit enough, but the Book of Lismore outdoes it in a very revel of adjectives. As though praises alone failed to satisfy the celebrant, he introduces the figure of a holy ungarmented usher—a living demonstration of the benignity of the climate. He was “without any human raiment, but all his body was full of bright white feathers like a dove or sea mew; and it was almost the speech of an angel that he had.” “Vast is the light and fruitfulness of the island,” he cried in welcome and launched forthwith on a prodigal expenditure of superextolling words outpoured on their new delightful home. It is all perfectly in keeping with the glow and luxuriance of sun-warmed shores and the unique airiness of his spontaneous raiment. Clearly “summer isles of Eden,” and nothing that has to do with icebergs or wintry blasts, are called for in this case.

About six centuries lie between St. Brendan’s experiences and the earliest writing purporting to relate them and generally accepted as to date. Doubtful manuscripts and miscellaneous allusions—also often doubtful—may lessen the gap; but at best we have several centuries bridged by tradition only, and that rather inferred than known. It seems likely that he really visited and enjoyed some remote lovely islands, not very often reached from the mainland, such as could in any age have been discovered among the eastern Atlantic archipelagoes. In doing so he might well meet with surprising adventures, readily distorted and magnified; and the first tales of them would be basis enough for the florid fancy of Celtic and medieval romancers, growing in extravagance with passing generations.

The Cartographic Evidence

That he found some island or islands was certainly believed, for his name is on many maps in full confidence. But as to the particular islands thereby identified we find that conjecture had a wide range, varying in different periods and even with individual bias.

The Hereford Map of circa 1275

Probably its first appearance is on the Hereford map of 1275 or not much later,[49] the inscription being “Fortunate Insulae sex sunt Insulae Sct Brandani.” It is about on the site of the Canary group, and the elliptical island Junonia is just below. The showing is uncertain and conventional; also the number six misses the mark by one; still there can be no doubt that the Canaries as a whole were intended. Concerning them Edrisi[50] had observed, about 1154: “The Fortunate Islands are two in number and are in the Sea of Darkness.” Perhaps he had Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, the most accessible pair, especially in mind. The surviving derivatives of the last eighth-century Beatus map[51] also bear the inscription “Insulae Fortunate” where the Canary Islands should be, but they assert nothing of “St. Brandan.” Doubtless, dimly known, they had been reputed Isles of the Blest from prehistoric times. If St. Brendan found them, he found them already the “Fortunate Isles.”

A tradition long survived—perhaps survives still—in the Canary archipelago supporting this identification by the Hereford map. Thus Father Espinosa,[52] who long dwelt in Teneriffe and wrote his book there between 1580 and 1590, avers that St. Brendan and his companions spent several years in that archipelago and quotes a still earlier “calendar,” date not given, as authority for their mighty works done there “in the time of the Emperor Justinian.” Even as late as the eighteenth century an expedition sailed from among them for an island believed to be outside of those already known and to be the one discovered by St. Brendan.

Fig. 2—Section, in two continuous parts, of the Pizigani map of 1367 showing St. Brendan’s Islands, Mayda, Brazil, Daculi, and other legendary islands. (After Jomard’s hand-copied reproduction.)

[(Top panel)]([(Bottom panel)]

The Dulcert Map of 1339

The second cartographical appearance of the saint’s name seems to be in the portolan map[53] of Angelinus Dulcert, the Majorcan, dated 1339, where three islands corresponding to those now known as the Madeiras (Madeira, Porto Santo, and Las Dezertas) and on the same site are labeled “Insulle Sa Brandani siue puelan.” Since “u” was currently substituted for “v,” and “m” and “n” were interchangeable on these old maps, the last two words should probably be read “sive puellam.” However the ending of the inscription be interpreted, there can be no doubt about St. Brendan and his title to the islands—according to Dulcert. And that this island group must be identified with Madeira and her consorts (though Madeira is named Capraria and Porto Santo is named Primaria) hardly admits of any question.

If the identification of them with the Fortunate Islands especially favored by St. Brendan were no more than a conjecture of Dulcert or some predecessor, it still had a certain plausibility from the facts of nature and the favorable report of antiquity. Strabo may have borne these islands in mind when he wrote: “the golden apples of the Hesperides, the Islands of the Blessed they speak of, which we know are still pointed out to us not far distant from the extremities of Maurusia, and opposite to Gades.”[54] Apparently, too, Diodorus Siculus, writing half a century or so before the Christian era about what happened a thousand years earlier still, means Madeira by the “great island of very mild and healthful climate” and “in great part mountainous but much likewise champaign, which is the most sweet and pleasant part of all the rest;”[55] whereto the Phoenicians were storm-driven after founding Cadiz and which the Etrurians coveted but the Carthaginians planned to hold for themselves. Even since those old days there has been a general recognition of Madeira’s balminess and slumberous, flowery, enticing beauty.

The Map of the Pizigani of 1367

Divers maps of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries do not contain the name of St. Brendan (it is perhaps never spelled Brendan in cartography) and hence do not count either way. But the identification of the notable map of 1367 of the brothers Pizigani[56] ([Fig. 2]) is the same as Dulcert’s, the inscription being also given in the alternative. Like many oceanic features of this strange production it is by no means clear, but seems to read “Ysole dctur sommare sey ysole pone+le brandany.” Perhaps it is to be understood as the “islands called of slumber or the islands of St. Brandan.” There is at any rate no doubt about the last word or its meaning. But, as if to place the matter beyond all question, a monkish figure, generally accepted as that of the saint himself, is depicted bending over them in an attitude of benediction.

This map evidently does not copy from Dulcert, for the forms, proportions, and individual names of the islands all differ. It calls the chief island Canaria, instead of Capraria or the later Madeira, and appends a longer name, which seems like Capirizia, to what have long been known as Las Dezertas, which appear greatly enlarged on it. Porto Santo is left unnamed on the map, perhaps because it lies so close to the general name of the group.

First Use of “Porto Santo” as Name of One of the Madeiras

A claim has been set up by the Portuguese that Porto Santo (Holy Port) was first applied to this island by their rediscoverers of the next century in honor of their safe arrival after peril, but this is abundantly confuted by its presence on divers fourteenth-century maps, notably the Atlante Mediceo[57] of 1351. Also the Book of the Spanish Friar,[58] dating from about the middle of that century, contains in his enumeration of islands the words “another Desierta, another Lecname, another Puerto Santo.” It would seem to have been a familiar appellation about 1350 or earlier, and the suggestion naturally occurs that it may have originated in the tradition of the visit and blessing of the Irish saint. At any rate, the Portuguese, in the fifteenth-century rediscovery, can have had nothing to do with conferring it.

Animal and Bird Names of Islands

Concerning such names as Canaria, Capraria, etc., which, by reason of other associations, appear oddly out of place in this group, the more general question is raised of the tendency to apply animal and bird names to Eastern Atlantic islands. Goat, rabbit, dog, falcon, dove, wolf, and crow were applied to various islands long before the Portuguese visited the Madeiras and Azores, finding them untenanted; these names long held their ground on the maps, and some of them are in use even now. The reason for their adoption piques one’s curiosity. If they could be taken as throwing any light on the fauna of these islands in 1350, they might also instruct us as to the probability of prior human occupancy or previous connection with the mainland. But, of course, in any significant instances some fancied resemblance of aspect may have suggested the name.

Madeira

Madeira, meaning island of the woods or forest island, is a direct Portuguese translation from the Italian “I. de Legname” of the Atlante Mediceo and various later maps, and of the “Lecname” of the unnamed Spanish friar who tells us he was born in 1305. It is sufficiently explained by the former condition of the island, the northern part of which is said to preserve still its abundant woodland. Perhaps the modern name of Madeira (or Madera) first appears on the map of Giraldi of 1426,[59] not very long after the rediscovery. But, with some cartographers, the Italian form of the name lingered on much later.

Fig. 3—Section of the Beccario map of 1426 showing St. Brendan’s Islands. (From a photograph in the author’s possession.)

The Beccario Map of 1426

The alternative names, which had been given the Madeira group by Dulcert and the Pizigani, commemorating both the general fact of repose or blessedness and the delighted visit of St. Brendan, were closely blended (in what became the accepted formula) by the 1426 map of Battista Beccario, which unluckily had never been published in reproduction. Before the war, however, the writer obtained a good photograph of a part of it from Munich and herewith presents a section recording the words “Insulle fortunate santi brandany” ([Fig. 3]).[60] The first “a” of the final name may possibly be an “e,” having been obscured by one of the compass lines; but I think not. Beccario repeats the same inscription in his very important and now well-known map[61] of 1435, substituting “sancti” for “santi” by way of correction.

With no serious variations, this name, “The Fortunate Islands of St. Brandan” (or Brendan), is applied to Madeira and her consorts by Pareto (1455;[62] [Fig. 21]), Benincasa (1482;[63] [Fig. 22]), the anonymous Weimar map formerly attributed to 1424 but probably of about 1480 or 1490,[64] and divers others. In several instances (the Beccario maps, for example) the words are almost as near to the most southerly pair of the Azores, next above them, as to the Madeiras below, and it is possible that the condition of special beatitude was understood as extending to the former also.

The Bianco Map of 1448

At any rate, the verdict of the fifteenth century for Madeira was by no means unanimous. The 1448 map of Bianco,[65] which is very unlike his earlier one of 1436 so far as concerns the Atlantic, was prepared after all the Azores had been found again by the Portuguese except Flores and Corvo. It shows the old familiar inaccurately north-and-south string of the three groups of the Azores as they had come to him conventionally and traditionally, for evidently he did not dare or could not bring himself to discard them. But it also shows a slanting array of islands farther out, arranged in two groups respectively of two islands and five islands each and much more accurately presented as to location and direction than the old Italian stand-bys. These are quite clearly the Portuguese version, brought down to that date, of the newly rediscovered Azorean archipelago. But Bianco was obviously put to it to conjecture what islands these might be. He drew names from miscellaneous sources: in particular the largest island of the main group, corresponding to Terceira, bears the title “y^a fortunat de sa. beati blandan.” Nevertheless, he shows and names Madeira, Porto Santo, and Deserta in their usual places. Evidently he had given up, if he ever held, all thought of annexing St. Brendan’s special blessing to them. He seems very confident of the St. Brandan’s Island of his slanting series, for it is drawn heavily in black and contrasts with the rather ghastly aspect of some neighbors. It has nearly the form of a Maltese cross, with long arms, but there is no reason to suppose that this has any significance.

Behaim’s Globe of 1492

About the same period a Catalan map[66] of unknown authorship, without copying details, adopted the same expedient of duplicating the Azores by adding the new slanting series. It is quite independent in details, however, omitting mention of “St. Brandan” in particular, though Ateallo (Antillia?) is given in the second group but not in the corresponding place. This may possibly indicate some confusion of Antillia with St. Brandan’s Island, such as is more evident in the transfer of the traditional outline of the former to the latter, little changed, by Behaim on his globe of 1492.

As it stands, this globe undoubtedly gives an original and unique representation of St. Brandan’s Island far west of the Cape Verde group and emphasizes it by showing Antillia independently in a more northern latitude and less western longitude and also of quite insignificant size and form. But Ravenstein, who made a very thorough study of the matter, tells us[67] that this globe has been twice retouched or renovated and that the only way to ascertain exactly what was originally delineated is to treat it as a palimpsest and remove the accretions. In particular, he relates the story of an expert geographer who found the draftsmen about to transpose St. Brandan’s Island and Antillia; but they yielded to his protest. Of course, it is impossible to be quite certain that these map figures are such and in such place as Behaim intended or that they bear the names he gave. The presumption favors the present showing, generally accepted as authentic. It gives the saint only one island, but this a very large one, set in mid-ocean between Africa and South America.

Possibly this location may be suggested by an undefined coast line shown by Bianco’s map of 1448, previously mentioned, and, like Behaim’s island, set opposite the Cape Verde group. In Venetian Italian it bears an obscure inscription, which calls it an “authentic island” and is variously interpreted as saying that this coast is fifteen hundred miles long or fifteen hundred miles distant. The map of Juan de la Cosa (1500)[68] exhibits off the coast of Brazil, and with an outline similar to Behaim’s, “the island which the Portuguese found.” His date is too late to have influenced Behaim, too early to have been prompted by Cabral’s accidental discovery of that very year. It is more likely that he and Behaim both were acquainted with Bianco’s work or that all three drew from the same report of discovery.

Later Maps

From this time on there is never more than one island for St. Brendan, but it indulges in wide wanderings. Especially as the attention of men was attracted to the more northern and western waters, the map-makers shifted the island thither. Thus the map of 1544, purporting to be the work of Sebastian Cabot and probably prepared more or less under his influence,[69] places the island San Brandan not far from the scene of his father’s explorations and his own. It lies well out to sea in about the latitude of the Straits of Belle Isle. The Ortelius map of 1570[70] ([Fig. 10]) repeats the showing with no great amount of change. In short, the final judgment of navigators and cartographers, before the island quite vanished from the maps, made choice of the waste of the North Atlantic as its most probable hiding place. Perhaps this westward tendency in rather high latitudes may be partly responsible for the hypotheses in recent times which have taken the explorer quite across to interior North America on a missionary errand. There is certainly nothing to prohibit any one from believing them, if he can and if it pleases him.

Conclusion

In general review it appears likely that St. Brendan in the sixth century wandered widely over the seas in quest of some warm island, concerning which wonderful accounts had been brought to him, and found several such isles, the Madeira group receiving his special approval, according to the prevailing opinion of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. But this judgment of those centuries is the only item as to which we can speak with any positiveness and confidence.

CHAPTER IV
THE ISLAND OF BRAZIL

So far as we know, the first appearance of the island of Brazil in geography was on the map of Angellinus Dalorto,[71] of Genoa, made in the year 1325. There it appears as a disc of land of considerable area, set in the Atlantic Ocean in the latitude of southern Ireland ([Fig. 4]). But the name itself is far older. In seeking its derivation, one is free to choose either one of two independent lines.

Probable Gaelic Origin of the Word “Brazil”

The word takes many forms on maps and in manuscripts: as Brasil, Bersil, Brazir, O’Brazil, O’Brassil, Breasail. As a personal name it has been common in Ireland from ancient days. The “Brazil fierce” of Campbell’s “O’Connor’s Child” may be recalled by the few who have not wholly forgotten that beautiful old-fashioned poem. Going farther back, we find Breasail mentioned as a pagan demigod in Hardiman’s “History of Galway”[72] which quotes from one of the Four Masters, who collated in the sixteenth century a mass of very ancient material indeed. Also St. Brecan, who shared the Aran Islands with St. Enda about A.D. 480 or 500, had Bresal for his original name when he flourished as the son of the first Christian king of Thormond. The name, however spelled, is said to have been built up from two Gaelic syllables “breas” and “ail,” each highly commendatory in implication and carrying that note of admiration alike to man or island. Quite in consonance therewith the fifteenth-century map of Fra Mauro in 1459[73] not only delineated and named this Atlantic Berzil but appended the inscription “Queste isole de Hibernia son dite fortunate,” ranking it as one of the “Fortunate Islands.”

Fig. 4—Section of the Dalorto map of 1325 showing Brazil, Daculi, and other legendary islands. (After Magnaghi’s photographic facsimile.)

Another Suggested Derivation

On the whole, this seems the more likely channel of derivation of the name; or, if there were two such channels, then the more important one. For there is another suggested derivation, of which much has rightly been made and which we must by no means neglect. Red dyewood bore the name “brazil” in the early Middle Ages, a word derived, Humboldt believed,[74] by translation from the Arabic bakkam of like meaning, on record in the ninth century. He notes that Brazir, one form of the name, as we have seen, recalls the French braise, the Portuguese braza and braseiro, the Spanish brasero, the Italian braciere, all having to do with fire, which is normally more or less red like the dye. He does not know any tongue of medieval Asia which could supply brasilli or the like for dyewood. He suggests also the possibility of the word’s being a borrowed place name, like indigo or jalap, commemorating the region of origin, but cannot identify any such place. His treatment of the topic leaves a feeling of uncertainty, with a preference for some sort of transformation from “bakkam” which would yield “brazil” probably by a figure of speech.

The earliest distinctly recognizable mention of brazil as a commodity occurs in a commercial treaty of 1193 between the Duchy of Ferrara, Italy, and a neighboring town or small state, which presents grana de Brasill in a long list including wax, furs, incense, indigo, and other merchandise.[75] The same curious phrase, “grain of Brazil,” recurs in a quite independent local charta of the same country only five years later. Muratori, who garnered such things into his famous compilation of Italian antiquities, avowed his bewilderment over this strange phrase, asking what dyewood could be so called; and Humboldt, reconsidering the whole matter, was no more clear in mind. He calls attention to the fact that cochineal very long afterward bore the same name, but evidently without considering this any sort of solution, as, indeed, it could not well be, since it bears distinct reference to the South American Brazil, which was discovered and named centuries later. But the facts remain that grain does not naturally mean dyewood of any kind or in any form, that its recurrence in public documents proves it a well-established characterization of a known article of trade in the twelfth century, and that its presentation is such as to indicate a granular packaged material.

Perhaps an explanation may be found in Marco Polo’s experience and experiments nearly a century later than these Italian documents. Of Lambri, a district in Sumatra, he writes:

They also have brazil in great quantities. This they sow, and when it is grown to the size of a small shoot they take it up and transplant it; then they let it grow for three years, after which they tear it up by the root. You must know that Messer Marco Polo aforesaid brought some seed of the brazil, such as they sow, to Venice with him and had it sown there, but never a thing came up. And I fancy it was because the climate was too cold.[76]

The seeds of that Sumatran shrub might well pass for grain in the sense of a small granular object, as we say a grain of sand, for example. But, since the plant was not and perhaps could not be reared in Italy, it seems unlikely that the seed should be a valued item of commerce, regularly listed, bargained for, and taxed. We do not hear of its being put to use as a dye; and, indeed, the bark or wood of the plant seems far more promising for that purpose. Like our distinguished forerunners in considering this little mystery, we must set it aside as not yet fully solved.

“Grain of Brazil” is not repeated in any entry, so far as I know, after the end of the twelfth century; but brazil as a commodity figures rather frequently; for example, in the schedules of port dues of Barcelona and other Catalan seaboard towns in the thirteenth century, as compiled by Capmany.[77] Thus in 1221 we find “carrega de Brasill,” in 1243 “caxia de bresil,” and somewhat later (1252) “cargua de brazil,” the spelling varying as in the easy-going fourteenth- and fifteenth-century maps, the word being plainly the same. But the word and the thing were not confined to the Mediterranean, for a grant of murage rates of 1312 to the city of Dublin, Ireland, uses the words “de brasile venali.”[78] This is pretty far afield and shows that the knowledge and use of brazil as taxable merchandise was nearly Europe-wide. As a rule, it has been taken for granted that the word meant either some special kind of red dyewood or dyewood in general. Marco Polo’s account conforms rather to the former version, while Humboldt seems to lean toward the latter; but there is singularly little in the entries which tends to identify it as wood at all or in any way relate it thereto. Such words as carrega, caxia, cargua, show that it was put up in some kind of inclosure, and perhaps give the impression of comminution or at least absence of bulkiness. Most likely many kinds of red bark, red wood suitable for dyeing, and perhaps other vegetable products available for that purpose were sometimes included under the name brazil. People of that time were more concerned about results and means to attain them than about exactness in classification or definition.

It may well be that both lines of derivation of the name meet in the Brazil Island west of Ireland, that it was given a traditional Irish name by Irish navigators and tale tellers and mapped accordingly by Italians, who would naturally apply to it the meaning with which they were familiar in commerce and eastern story, so that the Island of Brazil, extolled on all hands, would come to mean along the Mediterranean chiefly the island where peculiarly precious dyewoods abounded. We know that Columbus was pleased to collect what his followers called brazil in his third and fourth voyages along American shores;[79] that Cabot felicitates himself on the prospect of finding silk and brazilwood by persistence in his westward explorations;[80] and that the great Brazil of South America received its final name as a tribute to its prodigal production of such dyes.

Free Distribution of the Name on Early Maps

But there is a curious phenomenon to be noticed—the free distribution of this name among sea islands, especially of the Azores archipelago, from an early date. Thus the Pizigani map of 1367[81] applies it with slight change of spelling not only to the original disc-form Brazil west of Ireland and to a mysterious crescent-form island, which must be Mayda, but to what is plainly meant for Terceira of the main middle group of the Azores ([Fig. 2]). The Spanish Friar, naming Brazil in his island list about 1350, appears also to mean Terceira, judging by the order of the names.[82] His matter-of-fact tone indicates a long-settled item. This carries us well back toward the first settled date for the Irish Brazil in cartography. Further, the name still adheres to Terceira, though long restricted to a single mountainous headland. The explanation remains a matter of conjecture. Perhaps the Azores islands that bore it borrowed from the older Brazil west of Ireland. Perhaps also the word had gone about that islands were notable for dyes—archil, for example—and the special dye name brazil has been loosely affixed in consequence.

On some of the maps certain alternative names are given, which do not greatly further our investigation. Thus the very first one which shows Brazil—Dalorto, 1325—adds Montonis as a second choice ([Fig. 4]). This has been understood to mean the Isle of Rams, linking it with Edrisi’s Isle of Sheep, a quite ancient fancy, sometimes referred to the Faroes, but of very uncertain identification. But Freducci,[83] 1497, makes it Montanis; Calapoda,[84] 1552, Montorius; and an anonymous compass chart of 1384,[85] Monte Orius. In all these the idea of mountains, not sheep, is dominant. The change from “a” to “o” is easy with a not very vigilant transcriber, and it is most likely that Freducci preserves the original form and meaning.

The Pizigani map of 1367 is confused and enigmatic on this point, as in all its inscriptions. It seems to read ([Fig. 2]) “Ysola de nocorus sur de brazar,” but it may best be set aside as too uncertain.

Equally unenlightening is the “de Brazil de Binar” of Bianco’s 1448 map.[86] If the “n” be read “m,” the inscription may mean “Brazil of the two seas;” but the allusion is mystifying.

Fra Mauro’s inscription before quoted merely bears testimony to Brazil’s benign and almost Elysian repute and its connection with the Green Isle in fancy.

Location and Shape of the Island

The circular form of Brazil and its location westward of southern Ireland are affirmed by many maps, including Dalorto, 1325 ([Fig. 4]); Dulcert, 1339;[87] Laurenziano-Gaddiano, 1351;[88] Pizigani, 1367 ([Fig. 2]); anonymous Weimar map, probably about 1481;[89] Giraldi, 1426;[90] Beccario, 1426[91] and 1435[92] ([Fig. 20]); Juan da Napoli, perhaps 1430;[93] Bianco, 1436 and 1448;[94] Valsequa, 1439;[95] Pareto, 1455[96] ([Fig. 21]); Roselli, 1468;[97] Benincasa, 1482[98] ([Fig. 22]); Juan de la Cosa, 1500;[99] and numerous later maps. Probably the persistent roundness is ascribable to a certain preference for geometrical regularity, which sowed these early maps with circles, crescents, trilobed clover leaves, and other more unusual but not less artificial island forms. The direction must stand for the tradition of some old voyage or voyages.

Significant Shape on the Catalan Map of 1375

But the celebrated Catalan map of 1375[100] above mentioned introduced a significant novelty, converting the disc into an annulus of land—of course, still circular—surrounding a circular body of water dotted with islets ([Fig. 5]). The preferred explanation thus far advanced connects these islets with the Seven Cities of Portuguese and Spanish legend.[101] But there seem to be nine islands, not seven, and it is not clear what necessary relation exists between isles and cities nor whence the idea is derived of the central lake or sea as a background. Moreover, the Island of the Seven Cities was most often identified with Antillia far to the south, and there seems no warrant for identification with Brazil. All considered, this explanation seems arbitrary, inadequate, and unconvincing.

Fig. 5—Section of the Catalan map of 1375 showing the islands of Mayda and Brazil. (After Nordenskiöld’s photographic facsimile.)

The same ring form with inclosed water and islets is repeated by a map of the next century copied by Kretschmer.[102] It varies only by showing just seven islets, if we may rely for this detail on his handmade copy.

Possible Identification with the Gulf of St. Lawrence Region

Now, in all the Atlantic Ocean and its shores there is one region, and one only, which thus incloses a sheet of water having islands in its expanse, and this region lies in the very direction indicated on the old maps for Brazil. I allude to the projecting elbow of northeastern North America, which most nearly approaches Europe and has Cape Race for its apex. Its front is made up of Newfoundland and Cape Breton Island. The remainder of the circuit is made up of what we now call southern Labrador, a portion of eastern Quebec province, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. This irregular ring of territory incloses the great Gulf of St. Lawrence, which has within it the Magdalens, Brion’s Island, and some smaller islets, not to include the relatively large Anticosti and Prince Edward. It has two rather narrow channels of communication with the ocean, which might readily fail to impress greatly an observer whose chief mental picture would be the great land-surrounded, island-dotted expanse of water. The surrounding land would itself almost certainly be regarded as insular, for there was a strong tendency to picture everything west of Europe in that way, even long after the time when most of these maps were made. Even when Cartier[103] in 1535 ascended the St. Lawrence River it was in the hope of coming out again on the open sea—a hope that implies the very conception of an insular mass inclosing the gulf, not differing essentially from the showing of the Catalan map of 1375. The number of the islands is immaterial. We may picture the Catalan map-maker dotting them in from vague report as impartially as the far better known Lake Corrib is besprinkled with islands in most of the old maps—far more plentifully than the facts give warrant.

But it would seem that other observers were more impressed by the separation of Newfoundland, due to the Straits of Belle Isle and Cabot and the waterway (of the gulf) connecting them behind the great island. As a rule the maps presenting Brazil in this divided way adhere to the accepted latitude, which does not differ appreciably from that of the St. Lawrence Gulf region. The dividing passage, mainly from north to south but slightly curved at the ends which join the ocean, corresponds fairly well with the facts. The maps of Prunes, 1553[104] ([Fig. 12]), and Olives, 1568,[105] may be cited as instances of this divided form of Brazil. No explanation seems yet to have been offered except Nansen’s,[106] that the dividing channel represents “the river of death (Styx),” and Westropp’s,[107] that it may be owing to mistaken copying of a name space or label on some older map. But the former lacks any better basis than conjectured fancy and the latter is refuted by the position of the channel on most maps and by the general aspect of the delineation. As a matter of fact, the showing of most of the maps differs in little more than proportions from that of Gastaldi illustrating Ramusio in 1550,[108] when the Gulf of St. Lawrence was fairly well known to many, but appears as a rather narrow channel behind a broken-up Newfoundland, extending from the Strait of Belle Isle to the Strait of Cabot. As in the much older map referred to, the delineation of Gastaldi is perhaps to be explained by concentration of attention on the waterway and the ignoring of the wider parts of the expanse. Absolute demonstration of the causes of the divided Brazil of some maps and the ring of land inclosing an island-dotted body of water in others is, of course, impossible; but we can show that in the designated direction there is a region presenting both of these unusual features, so that one of the visitors might well be especially taken up with one set of characteristics, another with the other set, and might depict the region accordingly. This is the more probable because the region was peculiarly exposed to accidental or intentional discovery from the west of the British islands and is known, in fact, to have been the first to be reached therefrom of all North America in times of historic record.

It must not be supposed that Brazil was always thought of as relatively near Europe. Nicolay in 1560[109] ([Fig. 6]) and Zaltieri in 1566[110] prepared maps which show a Brazil Island in distinctly American waters, practically forming part of the archipelago into which Newfoundland was supposed to be divided, or at least lying between it and the Grand Banks. These presentations no doubt may have been suggested by American discoveries and later theories, especially as no navigator had been able to find Brazil at any point nearer Europe; but again they may be at least partly due to surviving early traditions of the great distance westward at which this island lay. The Brazil of Nicolay and Zaltieri is, to be sure, a very small affair; but their maps were made about two and a half centuries after the earliest one which shows this island—ample time for many misconceptions to creep in. Their only value is in their illustration of locality.

The Catalan Map of about 1480

More important in every way is a Catalan map ([Fig. 7]) preserved in Milan and reproduced by Nordenskiöld in 1892,[111] but since copied partly by Nansen, by Westropp, and by others. It belongs to the fifteenth century—perhaps about 1480—and deserves clearly to rank as the only map before Columbus, thus far reported, which shows a part of North America other than Greenland. The latter had long before appeared in the well-known map of Claudius Clavus, 1427[112] ([Fig. 16]), no doubt on the faith of the early Norse narratives and subsequent commercial intercourse, for the Norse Greenland colony is known to have existed in 1410 and probably did not die out entirely until much later. The Catalan map of about 1480 shows Greenland also as a great northwestern land mass beyond Iceland, identifying it by name as Illa Verde (Green Island). But just south, or west of south, of this Greenland at a slight interval and southwest of Iceland is drawn and named a large Brazil of the conventional circular disc form. Its position is that of Labrador, or perhaps Newfoundland, as it would naturally have been understood and reported by the Norse explorers. It can be nothing but one or both of these regions of America with perhaps neighboring lands.

Fig. 6—Section of the Nicolay map of 1560 showing, on the American Side of the Atlantic, Brazil, Man, and Insula Verde, the first two transferred from the European side. (After Nordenskiöld’s photographic facsimile.)

It is true that this map shows also another Brazil of the divided kind (in this instance with a channel crossing it from east to west) located in mid-Atlantic about where Prunes and others show their bisected Brazil. But this seems only an instance of conservation and deference for authority, such as has often been manifested in cartography. Of such deference for authority perhaps there is no more striking instance than Bianco’s map of 1448, which places the rediscovered Azores where they should be but also preserves them, on the faith of older maps, where they should not be—making a double series. The lesser bisected mid-Atlantic Brazil of the Catalan map may well be set aside as a survival without significance.

But the duplication by Bianco in 1448 raises a question of distance, which must be considered, for his Azores retained from the maps antedating the Portuguese rediscoveries are far nearer the coast of Europe than the truth at all warrants; and, so far as we can judge, the same cautious underestimating was applied to all oceanic islands as reported. Corvo, for example, is actually nearly half-way across the Atlantic, yet on all the maps for a long time is brought eastward to a position much nearer Portugal. We must suppose that the region about the Gulf of St. Lawrence, if visited, would be similarly treated, and we cannot tell how far the minimization of distance might be carried by some map-makers.

Fig. 7—Section of the Catalan map of about 1480 showing Brazil Island and Green Island (Illa Verde). (After Nordenskiöld’s photographic facsimile.)

The Sylvanus Map of 1511

The fact is, this matter does not rest in supposition only, for the thing has undoubtedly happened. The map of Sylvanus,[113] 1511, brings the Gulf of St. Lawrence and surroundings as an insular body almost as near Ireland as are many of the presentations of Brazil Island on older maps. He shows in front a single large island; a square gulf behind it; a bent shore line forming the border on the north, west, and south; and two gaps well representing the Straits of Belle Isle and Cabot. The names given are Terra Laboratorum and Regalis Domus. Nobody doubts that it illustrates the St. Lawrence Gulf region, though there has been much speculation as to what unknown explorer has had his discoveries commemorated here, thirteen years before the first voyage of Cartier. Why should not a like episode of discovery and imperfect record have happened at a still earlier date?

It is not to be supposed that Brazil Island was generally conceived of by intelligent persons as no farther at sea than it appears on the map of Dalorto, 1325, and divers later ones. Peasantry and fisher folk might, indeed, confuse it with the mythical Isle of the Undying—accessible only to a few chosen ones but vanishing from ordinary mortal gaze—and thus account for Brazil’s elusiveness, though so near at hand; but the sturdy explorers of Bristol[114] who kept sailing westward in search of the island, before and after Columbus, sometimes at least being away on this quest for many months together, must often have passed over the very site given by Dalorto and far beyond. They were looking for solid earth and rock and must have been convinced that the real Brazil was to be found in remoter seas. Also, during a great part of the period in which Brazil appeared on the maps off the Blaskets and Limerick and unduly close to Ireland, Italian traders were habitually following the Irish western coast and trafficking in that port and others and must often have been blown out, or sailed out by choice, far enough for a landing on the island if it had actually been where Dalorto and others pictured it. The total lack of any such happening must have been convincing to all except devotees of the occult and those given over blindly to seashore tradition. No doubt the far westward showing of the fifteenth-century Catalan and the much later Nicolay and Zaltieri maps accorded with the general expectation of thoughtful and well-informed navigators.

Omission of the Name in Norse and Irish Records

It may seem strange that the Norse sagas do not mention Brazil by that name, though its relation to the Scandinavian colony of Greenland is made so conspicuous on the Catalan fifteenth-century map above referred to; also that there is no distinct Irish record of any voyage to Brazil as such, though the western ports of Ireland were natural points of departure and return for western voyages and though voyages to a far western Great Ireland are reported by the Norse from Irish sources. Perhaps there is no quite satisfactory answer to this. All narratives of the kind are fragmentary and more or less mythical, and the name Brazil may often have been used in the reports of Irish explorers, as it certainly was later the especial goal of the English, without having left any other trace than the name on the map and such hints as we have mentioned. The Norse seem to have adhered to their own names Markland and Vinland, only mentioning Great Ireland incidentally in the same neighborhood and Brazil not at all unless the delineation of the Catalan map be of their suggestion; but no really strong adverse argument can be founded on these matters of nomenclature and omission where all references and records are so meager.

There can be no certainty; but from the evidence at hand it seems likely that the part of America indicated, i. e. Newfoundland and neighboring shores, was visited very early by Irish-speaking people, who gave it the commendatory name Brazil. Naturally one inclines to ascribe such an unremitting westward push to the powerful religious impulsion which, according to Dicuil, carried Irishmen to Iceland in the latter part of the eighth century and even bore them on, it is reported, some two hundred miles beyond it. The date, however, may have been much later. Yet it must have preceded Dalorto’s map of 1325, whereon Brazil first appears by name.

Of evidence on the ground there is nothing; but what have we now to show even for the perfectly attested visits to the same region of Cabot and Cortereal? Their case rests on maps, governmental entries, and contemporary correspondence, luckily preserved. Earlier visits to Brazil have no epistles, no entries, to show but must rely on the maps and the general tradition in the British islands of such a western region across at least a part of the great sea.

CHAPTER V
THE ISLAND OF THE SEVEN CITIES

The mythical islands of the Atlantic (les îles fantastiques) on the old maps have had divers origins, instructive to study. Perhaps only one of them derives its name and being directly from a real human episode of a twilight period in history.

When the Moors descended on Spain in 711, routed King Roderick’s army beside the Guadalete, and rapidly overran the Iberian Peninsula, it was most natural, indeed nearly inevitable, that some Christian fugitives should continue their flight from the seaboard to accessible islands already known or rumored, or even desperately commit themselves in blindness to the remoter mysteries of the ocean. Such an event would afford a fabric for the embroidery of later fancy. A part of this has been preserved by record; and it is curious to watch the development of the story, which takes several forms, not differing widely, however, one from another.

The Island of Brazil

When Pedro de Ayala, Spanish Ambassador to Great Britain, found occasion in 1498 to report English exploring activities to Ferdinand and Isabella, he wrote:

The people of Bristol have, for the last seven years, sent out every year two, three, or four light ships (caravels) in search of the island of Brasil and the seven cities.[115]

There is indeed one well-attested voyage of 1480 conducted by well-known navigators, seeking this insular Brazil, and it was not the earliest.

The first appearance of that island thus far reported, as we have seen in the preceding chapter, is on the map of Dalorto[116] (dated 1325; [Fig. 4]) as a disc of land well at sea, westward from Hibernian Munster; but the Catalan map of 1375[117] ([Fig. 5]) and at least one other[118] turn the disc into a ring surrounding a body of water which is studded with small islands—apparently nine in the Catalan map photographically reproduced by Nordenskiöld, though Dr. Kretschmer draws seven on the other. These miniature islands have sometimes been thought[119] to represent the seven cities of the old legend; but islets are not cities, and there seems no reason why each city should require an islet. However, the coincidence of number, exact or approximate, is suggestive.

Antillia

Antillia (variously spelled) was a home for the elusive cities more favored than Brazil by cartography and tradition. In 1474 Toscanelli, a cosmographer of Florence, being consulted by Christopher Columbus as to the prospects of a westward voyage, sent him a copy of a letter which he had written to a friend in the service of the King of Portugal. Its authenticity has been questioned, but it is still believed in by the majority of inquirers and may be accepted provisionally. In it occurs this passage:

From the island Antilia, which you call the seven cities, and whereof you have some knowledge, to the most noble island of Cipango [Japan], are ten spaces, which make 2,500 miles.[120]

The name Antillia had appeared on the maps much earlier. As Atilae, or Atulae, it is doubtfully found in an inscription on that of the Pizigani (1367;[121] [Fig. 2]), identifying a “shore,” not drawn, on which a colossal statue of warning had been erected. The location seems to be somewhere in the region where Corvo of the Azores should appear.

We meet the island name, for the first time unmistakably, on the map of Beccario (Becharius) of 1435[122] ([Fig. 20]). It is applied to the chief of a group of four large islands, comparable to nothing actually in the western Atlantic except the Greater Antilles, or three of them with Florida (Bimini). They are collectively designated “Insulle a Novo Repte”—the “Newly Reported Islands.” Antillia itself is shown as an elongated quadrilateral having its sides indented by seven two-lobed bays of identical form, beside another and larger bay in the southern end. Several subsequent maps repeat the delineation with little change, and the map of Benincasa (1482;[123] [Fig. 22]) supplies local names for the bays or the regions adjoining excepting only the lowest but one on the eastern side, which bay is opposite the middle of the island name Antillia. The other names as read by Dr. Kretschmer are Aira, Ansalli, Ansodi, Con, Anhuib, Ansesseli, and Ansolli. It will be observed that five of them borrow the first syllable of Antillia. Nobody has explained these names, and they seem mere products of linguistic fancy. But again the coincidence in number is impressive, although somewhat offset by the fact that the next largest island in the group, Saluaga, has a similar arrangement of five bays of like form and carries the names, similarly applied, of Arahas, Duchal, Imada, Nom, and Consilla. They can hardly be extra bishops’ towns. At least we are in the dark about them. The anonymous map sometimes attributed to 1424 and preserved at Weimar[124] shows in photographic copy traces of names, or at least letters, on the part of Antillia which it represents. Its true date is believed to be about that of Benincasa’s map above cited. But the markings do not seem to be identical and are very meager.

The Legendary Home of Portuguese Refugees

However, there can be no doubt of Toscanelli’s meaning at an earlier date in the passage quoted. The same is true of Behaim’s globe (1492), though he discards the accepted form of Antillia. He appends a long inscription, translated by Ravenstein as follows:

In the year 734 of Christ, when the whole of Spain had been won by the heathen (Moors) of Africa, the above island Antilia, called Septe citade (Seven cities), was inhabited by an archbishop from the Porto in Portugal, with six other bishops, and other Christians, men and women, who had fled thither from Spain, by ship, together with their cattle, belongings, and goods. 1414 a ship from Spain got nighest it without being endangered.[125]

Again, in Ruysch’s map of 1508 there is “a large island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean between Lat. N. 37° and 40°. It is called Antilia Insula, and a long legend asserts that it had been discovered long ago by the Spaniards, whose last Gothic king, Roderik, had taken refuge there from the invasion of the Barbarians.”[126]

Ferdinand Columbus, living between 1488 and 1539, says that some Portuguese cartographers had located

Antilla ... not ... above 200 leagues due west from the Canaries and Azores, which they conclude to be certainly the island of the seven cities, peopled by the Portuguese at the time that Spain was conquered by the Moors in the year 714. At which time they say, seven bishops with their people embark’d and sailed to this island, where each of them built a city; and to the end none of their people might think of returning to Spain, they burnt the ships, tackle and all things necessary for sailing. Some Portuguese discoursing about this island, there were those that affirmed several Portuguese had gone to it, who could not find the way to it again.[127]

He relates particularly how “in the time of Henry infant of Portugal [perhaps about 1430], a Portuguese ship was drove by stress of weather to this island Antilla.” The crew went to church with the islanders but were afraid of being detained and hurried back to Portugal. The Prince heard their story and ordered them to return to the island, but they escaped from him and were not found again. It is said that of the sand gathered on Antillia for the cook room a third part was pure gold.

Galvano tells of a still later visit; or possibly it is only another version of the same:

In this yeere also, 1447, it happened that there came a Portugall ship through the streight of Gibraltar; and being taken with a great tempest, was forced to runne westwards more then willingly the men would, and at last they fell upon an Island which had seven cities, and the people spake the Portugall toong, and they demanded if the Moors did yet trouble Spaine, whence they had fled for the losse which they received by the death of the king of Spaine, Don Roderigo.

The boateswaine of the ship brought home a little of the sand, and sold it unto a goldsmith of Lisbon, out of the which he had a good quantitie of gold.

Don Pedro understanding this, being then governour of the realme, caused all the things thus brought home, and made knowne, to be recorded in the house of justice.

There be some that thinke, that those Islands whereunto the Portugals were thus driven, were the Antiles, or Newe Spaine.[128]

Another Account

The Portuguese historian Faria y Sousa has yet another version. According to Stevens’ translation:

After Roderick’s defeat the Moors spread themselves over all the province, committing inhuman barbarities. * * * The chief resistance was at Merida. The defendants, many of whom were Portuguese, that being the Supreme Tribunal of Lusitania, were commanded by Sacaru, a noble Goth. Many brave actions passed at the siege, but at length there being no hopes of relief and provisions failing, the town was surrendered upon articles. The commander of the Lusitanians, traversing Portugal, came to a seaport town, where, collecting a good number of ships, he put to sea, but to which part of the world they were carried does not appear. There is an ancient fable of an island called Antilla in the western ocean, inhabited by Portuguese, but it could never yet be found, and therefore we will leave it until such time as it is discovered, but to this place our author supposes these Portugals to have been driven.[129]

It is plain that Captain Stevens paraphrases with comments rather than translates. The original[130] avers that the fugitives made sail for the Fortunate Islands (the Canaries), in order that they might preserve some remnants of the Spanish race, but were carried elsewhere. It also specifies that the legendary island which they are supposed to have reached is inhabited by Portuguese and contains seven cities—tiene siete cividades.

This last account lacks positive mention of the emigrating bishops and for the first time names a definite though rather remote goal as aimed at by their effort. But the movement from Merida is well accounted for, and a trusted military commander would seem a natural leader for such an enterprise of wholesale escape. The bishops, implied by the seven cities, might well gather to him at Oporto or be picked up on the way. On the whole it seems the most easily believable version of the story; though of course it does not necessarily follow that they really chose any land so remote as Teneriffe and its neighbors—if they knew of them—for a new abiding place. Of course the continuance of Portuguese language and civilization and the persistence of seven isolated towns through so many centuries must be ranked with the auriferous sands of Antillia as late products of the dreaming Iberian brain.

Mythical Location of the Seven Cities on the Mainland

The citations thus far given identify the Island of the Seven Cities with some legendary, but generally believed-in patch of land afar out in the ocean—sometimes with the Island of Brazil, more often with Antillia. But the earliest of them dates six or seven centuries after the supposed fact, and it may well be that a distinction was made at first, which became lost afterward by blending. In a still later stage of development the name of the Seven Cities becomes separate and strangely migratory, not avoiding even the mainland. We know, for instance, what power the Seven Cities of Cibola had to draw Coronado and his followers northward through the mountains and deserts of our still arid Southwest until all that was real of them stood revealed as the even then antiquated and rather uncleanly terraced villages of sun-dried brick which are picturesquely familiar on railway folders and in the pages of illustrated magazines.

But this was not the only part of North America on which the romantic myth alighted. The British Museum contains in MS. 2803 of the Egerton collection an anonymous world map,[131] ([Fig. 8]), forming part of a portolan atlas attributed by conjecture to 1508, which shows, somewhat as in La Cosa’s map of 1500, the Atlantic coast distorted to a nearly westward trend, with the Seven Cities (Septem Civitates), represented by conventional indications of miters, scattered along a seaboard tract from a point considerably west of “terra de los bacalos” and the Bay of Fundy to a point nearly opposite the western end of Cuba. The cartographer’s ideas of geography were exceedingly vague, but apparently he conceived of Portuguese episcopal domination for the coastal country between lower New England and Florida as we know them now. Perhaps, however, he merely meant to set down his cities somewhere on the eastern shore of temperate North America and has strewn them along at convenience.

Fig. 8—Section of the world map in the portolan atlas of about 1508 known as Egerton MS. 2803 in the British Museum, placing the Seven Cities in North America and the name “Antiglia” in South America. (After Stevenson’s photographic facsimile.)

Incidentally, this map is also interesting as one of a few which inscribe Antillia, with slight changes of orthography, on some part of the mainland of South America. In this instance “Antiglia” occupies a tract of the northwestern coastal country apparently corresponding to contiguous portions of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.

Later Reappearance As an Island

But the Island of the Seven Cities appeared as such on other maps and by this name only. Perhaps its most salient showing is on Desceliers’ fine map of 1546[132] ([Fig. 9]), that entertaining repository of isles which are more than dubious and names which are fantastic. He presents it off the American coast about a third as far as the Bermudas and midway from Cape Breton to the Bay of Fundy. The size is considerable, the outline being deeply embayed on several sides and hence very irregular, almost as much so as Celebes. Two islets lie near two of its projecting peninsulas. It bears a brief inscription giving the name Sete Cidades and indicating that it belongs to Portugal.

This choice of location would have been more venturesome a century later. In 1546 there had been some exploring and much fishing in these waters but no determined settlement near them, and they were hardly yet familiar. However, the Ortelius map of 1570[133] ([Fig. 10]), and the Mercator map of 1587[134] find it more prudent to move this island farther south and farther out to sea, reducing its area, but retaining its traditional name. Not long after this, except for a local name on St. Michaels of the Azores, the Seven Cities disappear from geography.

Fig. 9—Section of the Desceliers map of 1546 showing the Island of Seven Cities and various other legendary islands. (After Kretschmer’s hand-copied reproduction.) The names are mostly upside down because on the original south is at the top.

Fig. 10—Section of Ortelius’ world map of 1570 showing, of the legendary islands and regions discussed in the present work, the Island of Seven Cities (“Sept cites”), St. Brendan’s Islands, Brazil, Vlaenderen, Green Island (Y. Verdo), Estotiland, Drogio, Frisland, Islands of Demons, La Emperadada, and Grocland. (After Nordenskiöld’s photographic facsimile.)

Occurrence of the Name in the Azores

The exception noted is well worth considering. Just as Terceira retains her medieval name of Brazil to designate one headland, St. Michaels has still its valley of the Seven Cities. Brown’s guidebook presents the fact very casually: “St. Michaels. Ponta Delgada. Brown’s Hotel. About ten people. Among the chief sights are the lava beds coming from Sete Cidades.... At Sete Cidades, which is worth a visit, there is a great crater with two lakes at the bottom, one of which appears to be green, the other blue.”[135]

This naïve incuriousness in the presence of something so significant of course has not been shared by a different order of observers. Buache[136] found here as he thought the genuine and only Seven Cities of the legend. Humboldt[137] opposed this view with a reminder of the Seven Cities of Cibola. But it is fair to remember that New Mexico was quite impossible for the Portuguese of 711 or thereabout, whereas St. Michaels Island offered an accessible and tempting place of refuge. The name could not have been derived from settlement in the former; but it might really be derived from settlement in the latter. Granting that the fugitives might not be able to maintain themselves there in safety for many years after the Arabs had begun their tentative and always uneasy incursions into the western Sea of Darkness, it still may be that the town or towns of this hidden island valley might endure long enough and seem imposing enough and be visited often enough by Christians from the mainland to supply the nucleus of the most picturesque and adventurous of legends; and this tale might follow any later migration into the unknown, or survive and find new abiding places for the name and fancy long after the original colony—archbishop and bishops and congregations, military commanders, and mailed soldiery—had all been somehow destroyed or had melted apart and drifted away. All that remains certain is the continued presence of the name of the Seven Cities on that spot.

Some ruins are said to have marked it formerly, but very little is visible now, if we may trust the following description by an intelligent visitor in the middle of the last century:

Emerging from these sunken lanes, so peculiar to the island of St. Michael’s, we come to the green hills which border the village and the valley of the Seven Cities.... From these dull evergreen mountains, stretching before us without apparent end, we speedily had an unexpected change. Suddenly the mountain track up which we were climbing ended on the edge of a vast precipice, hitherto entirely concealed, and at a moment’s transition disclosed a wide and deeply sunk valley with a scattered village and a blue lake. The hills which hemmed them in were bold and precipitous, tent-shaped, rounded and serrated. Others swept in soft and gentle lines into a little plain where the small village was nestled by the water side. The lake was of the deepest blue and so calm that a sea bird skimming over its surface seemed two, so perfect was its image in the water. The clouds above were floating in this very deep lake, and the inverted tops of the hills on every side were perfectly reflected in its bosom. A few women on the shore seemed rooted there, so steady were their reflections in the water, and the cattle standing in the shallows stood like cattle in a picture.... The sides slope gradually from this part of the valley into the level ground where the village stands. It is a small collection of cottages, without a church or a wineshop or a store of any kind, and at the time I entered it was enveloped in clouds of wood smoke which rose from the fires used in the process of bleaching cloth. This and clothes washing are the chief occupations of the villagers....

A portion of the lake is separated from the larger one by a narrow causeway. It is singular to notice the difference made in the two pieces of water by this small embankment; for, while the large lake is clear and crystalline, this is thick, green, and muddy, and as gloomy as the Dead Sea, with no clouds or birds or bright sky reflected in it.[138]

Perhaps a little excavating archeology might not be amiss in the neighborhood of the causeway and the green dead lakelet. But at least it is satisfactory to have a good external account of the only site in the world, so far as I know, which still bears the legendary name. As elsewhere used, this name has certainly wandered widely and been affixed to many places. Whether any of these represent real refuges of the original emigrants or their descendants or others like them no one can quite certainly say; but there is no evidence for it, and the probabilities are against it. Certainly no Spanish nor Portuguese community, of Moorish or of any pre-Columbian times, established itself in western lands for any great period to make good the aspiration of the fugitives of Merida.

CHAPTER VI
THE PROBLEM OF MAYDA

Of all the legendary islands and island names on the medieval maps, Mayda has been the most enduring. The shape of the island has generally approximated a crescent; its site most often has been far west of lower Brittany and more or less nearly southwest of Ireland; the spelling of the name sometimes has varied to Maida, Mayd, Mayde, Asmaida, or Asmayda. The island had other names also earlier and later and between times, but the identity is fairly clear. As a geographical item it is very persistent indeed. Humboldt about 1836 remarked that, out of eleven such islands which he might mention, only two, Mayda and Brazil Rock, maintain themselves on modern charts.[139] In a note he instances the world map of John Purdy of 1834. However, this was not the end; for a relief map published in Chicago and bearing a notice of copyright of 1906 exhibits Mayda. Possibly this is intended to have an educational and historic bearing; but it seems to be shown in simple credulity, a crowning instance of cartographic conservation.

Possible Arabic Origin of Name

If Mayda may, therefore, be said to belong in a sense to the twentieth century, it is none the less very old, and the name has sometimes been ascribed to an Arabic origin. Not very long after their conquest of Spain the Moors certainly sailed the eastern Atlantic quite freely and may well have extended their voyages into its middle waters and indefinitely beyond. They named some islands of the Azores, as would appear from Edrisi’s treatise and other productions; but these names did not adhere unless in free translation. The name Mayda was not one of those that have come down to us in their writings or on their maps, and its origin remains unexplained. It is unlike all the other names in the sea. Perhaps the Arabic impression is strengthened by the form Asmaidas, under which it appears (this is nearly or quite its first appearance) on the map of the New World in the 1513 edition of Ptolemy ([Fig. 11]).[140] But any possible significance vanishes from the prefixed syllable when we find the same map turning Gomera into Agomera, Madeira into Amadera, and Brazil into Obrassil. Evidently this map-maker had a fancy for superfluous vowels as a beginning of his island names. He may have been led into it by the common practice of prefixing “I” or the alternative “Y” (meaning Insula, Isola, Ilha, or Innis) instead of writing out the word for island in one language or another.