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Transcriber’s note:

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(example: y^a).

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”

[Illustration]

New York

American Geographical Society

1922

Copyright, 1922

by

The American Geographical Society

of New York

The Conde Nast Press

Greenwich, Conn.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I INTRODUCTION 1

II ATLANTIS 11

III ST. BRENDAN’S EXPLORATIONS AND ISLANDS 34

IV THE ISLAND OF BRAZIL 50

V THE ISLAND OF THE SEVEN CITIES 68

VI THE PROBLEM OF MAYDA 81

VII GREENLAND OR GREEN ISLAND 94

VIII MARKLAND, OTHERWISE NEWFOUNDLAND 114

IX ESTOTILAND AND THE OTHER ISLANDS OF ZENO 124

X ANTILLIA AND THE ANTILLES 144

XI CORVO, OUR NEAREST EUROPEAN NEIGHBOR 164

XII THE SUNKEN LAND OF BUSS AND OTHER PHANTOM ISLANDS 174

XIII SUMMARY 187

INDEX 191

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._)

FIG. PAGE

1 Map of the Sargasso Sea, 1:72,000,000 28

2 The Pizigani, 1367 (two sections) 40–41

3 Beccario, 1426 45

4 Dalorto, 1325 51

5 Catalan map, 1375 58

6 Nicolay, 1560 62

7 Catalan map, about 1480 64

8 World map in portolan atlas, about 1508 (Egerton MS. 2803) 74

9 Desceliers, 1546 76

10 Ortelius, 1570 77

11 Ptolemy, 1513 82

12 Prunes, 1553 88

13 Coppo, 1528 97

14 Bishop Thorláksson, 1606 98

15 Map of the early Norse Western and Eastern Settlements

of Greenland, 1:6,400,000 103

16 Clavus, 1427 104

17 Donnus Nicolaus Germanus, after 1466 105

18 Sigurdr Stefánsson, 1590 107

19 Zeno, 1558 126

20 Beccario, 1435 152

21 Pareto, 1455 158

22 Benincasa, 1482 160

23 Representation of Corvo on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century

maps as compared with its present outline 172

24 Buss Island, probably 1673 176

25 Bianco, 1436 179

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]

[Illustration: 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.

[Illustration: 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.)]

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.

[Illustration: 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.”

[Illustration: 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.

[Illustration: 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.

[Illustration: 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.

[Illustration: 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.

[Illustration: 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.

[Illustration: 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.]

[Illustration: 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.

[Illustration: FIG. 11--Section of the map of the New World in the 1513

edition of Ptolemy showing the islands of Mayda (asmaidas) and Brazil

(obrassil). (After Kretschmer’s hand-copied reproduction.)]

However, there is a recorded Arabic association of this particular

island under another name. It had been generally called Mam or Man,

and occasionally other names, for more than a century before it was

called Mayda. Perhaps the oldest name of all is Brazir, by which it

appears on the map of 1367 of the Pizigani brothers (Fig. 2),[141] a

form evidently modified from Brazil and shared with the round island

of that name then already more than forty years old on the charts.

The Brazil which we specially have to do with bears roughly and

approximately the crescent form, which later became usually more neat

and conventionalized under the name Man or Mayda. It appears south (or

rather a little west of south) of the circular Brazil, which is, as

usual, west of southern Ireland and a little south of west of Limerick.

The crescent island is also almost exactly in the latitude of southern

Brittany, taking a point a little below the Isle de Sein, which still

bears that name. In this position there may be indications of relation

with both Brittany and Ireland. The former relation is pictorially

attested by three Breton ships. One of them is shown returning to the

mouth of the Loire. A second has barely escaped from the neighborhood

of the fateful island. A third is being drawn down stern foremost by

a very aggressive decapod, which drags overboard one of the crew;

perhaps she has already shattered herself on the rocks, offering the

opportunity of such capture in her disabled state. A dragon flies by

with another seaman, apparently snatched from the submerging deck.

Blurred and confused inscriptions in strange transitional Latin seem

to warn us of the special dangers of navigation in this quarter; the

staving of holes in ships, the tawny monsters, known to the Arabs,

which rise from the depths, the dragons that come flying to devour. The

words “Arabe” and “Arabour” are readily decipherable; so is “dragones.”

Perhaps there is no statement that Arabs have been to that island,

for their peculiar experience may belong to some other quarter of the

globe; but the verbal association is surely significant. The name

Bentusla (Bentufla?) applied to this crescent island by Bianco in his

map of 1448[142] has sometimes been thought to have an Arabic origin;

but one would not feel safe in citing this as absolute corroboration.

The Breton character of the ships, however, may be gathered (as well as

from their direction and behavior) from the barred ensigns which they

carry, recalling the barred standard set up at Nantes of Brittany, in

Dulcert’s map of 1339,[143] just as the _fleur-de-lis_ is planted by

him at Paris.

MAYDA AND THE ISLE OF MAN

We have, then, in this fourteenth-century island a direct recorded

association with the Arabs, followed long after by what have been

thought to be Arabic names. We have also a pictorial and cartographical

connection with Brittany and also an indication of relations with

Ireland. This last is fortified by its next and, except Mayda, its most

lasting name.

The great Catalan map of 1375[144] (Fig. 5) calls it Mam, which should

doubtless be read as Man, for it was common to treat “m” and “n” as

interchangeable, no less than “u” and “v” or “i” and “y.” Thus Pareto’s

map of 1455[145] (Fig. 21) turns the Latin “hanc” into “hamc” and

“Aragon” into “Aragom.” On some of the early maps, e. g. that of

Juan da Napoli (fifteenth century),[146] the proper spelling “Man” is

retained, just as it is retained and has been ever since early Celtic

days, in the name of the home of “the little Manx nation” in the Irish

Sea. That the same name should be carried farther afield and applied

to a remote island of the Atlantic Ocean is quite in accordance with

the natural course of things and the general experience of mankind.

No doubt the name Man might be derived from other sources, but the

chances are in this instance that the Irish people whose navigators

found Brazil Island (or imagined it, if you please) did the same favor

for the crescent-shaped “Man,” quite overriding for a hundred years any

preceding or competing titles.

Almost immediately there was some competition, for the Pinelli map

of 1384[147] calls it Jonzele (possibly to be read I Onzele, a word

which has an Italian look but is of no certain derivation), reducing

the delineation of the island to a mere shred, bringing Brazil close

to it, and giving the pair a more northern and more inshore location.

Another map of about the same period follows this lead, but there

the divergence ended. Soleri of 1385[148] reverted to the former

representation; and about the opening of the fifteenth century the

regular showing of the pair was established--Brazil and Man, circle

and crescent, by those names and in approximately the locations and

relative position first stated.

It is true that the crescent island is sometimes represented without

any name, as though it were well enough known to make a name

unnecessary. But during the fifteenth century, when it is called

anything, with a bare exception or two, it is called Man. Its shape and

general location are substantially those of the Catalan map of 1375 on

the maps of Juan da Napoli; Giraldi, 1426;[149] Beccario, 1426[150]

and 1435[151] (Fig. 20); Bianco, 1436 and 1448;[152] Benincasa,

1467[153] and 1482[154] (Fig. 22); Roselli, 1468;[155] the Weimar map,

(probably) about 1481;[156] Freducci, 1497;[157] and others--arguing

surely a robust and confident tradition.

RESUMPTION OF NAME “MAYDA”

On sixteenth-century maps this island is still generally presented,

though lacking on those of Ruysch, 1508;[158] Coppo, 1528[159] (Fig.

13); and Ribero, 1529;[160] but suddenly and almost completely the

name Mayda in its various forms takes the place of Man, a substitution

quite unaccounted for. There are hardly enough instances of survival of

the older name to be worth mentioning. Was there some resuscitation of

old records or charts, now lost again, which thus overcame the Celtic

claim and supplied an Arabic or at least a quite alien and unusual

designation? The little mystery is not likely ever to be cleared up.

The previously mentioned map from the Ptolemy edition of 1513 (Fig.

11), which perhaps first introduces it, also presents several other

innovations in departing from the crescent form and shifting the island

a degree or two southward; and these changes surely seem to hint at

some fresh information. That there was no supposed change of identity

is shown by the fact that succeeding cartographers down to and beyond

the middle of that century revert generally to the established crescent

form and to nearly the same place in the ocean previously occupied by

Man, while applying the new name Mayda. Thus an anonymous Portuguese

map of 1519 or 1520,[161] reproduced by Kretschmer, and the graduated

and numbered map of Prunes, 1553[162] (Fig. 12), concur in placing

Mayda or Mayd at about latitude 48° N., the latitude of Quimper,

Brittany, and almost exactly the same as that given by the Pizigani to

the crescent island on its first appearance on the maps as a clearly

recognizable entity.

TRANSFERENCE OF MAYDA TO AMERICAN WATERS

The maps made after the world had become more or less familiarized

with the details of modern discoveries, in this case as in most others

of its kind, indicate little except the dying out of old traditions,

whatever they may have been, and haphazard or conventional substitution

of locations and forms or the influence of the new geographic facts

and theories. Thus Desceliers’ map of 1546[163] (Fig. 9), a museum of

strangely-named sea islands, makes the latitude of “Maidas” 47° and

the longitude that of St. Michaels, but not long afterward Nicolay

(1560;[164] Fig. 6) and Zaltieri (1566)[165] transferred the island to

Newfoundland waters. Nicolay calls it “I man orbolunda,” and places

it just south of the Strait of Belle Isle. It is accompanied by Green

Island and by Brazil, a little farther out on the Grand Banks where the

Virgin Rocks may still be found at low tide. Taken together these three

islands look like parts of a disintegrated Newfoundland. Zaltieri of

1566 gives Maida by that name more nearly the same outward location,

though it is still distinctly American. Nicolay’s name “orbolunda”

is one of the many puzzling things connected with this island. His

“Man” may be either a reversion to the fifteenth-century name, or,

more likely, a modification of, or error in copying from Gastaldi’s

map-illustration[166] of Ramusio about ten years previously, which

allots the same inclement site to an “isola de demoni” and depicts the

little capering devils in wait there for their prey. It is likely,

though, that Gastaldi had no thought of identifying it with Mayda. But

the neighborhood of the island of Brazil and Green Island seem nearly

conclusive evidence that Nicolay intended I Man for Mayda and had

ascribed to it, by reason of evil association, the supposed attributes

of Gastaldi’s island. However, Ramusio himself in 1566,[167] the same

year as Zaltieri, set his “Man” south of Brazil off the coast of

Ireland. The only really important contributions of these maps are

their testimony to the continued diabolical reports of Mayda, or Man,

and the apparent conviction of Nicolay and Zaltieri that the island was

after all American; a suggestion that could have had no meaning and no

support in the times when America was unrecognized. Evidently these

map-makers did not regard the inadequate western longitude of Mayda, or

Man, in the older maps as a formidable objection. Presumably they were

well aware how many of the insular oceanic distances as shown by these

forerunners needed stretching in the light of later discovery. But

their views with regard to an American Mayda seem to have ended with

them, so far as map representation is concerned.

[Illustration: FIG. 12--Section of the Prunes map of 1553 showing

Mayda (in latitude 48°), Brazil, and Estotiland (“Esthlanda”). (After

Kretschmer’s hand-copied reproduction.)]

POSSIBLE IDENTITY OF VLAENDEREN ISLAND WITH MAYDA

There is another curious and rather mystifying episodical divergence

in the cartography of that period, this time on the part of the great

geographers Ortelius and Mercator in their respective series of maps

during the latter part of the sixteenth century, for example Ortelius

of 1570[168] and Mercator of 1587.[169] Ortelius presents as Vlaenderen

an oceanic island which certainly seems intended for Mayda (Fig. 10),

while Mercator shows Vlaenderen as lying about half-way between Brazil

and the usual site of Maida. The word has a Dutch or Flemish look. Of

course there must be some explanation of it, but this is unknown to the

writer. The natural inference would be that some skipper of the Low

Countries thought he had happened upon it and reported accordingly.

This was what occurred in the case of Negra’s Rock, now held to be

wholly fictitious though shown in many maps; and also in the case of

the sunken land of Buss, now generally recognized as real and as a part

of Greenland but recorded and delineated in the wrong place by an error

of observation. It may be that Ortelius believed in a rediscovery of

Mayda and that for some reason it should have the name latest given.

But, in spite of the prestige of these great names, Vlaenderen did not

continue on the maps, while Mayda did, though in a rather capricious

way.

PERSISTENCE OF MAYDA ON MAPS DOWN TO THE MODERN PERIOD

There would be little profit in listing the maps of the seventeenth,

eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries which persisted by inertia and

convention in the nearly stereotyped delineation of Mayda but, of

course, with slight variations in location and name. Thus Nicolaas

Vischer in a map of Europe of 1670 (?)[170] shows “L’as Maidas” in

the longitude of Madeira and the latitude of Brittany; a world map

in Robert’s “Atlas Universel” (1757)[171] gives “I. Maida” about the

longitude of Madeira and the latitude of Gascony; and on a chart of the

Atlantic Ocean published in New York in 1814[172] “Mayda” appears in

longitude 20° W. and latitude 46° N. But these representations have no

significance except as to human continuity.

The evil reputation which was early established and seems to have hung

about the island in later stages, assimilating the icy clashings and

noises and terrors of the north as it had previously incorporated the

monstrous fears of a warmer part of the ocean, is surely a curious

phenomenon. I have fancied it may be responsible for the probably quite

imaginary Devil Rock, which appears in some relatively recent maps,

perhaps as a kind of substitute for Mayda, much in the fashion that

Brazil Rock took the place of Brazil Island when belief in the latter

became difficult. The present view of the U. S. Hydrographic Office,

as expressed on its charts, is that Negra’s Rock, Devil Rock, Green

Island, or Rock, and all that tribe are unreal “dangers,” probably

reported as the result of peculiar appearances of the water surface.

Whether the possibility has been wholly eliminated of a lance of rock

jutting up to the surface from great depths and not yet officially

recognized, I will not presume to say; but it seems highly improbable

that there is anything of the sort in the North Atlantic Ocean except

the lonely and nearly submerged peak of Rockall, some 400 miles west of

Britain, and the well-known oceanic groups and archipelagoes.

PROBABLE BASIS OF FACT UNDERLYING THIS LEGENDARY ISLAND

What was this island, then, which held its place in the maps during

half a millennium and more, under two chief names and occasional

substitutes, designations apparently received from so many different

peoples? One cannot easily set it aside as a “peculiar appearance

of the surface” or as a mere figment of fancy. But there is nothing

westward or southwestward of the Azores except the Bermudas and

the capes and coast islands of America. The identification with

some outlying island of the Azores, as Corvo, for example, is an

old hypothesis; and the grotesquery of that rocky islet seems to

have deeply impressed the minds of early navigators, lending some

countenance to the idea. But the Laurenziano map of 1351[173] and the

Book of the Spanish Friar[174] show that all the islands of the Azores

group were known before the middle of the fourteenth century, and

Corvo in particular had been given the name which it still holds. Man,

afterward Mayda, appears on many maps of the fifteenth century, which

show also the Azores in full. Perhaps this is not conclusive, for there

are strange blunders and duplications on old maps; but it is at least

highly significant. If Man, or Mayda, were really Corvo or another

island of the Azores group, surely someone would have found it out in

the course of the fifteenth or sixteenth century, just as it came to

be perceived after a time that the Azores had been located too near

to Europe and just as Bianco’s duplication of the Azores in 1448 had

finally to be rejected. Mayda, if real, must have been something more

remote and difficult to determine than Corvo.

Perhaps Nicolay and Zaltieri were right in thinking that Mayda was

America, or at least was on the side of the Atlantic toward America.

The latitude generally chosen by the maps would then call for Avalon

Peninsula, Newfoundland, often supposed to be insular in early days;

or perhaps for Cape Breton Island, the next salient land feature. But

that is an uncertain reliance, for the observations of pre-Columbian

navigators would surely be rather haphazard, and they might naturally

judge by similarity of climate. This would justify them in supposing

that a region really more southerly lay in the latitude of northern

France--for example Cape Cod, which juts out conspicuously and is

curved and almost insular. Or by going farther south, although nearer

Europe, they might thus indicate the Bermudas, the main island of which

is given a crescent form on several relatively late maps. But we must

not lay too much stress on this last item, for divers other map islands

were modeled on this plan. We may be justified, then, in saying that

Mayda was probably west of the middle of the Atlantic and that Bermuda,

Cape Cod, or Cape Breton is as likely a candidate for identification as

we can name.

CHAPTER VII

GREENLAND OR GREEN ISLAND

The first account of Greenland given to the world, indeed the first

mention of that region in literature, is by Adam of Bremen, an

ecclesiastical official and geographical author.

ADAM OF BREMEN’S ACCOUNT OF GREENLAND

He interviewed in 1069 the enterprising king Sweyn of Denmark, and

acquired from him divers Scandinavian and other northern items which

Adam embodied about 1076 in his work “Descriptio Insularum Aquilonis,”

the Description of the Northern Islands. Nansen quotes, with other

matter, the following passages:[175]

... On the north this ocean flows past the Orchades, thence

endlessly around the circle of the earth, having on the left

Hybernia, the home of the Scots, which is now called Ireland,

and on the right the skerries of Nordmannia, and farther off

the islands of Iceland and Greenland....

Furthermore, there are many other islands in the great ocean,

of which Greenland is not the least; it lies farther out in

the ocean, opposite the mountains of Suedea, or the Riphean

range. To this island, it is said, one can sail from the shore

of Nortmannia [_sic_] in five or seven days, as likewise to

Iceland. The people there are blue (“cerulei”, bluish-green)

from the salt water; and from this the region takes its name.

They live in a similar fashion to the Icelanders, except that

they are more cruel and trouble seafarers by predatory attacks.

To them also, as is reported, Christianity has lately been

wafted.

It was in fact about seventy-five years since Leif, son of Eric the

Red, according to the sagas, had effected that wafting from the

Christian court of Norway to the still pagan Norsemen of his father’s

far-western domain. For Adam clearly means these white people and not

the Eskimos, with whom they had not yet come in contact and of whom no

whisper had yet reached the European world unless it related to relics

of former occupancy discerned on first landing. It is surely matter for

astonishment to find the ruddy followers of hot-blooded Eric described

as bluish-green and so conspicuous in this complexion that it gave

their region its name. Perhaps there is no more curious instance to be

found of the inveterate human tendency to read into any unfamiliar name

some meaning that seems plausible.

It is not clear where Adam supposed Greenland to be located; perhaps

he, too, was not clear about the matter. The earlier of his two

passages on the subject seems to call for something like the true

location in the far west; but the later mention of the mountains of

Sweden has been understood by the most learned commentators to indicate

a site directly north of Norway. King Sweyn perhaps had a fairly good

idea of the sailing courses for Iceland and Greenland, but his guest

may have assimilated the information rather confusedly. Adam seems

convinced that Greenland was a distinctly oceanic island, with no

suggestion of any near relation to any continent. In this respect he

differs from certain maps of the fifteenth century with which we shall

presently have to deal. We know now that the truth lies between these

views; that the highly glaciated mass which we name in its entirety

Greenland is, indeed, an island and probably the largest of islands but

an island with the aspect and attributes of a peninsula, being barely

severed from that polar archipelago which crowns our American mainland

and being not very remote at one point from the mainland itself.

ITS INSULAR CHARACTER

Adam’s idea of oceanic insulation was accepted in many quarters, as

the maps disclose. Of course, they may not have derived it from him

in all instances, directly or indirectly, but at least they shared

it. Usually the name, slightly changed, becomes the equivalent “Green

Island” in one or another of several languages. Thus, to take a very

late instance, the map of Coppo, 1528[176] (Fig. 13), discloses near

the true site of Greenland a mass of land elongated from east to west,

but clearly all at sea with no greater land near it, and labeled Isola

Verde. There seems no room for doubt of the meaning or origin of this

name. That any land found there should be an island of the sea was

the natural assumption of geographers at that time. Maps of the early

sixteenth century generally show a scattering of islands south of North

America sometimes approaching an archipelago, sometimes more widely

distributed, and in either case being substitutes for what we now know

as North America and its appendages.

AS “ILLA VERDE” ON THE CATALAN MAP OF 1480

In another well-known map[177] (Fig. 7), an unnamed cartographer,

said to be Catalan, probably about 1480, delineates an elongated Illa

Verde (using the Portuguese name for island), locating it southwest of

Iceland, which bears the name Fixlanda, but is easily identifiable by

its outline and geographical features. His Illa Verde runs nearly north

and south, approximating more closely than Coppo’s island the true

trend of Greenland. It also by its greater bulk seems founded on more

adequate information. It is equally at sea and remote from other land,

except that off its concave southern end, with a narrow interval, lies

a large circular island named Brazil, our old mythical acquaintance of

medieval maps not often located so far westward but, as we have seen in

Chapter IV, apparently intended to represent the Gulf of St. Lawrence

region. These two islands strikingly resemble in general situation and

arrangement the Greenland and Estotiland (Labrador) in a map (Fig. 14)

illustrating Torfaeus’ early eighteenth century “Gronlandia,”[178]

except that the rounded outline of Estotiland is not completed, its

proportional area is greater than “Brazil,” the strait between the

two bodies of land is a little wider, and the lower end of Torfaeus’

Greenland is not made concave like that of Illa Verde. But again there

can be no doubt that the Illa Verde of the Catalan (if he were a

Catalan) represents the Greenland of Adam of Bremen and the sagas.

[Illustration: FIG. 13--Coppo’s world map of 1528 showing Green Island

(“isola verde”). (After Kretschmer’s hand-copied reproduction.)]

GREEN ISLAND ON SIXTEENTH-CENTURY MAPS

To the same origin, in a remoter sense, we may ascribe the rather

large Insula Viridis of Schöner, 1520,[179] which is brought down to a

latitude between that of southern Ireland and that of northern Spain

and something east of mid-ocean. It must seem that the map-maker had

quite lost sight of any relation between this Latinized Green Island

and the true Greenland of the northwest.

[Illustration: FIG. 14--Bishop Thorláksson’s map of Greenland 1606,

showing Estotiland as a part of America. Cf. with Fig. 18. (From

Torfaeus’ “Gronlandia antiqua,” Copenhagen, 1706, in the library of the

American Geographical Society.)]

This is even more obviously true of Nicolay’s map of 1560[180] (Fig.

6), which carries Verde into the Newfoundland Banks, even nearer

than his Brazil to a broken-up Newfoundland; and of Zaltieri’s map

of 1566,[181] which plants Verde rather close to “C. Ras” (Cape

Race), with only a narrow strip of water between. These cartographers

undoubtedly indicated American habitats for their little island; but

they can have had no thought of confusing it with Greenland, which

they well knew and which Zaltieri distinctly shows as Grutlandia.

They would be far from admitting a common origin. Perhaps in most

of such northern cases a conception like Coppo’s of Greenland as

an oceanic island is at the root of the derivation; but successive

copyings, modifications, and shiftings may have altered the area, form,

and location, while the clue was gradually lost and only the name

remained--hardly as a reminder, for it is of too general descriptive

application.

VARIOUS “GREEN ISLANDS:” SHRINKAGE OF THE NAME

There is, indeed, one instance of a Green Island with which Greenland

can have had nothing whatever to do. Peter Martyr d’Anghiera’s sketch

map of 1511[182] shows a small tropical Isla Verde near Trinidad; it is

apparently Tobago. Doubtless its luxuriance of vegetation prompted the

name.

This may have happened in other instances of warm climates or even in

temperate zones where grass and foliage grow freely; so that we in

many cases cannot distinguish on the maps the Green Islands, real or

fanciful, which acquired their name as a remote legacy of Eric’s land

from those which were called “green” simply because they were green.

Both derivations may sometimes apply; but the islands of the far

northwest bearing that name, like Coppo’s island and the Catalan’s Illa

Verde, must naturally go into the former category.

As we have seen, Green Islands were scattered rather widely; but the

name occurs most often in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in

the middle or eastern part of the ocean to indicate a small island,

having Mayda (Vlaenderen) for its rather distant consort. Desceliers

indeed, in 1546[183] (Fig. 9), shows it in the same longitude as

the tip of Labrador, but this is done by carrying Labrador too far

eastward. St. Brandan’s Island is a neighbor on his map. Ortelius,

in 1570[184] (Fig. 10) and Mercator, in 1587,[185] represent Y

Verde west of Vlaenderen in the region north of the Azores. In the

eighteenth century it still held its ground west of France in the

eastern Atlantic as Isla Verde, Isla Verte, Ile Verte, Ilha Verde, and

Green Island. By the early part of the nineteenth century it had, after

its kind, dwindled to Green Rock--Brazil Island similarly becoming

Brazil Rock--as dubious rocks became easier to believe in than dubious

islands. Perhaps the well-known actual instances of Rockall and the

Virgin Rocks may have prompted credence in other spears and knolls of

the earth crust here and there reaching the surface.

The Hydrographic Office does not believe in any such Green Rock or

Green Island but supplies, in a letter to the writer, a mariner’s yarn

which is not without interest and may be evidence for the rock as far

as it goes.

“Captain Tulloch, of New Hampshire, states that an acquaintance of

his, Captain Coombs, of the ship _Pallas_, of Bath, Maine, in keeping

a lookout for Green Island actually saw it on a remarkably fine day

when the sea was smooth. According to the story, he went out in his

boat and examined it and found it to be a large rock covered with green

moss. The rock did not seem much larger than a vessel floating bottom

upward, and it was smooth all around. The summit was higher than a

vessel’s bottom would appear out of the water, being about twenty feet

above the surface of the sea. Captain Coombs added that if the object

had not been so high he would have thought it to be a capsized vessel.

A sounding taken near this spot shows that a depth of 1,500 fathoms

exists there.”

So Greenland, misunderstood and carried southward, dwindles to what may

be taken for a capsized vessel’s hull, the existence of which is denied

by those who best should know. Or, to take it the other way about, the

traditions of Green Island, dwindling, prompted the mariner’s fancy to

develop a Green Rock; and Green Island is in numerous instances derived

mainly, even if remotely, from Greenland, reinforced sometimes by

implications of attractiveness.

ORIGIN OF THE NAME “GREENLAND” AND ITS JUSTIFICATION

There can be no doubt that the Down East sea captain, who was so quick

to perceive green vegetation on his fancied Green Island, came nearer

the true explanation of Greenland’s name than the good prebendary of

Bremen with his bluish-green Norsemen colored by the sea. It is pretty

well understood that about 985 or 986 Eric Rauda (Eric the Red, or

Ruddy), the first explorer and colonizer of this new region, applied

the name at least partly as an advertisement of fertility and promising

conditions for the encouragement of Icelandic colonists. This is the

way Ari Frode (the Wise), the best informed man of Iceland, puts it

in his surviving Libellus of the “Islendingabok” about a century

later:[186]

This country which is called Greenland was discovered and

colonized from Iceland. Eric the Red was the name of the man,

an inhabitant of Breidafirth, who went thither from here and

settled at that place, which has since been called Ericsfirth.

He gave a name to the country and called it Greenland and

said that it must persuade men to go thither if it had a good

name. They found there both east and west in the country the

dwellings of men and fragments of boats and stone implements

such that it might be perceived from these that that manner

of people had been there who have inhabited Wineland and whom

Greenlanders call Skraelings. And this when he set about the

colonization of the country was fourteen or fifteen winters

before the introduction of Christianity here in Iceland,

according to what a certain man who himself accompanied Eric

the Red thither informed Thorkell Gellison.

This last was an uncle of Ari, a man of liberal and inquiring mind and

one of Ari’s most valued sources of knowledge as to the affairs of

earlier generations.

The passage has been often quoted, but that Eric was largely justified

in his nomenclature is less generally known. Greenland to the

intending colonists would naturally mean not the ice-enshrouded waste

of the almost continental interior nor yet the forbidding cliffs of

the eastern coast guarded by a nearly impassable floe-laden Arctic

current, but the really habitable thousand-mile fringe of uncovered

land along the southwestern shore, on the average fifty miles wide and

occasionally much wider. It was partly shut in by forbidding headlands

and perverse currents, but feasible of access when the true course was

disclosed. Some parts of this region were, and still are, green with

grass and bright with summer flowers. Nansen, who certainly ought to

know, declares that the Greenland sites chosen would have seemed more

attractive than Iceland to an Icelander. Rink, who was connected with

the Greenland government for a full generation, mentions certain places

with special approval and regards life in most parts of the inhabited

region quite contentedly.[187] Professor Hovgaard tells us:[188]

ICELANDIC SETTLEMENT

It was on this strip of land that the Icelanders settled at the

end of the tenth century. Though barren on the outer shores and

islands and on the hills, it is covered at the inner part of

the fiords on the low level by a rich growth of grass together

with stunted birch trees and various bushes, particularly

willows. On the north side of the valleys crowberries

(_Empetrum nigrum_) may be found....

Eric settled in Ericsfiord, the present Tunugdliarfik, at

a place which he called Brattahlid, now Kagsiarsuk, in 985

or 986. Two distinct colonies were founded, the Eastern

Settlement, extending from about Cape Farewell to a point well

beyond Cape Desolation, comprising the whole of Julianehaab

Bay and the coast past Ivigtut, and the Western Settlement,

beginning about one hundred and seventy miles farther north

at Lysufiord, [i.e. Agnafiord], the present Ameralikfiord,

comprising the district of Godthaab.

The fiord next Ericsfiord in the Eastern Settlement was

Einarsfiord, now Igalikofiord. These fiords were separated

at their head by a low and narrow strip of land, the present

Igaliko Isthmus. It was here, at Gardar, that the Althing of

Greenland met, and here was also found the bishop’s seat,

established at the beginning of the twelfth century. There were

as many as sixteen churches in Greenland, for almost every

fiord had its own church on account of the long distances and

difficult traveling between the fiords.

[Illustration: FIG. 15--Map of the early Norse Western and Eastern

Settlements of Greenland. Scale 1:6,400,000. (The inset below.

1:70,000,000, shows the relation of Norway, Iceland, and Greenland.)]

The unfamiliar localities above named may be followed by the aid of the

accompanying map (Fig. 15) copied from Finnur

Jónsson’s maps,[189] which embody the results of the research of the

best experts and scholars with the aid of relics on the ground and

surviving records. It is apparent that from the first to last the

heart of Greenland was about the low, fairly fertile, favorable tract

near the heads of the two fiords named for Eric and his friend, Einar,

and not far from Eric’s Greenland home. The Western Settlement was a

comparatively small offshoot, with four churches only, yet it contrived

to maintain existence for between three and four centuries, being at

last obliterated, as is supposed, by the Eskimos. The main settlement

was still more enduring, having a continuous record of nearly half

a millennium, a history not surpassed in duration by some far more

populous and powerful nations.

[Illustration: FIG. 16--Section of the Clavus map of 1427 showing

Greenland continuous with Europe. (After Joseph Fischer’s hand-copied

reproduction.)]

This seems marvelous, if it be true that the entire population never

exceeded 2,000 souls, as Nansen and Hovgaard have supposed. Rink, on

the other hand, estimated the maximum at 10,000.[190] Some intermediate

number would seem more likely than either extreme, if we may hazard

a conjecture where doctors disagree. The prosperity of the colony,

such as it was, seems to have been at its best in the eleventh and

twelfth centuries but was never conspicuous enough to get an outline of

Greenland into the maps until about the time of final extinction.

[Illustration: FIG. 17--Section of the world map of Donnus Nicolaus

Germanus (after 1466) showing Greenland continuous with Europe. (After

Joseph Fischer’s photographic reproduction.)]

GREENLAND AS A PENINSULA

We must remember, though, that during the earlier part of this period

there were not many maps extant which included the Atlantic, and

of these the greater number were more concerned with theological

conceptions and figures of wonder than with the sober facts of

geography, especially in remote places. About 1300 a remarkable series

of navigators’ portolan maps, revolutionizing this attitude, began to

add to the delineation of the Mediterranean, which they had already

developed with considerable minuteness, something definite of the

outer European coasts, islands, and waters. Step by step they advanced

into the unknown or little known, but perhaps none of them, before the

fifteenth century, can be confidently relied on as indicating Greenland.

This remained for the Nancy map of Claudius Clavus (Schwartz),

1427[191] (Fig. 16). Greenland is, however, made distinctly continuous

with Europe, being connected thereto by a long land bridge, far north

of Iceland, in accordance with an hypothesis then prevailing. The

second half of the same century saw this conception of Claudius Clavus

greatly popularized. Divers maps[192] appeared, some showing Greenland

as a prodigiously elongated peninsula of Europe, having its tip in the

correct location (Fig. 17), while others ran up a perverse trapezoidal

Greenland from the north coast of Norway.

Probably one or more of the former kind suggested in part the memorable

Zeno map of 1558[193] (Fig. 19), professing to be a reproduction of a

map prepared by the Zeni of a past generation and carelessly damaged

by the final editor in boyhood. If not a total forgery, it is at least

untrustworthy, as we shall see in Chapter IX, and the same is true of

an accompanying narrative of experiences in Greenland about 1400.

Another map of somewhat later date, by Sigurdr Stefánsson, probably

1590[194] (Fig. 18), is a quite honest presentation of the traditional

views of Icelanders at that time and is distinctly more modern than

the Zeno map in the complete severance of Greenland from Europe and

its union with the great western land mass which included Helluland,

Markland, and Vinland, supposed to be divided by a fiord from “America

of the Spaniards.” Of course, that union with the Western continent

is not precisely accurate and the eastward trend which he gives his

great peninsula is still less so; but his map, often copied, remains a

peculiarly interesting production.

LIFE OF THE ICELANDIC COLONY

To hark back to Adam of Bremen, the charges of special cruelty and

predatory attacks on seafarers in the middle of the eleventh century

awaken some surprise. The life of the people seems simple and innocent

enough, as disclosed by their relics and remnants, which have been

unearthed with great care. As seal bones predominate in their refuse

piles, this offshore supply must have been their greatest reliance

for animal food; but they had also sheep, goats, and a small breed of

cattle. They spun wool and wove it; they carved vessels of soapstone,

sometimes with decoration; they milked cows and made butter; they

exported sealskins, ropes of walrus hide, and walrus tusks; they paid

tithes to the Pope in such commodities; they boiled seal fat and made

seal tar; they gathered tree trunks as driftwood far up the coast

and probably brought back cargoes of timber from Markland; they built

substantial houses and churches, using huge stones in some cases. But

they had to import grain, iron, and many other articles from Europe;

and the infrequent visits of ships from Iceland, Norway, and elsewhere

must have made a break in the monotony of their lives which they could

ill afford to forego. One would expect them to be especially kind to

such visitors.

[Illustration: FIG. 18--Sigurdr Stefánsson’s map of Greenland, 1590,

showing the severance of Greenland from Europe and its union with the

western land mass which includes Helluland, Markland, and Vinland. Cf.

with Fig. 14. (From Torfaeus’ “Gronlandia antiqua,” Copenhagen, 1706,

in the library of the American Geographical Society.)]

On the other hand, the belligerent spirit which kept up the bloody

feuds of Iceland would not quickly have lapsed from these transplanted

Icelanders in their new home. Moreover, there were thralls among

them and the irritations growing out of thralldom. Also, while much

of their daily routine was quiet enough, they were subject to savage

weather and perils of navigation, of the fisheries, of hunting far up

the coast, where many of them maintained stations for that purpose at

Krogfiordsheath and other points. Even in getting to Greenland Eric was

able to carry through only about half of the ships that sailed with

him, and Gudrid and Thorbiorn, coming later, incurred ample experiences

of storm and danger. These wild elements of life would tend to enhance

a certain recklessness; and the law must have been impotent to maintain

order in remote fiords and headlands, even if it had sought to do so.

In the Floamanna Saga, dealing with events not long after the very

first settlement, the thralls of Thorgils murder his young wife on the

eastern coast, where they had all been cast ashore together. In another

of the Greenland tales there is a bloody contention, freely involving

homicide, over the claims of the church upon the contents of two ships

which had come to grief. No doubt such instances might be multiplied;

but in the main we may believe that the lives of the Greenlanders

went orderly enough in common grooves of very primitive husbandry and

fishing. Adam may have judged by reports of visitors with a grievance,

narrated at second or third hand.

If Greenland had a long history, it was that of a few people in a

remote region and could not present many salient features. The colony

possessed at least one monastery and the beginning of a literature,

including, it is said, the Lay of Atli, revealing a curious interest in

the career of the great Hun Attila, on the part of a distant colonist

hidden in Arctic mists and writing beside the glaciers. In art, as

distinguished from literature, they seem to have made few advances,

if any, beyond mere ornamental carving or designing on a plane hardly

surpassing that of the Eskimos.

EXPLORATIONS OF EARLY GREENLANDERS

But in seamanship and exploration their achievements, considering

their numbers and resources, were really wonderful. All experts agree

that Eric’s first exploration was daring, skillful, persistent, and

exhaustive, according to the best modern standards, and that his

selection of settlement sites was exceedingly judicious; in fact, could

not have been improved upon. Then followed in less than twenty years

the discovery of the American mainland by Eric’s son Leif (or, as some

say, by one Biarni, followed by Leif) and a series of other voyages,

including Thorfinn Karlsefni’s prolonged effort to colonize, involving

the tracing of the American coast line from at least upper Labrador to

some point south of Newfoundland. The precise lower limit is matter of

dispute, but, according to the better opinion, may be found somewhere

on the front of southern New England. These were followed in 1121

by the missionary journey, as it seems to have been, of Bishop Eric

Gnupsson, who then sailed out of Greenland for Vinland, we do not know

with what result. Subsequent communication with parts of the American

continent was probably not uncommon, as has been inferred from the

accidental arrival in 1347 of a ship which had sailed from Greenland to

Markland and been storm-driven from the latter westward. It pursued its

course to Norway.

In the opposite (northern) direction we know of at least two

venturesome voyages up Baffin Bay, and, as the records have reached us

almost by accident, we may naturally conjecture many more.

A British exploring expedition in 1824 acquired a small stone inscribed

with runic characters near some beacons on an island north of Upernivik

on the upper northwestern coast of Greenland. The original is lost,

but a duplicate of it is preserved in the Copenhagen National Museum.

Divers copies[195] have been published. The inscription is thought

to date from about 1300, translated by various runologists, with

differences in detail. As given by Professor Hovgaard, it reads:

Erling Sigvatsson and Bjarne Thordarson and Endride Oddson

built this (or these) beacon(s) Saturday after “Gagnday” (April

25th) and cleared (the place) (or made the inscription) 1135

(?).

The year is reported with some uncertainty; and it must be owned that

the body of the text offers several alternatives. Such a memorial would

more naturally be put up by the men who built the beacons or those of

about their time than by a later generation to commemorate the not

vitally important doings of those who were dead and gone. The year 1300

seems a little late for venturing so far, as it was about the beginning

of a period of decadence and less than forty years before the Western

Settlement vanished altogether. The date 1135 would better accord with

the climax of Norse strenuousness and Greenland adventure. Perhaps the

runes were carved in the stone earlier than the runologists suppose.

But, whether the original visit took place in the twelfth century or

the fourteenth, and whether the stone denotes two Norse visits to this

place or only one, it is still conclusive that some Greenlanders had

explored well to the northward along the shore of Baffin Bay in the

time of the old colony.

A more extensive exploration was undertaken in 1266 by the clergy,

apparently of the Bishop’s seat, since they traveled home to Gardar.

It appears that certain men had been farther north than usual but

reported no sign of previous occupancy by the Eskimos (who seem by

this time to have awakened some concern among the Norsemen) except

at the unusually broad reindeer-pasture land and hunting ground of

Krogfiordsheath, a little below Disko Bay. This made a good starting

point for the ship, which was thereupon sent “northward in order to

explore the regions north of the farthest point which they had hitherto

visited,” apparently with a special view of getting more light on the

whereabouts of the heathen and their line of approach. In these regards

the adventure was barren; but the narrative of one of the priests is

interesting so far as it goes:[196]

... they sailed out from Krogfiordsheath, until they lost

sight of the land. Then they had a south wind against them and

darkness, and they had to let the ship go before the wind;

but when the storm ceased and it cleared up again, they saw

many islands and all kinds of game, both seals and whales and

a great number of bears. They came right into the sea-bay and

lost sight of all the land, both the southern coast and the

glaciers; but south of them were also glaciers as far as they

could see.

That was their farthest point. They then sailed southward, reaching

Krogfiordsheath again and eventually Gardar. On the way they had

noticed some abandoned Eskimo houses but no living Eskimos.

There is some attempt to indicate latitude by the way shadows fell in a

boat. Also we are told, apparently meaning midsummer or a little later:

“at midnight the sun was as high as at home in the settlement when it

is in northwest.” But speculations as to their course and distance

have given varying results. Some think they may even have passed into

Smith Sound; others that they may have crossed the Middle Water to

the western shore of Baffin Bay, seeing south of them the glaciers of

northeastern Baffin Land; others still that they did not get very far

above Upernivik; but, whatever the exact limit, it seems to have been a

notable bit of Arctic exploration, prosecuted rather at random and with

scant resources.

THE ESKIMOS

The Eskimos (Skraelings) are referred to in this account as if already

known to the settlers, though uncertain as to their home quarters and

mysterious in their coming and going. Probably there had been some

contact, not wholly friendly, between outranging members of the two

races. The Historia Norvegiae,[197] a manuscript of the same century

discovered in Scotland, says:

Beyond the Greenlanders toward the north their hunters came

across a kind of small people called Skraelings. When they are

wounded alive their wound becomes white without issue of blood;

but the blood scarcely ceases to stream out of them when they

are dead.

Whatever may be thought of this magical oddity of surgery, it at least

seems to imply authentically some experiments in piercing or slashing

the living. Whether such collision was a matter of the thirteenth

century only or had first occurred in the twelfth or still earlier

we cannot say. The Eskimo race was the ominous shadow of the Norse

colonist from the beginning, though long unrecognized as a menace.

Apparently there had been a temporary movement of these people down the

western coast about the tenth century, withdrawing before the first

white men appeared. After that for generations, perhaps centuries,

the weaker heathen wisely kept out of sight, either beyond the water

or at hunting grounds far up the Greenland coast. At last they moved

nearer, and there was occasional contact while still the Norsemen were

formidable. But by the fourteenth century Norse Greenland had begun to

dwindle in power and population, with diminishing aid and reinforcement

from Europe, and the danger drew nearer. Perhaps there was some special

impulsion of the uncivilized people which resulted in the obliteration

of the Western Norse Settlement, always relatively feeble. Some rumor

of its need having reached the Eastern Settlement, an expedition

of relief was dispatched about 1337, or perhaps a little later,

accompanied by Ivar Bardsen, then or afterward steward of the Bishop,

who tells the tale. Only a few stray cattle were found; presumably the

colonists had been killed or carried away.

The ground thus lost could not be regained. On the contrary, we

may suppose the Eskimos to be getting stronger and drawing nearer.

In 1355 an expedition under Paul Knutson came out to reinforce the

Norsemen; but it returned home in or before 1364 and can have made

only a temporary lightening of the load. In 1379 there seems to have

been an Eskimo attack, costing the Norsemen 18 of their few men. But

peace may have reigned as a rule. At any rate, the ordinary functions

of life went on, for it is of record that a young Icelander, visiting

Greenland, was married by the Bishop at Gardar in 1409; and the last

visit of the Norwegian _knorr_, or supply ship, occurred by way of

Iceland in 1410.

After that nothing is certainly known. There are two papal letters at

different periods of the century, based on very questionable hearsay

information and indicating confusion and general falling away. There

was even a futile effort to reopen communication in 1492. Probably by

that time the Norsemen and Norse women were all dead or married to the

Eskimos. That particular form of primitive heathendom seems to have

absorbed them.

Greenland was to be rediscovered and repeopled in due season; but

for the time being it had become in European knowledge only a

half-forgotten figure on certain maps, sometimes given with fair

accuracy of outline but sometimes also as an oceanic Green Island of

only indirect relation to reality and passing its name on to little

islands and even fancied rocks far at sea, which owned nothing in

common with the far northern region except a part of its name.