“The thirteenth day of May we passed by the Island of Paris, and
the Island of the bankes of Helicon, and the Island called Ditter,
where are many boares and the women bee witches.” This glimpse of
Mediterranean travel from one of the sixteenth-century wanderers whose
voyages are recorded in Hakluyt might be paralleled from the outer
Atlantic, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, or the South Seas. In the
_Arabian Nights_, for example, Sayf Al-Muluk and his companions came in
turn to the isle of the old men of the sea; to the isle of ghouls who
sleep under cover of their ears; to the isle of gigantic blackamoors
with protruding eyeteeth; and to the isle of trained apes “bigger than
he-mules.”
Such folk seem at home in the wilderness of waters. These distant
spaces of the sea are little worlds of their own which imagination
feels free to dower with peculiar institutions and stock with peculiar
peoples. In islands of reality or fantasy men place their ideal states,
their pirate realms, their abodes of exile, their refuges from the
restraints and traditions of life--the sanctuaries of pursuits and
companionships other than those of which they have tired. In them,
also, they place the regions of repose; to reach felicity one must
cross water.
On journeys thither one might sight the shores of the folk of prodigy.
There were islands of men, and islands of women, and islands of
hermits, and islands of witches, and islands of satyrs, and islands of
giants, and islands of dwarfs, and islands of dog-headed, ox-worshiping
cannibals. The impulse thus to set aside a maritime domicile for the
nondescript nations was strongest with Arab geographers and Celtic
story-tellers. It culminates in the romancing narrative of Maundeville,
who dotted the eastern seas with the archipelagoes of his fancy and
settled them with the creatures of fable.
When the spell of terror woven in classic times began to lift from
the Atlantic, its islands swam into sight as to the strains of harp
music. They appeared to belong equally to geography and to poetry.
Of Madeira, the discovery of which is associated with the romance of
fugitive English lovers, an old writer declared that such a delightful
land “could only have been discovered by love.” For reasons as yet
unexplained, nearly all the newly found islands of the eastern Atlantic
bore the names of animals or birds. About them, Sir John Hawkins wrote,
“are certaine flitting Ilands which have been oftentimes seene, and
when men approched neere them, they vanished.” The older maps show one
such island which was called St. Brendan’s. It is a memory of the Irish
sea epics, and the latter are themselves a review of the entire island
story.
In these five wander-tales the empty spaces of the Atlantic are filled
in with islands which were loaned to the Irish by Homer from the
Odyssey and Plato from his Atlantis; by the Greek, Lucian, from his
Rabelaisian _True History_; by the Roman, Seneca, with his vision of a
continent in the west; by him who saw the Sea of Glass from the rock
of Patmos; by Arab story-tellers, and by early Moorish and Spanish
chroniclers from their narratives of the shadowy Antillia, the Isle
of the Seven Bishops, and the legendary journey of the Deluded Folk.
Celtic fancy passed a wand over this jumble of material, and a strange
new world appeared. Headlands of snow and ice and islands of perpetual
summer were within a day’s sail of one another, pagan fables and
monkish marvels were domiciled together, there was much mist and much
sunshine, and around all was “the mighty and intolerable ocean” which
St. Brendan saw at Sliabh Daidche.
Tennyson has set one of these tales, _The Voyage of Mældune_, to his
own music. It was a journey of revenge a chieftain made with his men to
slay the man who has slain his father. They came to the Silent Isle,
where their voices were thinner and fainter than any flittermouse
shriek; to the Isle of Shouting where wild birds cried from its summit
till the steer fell down at the plow and the harvest died in the field;
to the Isle of Flowers where were blossom and promise of blossom and
never a fruit; to the Isle of Fruits, and in every berry and fruit the
poisonous pleasure of wine; to the Isle of Fire, which shuddered and
shook like a man in a mortal affright; to the Bounteous Isle, where the
men began to be weary, to sigh and to stretch and yawn; to the Isle of
Witches, naked as heaven, who bosomed the burst of the spray; to the
Isle of the Double Towers, that shocked on each other and butted each
other with clashing of bells; and to the Isle of a Saint, who told the
men, “Go back to the Isle of Finn, and suffer the past to be past.”
This narrative may stand with variations for all of the Irish sea
tales. Under the sway of some overmastering motive the hero puts forth
upon the deep--for revenge, or to save a comrade condemned, or to seek
a woman, or to reach the Land of Promise, or to find the Lord upon
the sea. The voyagers pass from island to island. Complaisant Circes
greet them from one shore and indignant female virtue repels them from
another. They come to the isle called the Delicious, to the Isle of
Sheep, to the Isle of Laughter, to the Moving Isle which was a whale’s
back, to the isle which is the mouth of hell. They see demons racing
their horses on a magic course, and red-hot swine issuing from caves,
and stinging cats, and Judas on his rock, and ants the size of foals.
A griffin assaults them, the Cyclopes threaten them, birds sing psalms
to them. Repentant, or triumphant, or prophetic, or stricken in years,
they come back at last to an Ireland that has forgotten them.
Who fares on from island to island with these Celtic dreamers may visit
the whole realm of fable.
_The Sunken Lands_
Gazing into the ocean depths in warm latitudes one sees the fronds of
tall aquatic plants sway slightly as if a slow breeze stirred them.
Walls of coral rise there with a wavering semblance to palaces. The
purple mullet swims in and out of sunken grottos. Such sunlight as
reaches them is subdued to softness, like that admitted by cathedral
windows when it is late afternoon. These seem to be groves and gardens
and habitations under the sea. Beings like one’s fellow mortals, but
more beautiful and gentle, might live there and rove in the dim peace
of meadows beneath the foam and tumult of the reefs.
Such thoughts come without bidding. Always men have sought the land of
heart’s desire, and sometimes they told themselves that it was under
the sea; or perhaps that what they saw there was not the promise of
what should be but the wreck of what had been.
The sea is a mirror as well as a window. It repeats the curves of
shore and sky and all that is between--cornfields, and grazing cattle,
and the burden of orchards, and cottage smoke, and the loom of church
towers. Here is an underworld, though it be but the simple magic of
light upon smooth water. There is a subtler magic of mist and water
and uncertain sun gleams when one stands on the west coast of Ireland
and looks seaward through the eyes of a people in whom wonder never
flickered down in doubt.
Dwelling alone on the outer coast of the world as the ancients knew it,
these folk had beheld strange things in the great waters that roared
along their cliffs. Shadowy islands showed themselves in thick weather,
and, though no trace of them remained when the cloud bank lifted, these
were no tricks of mirage wrought by fog and muffled sunlight. They were
isles of enchantment that might have floated out of sight, but more
likely had sunk beneath the wave, not to emerge again until another
seven years were gone. The glints of splendor upon the distant sea were
not the track of the sun in broken water. They came from the golden
roofs and spires of a sunken city.
So out of things seen--as in a glass darkly--upon, above, and under the
billow, and out of things imagined or hoped for, men have wrought the
legend of cities that sleep beneath the ocean. The tale of Atlantis
is the oldest form of the legend. But the tales of lost cities are
not legend altogether and the tale of Atlantis may not be legend
altogether. There are submerged ruins on which romance bases itself as
upon reality, there are authentic historical happenings, and there are
local traditions which, it may be, retain the memory of cities that
were upon islands or coasts engulfed by the sea.
[Illustration: _In Islands Men Placed Their Ideal States.... To Reach
Felicity One Must Cross Water_]
Along the Italian coast the columns of sunken Roman villas have given
rise to stories of drowned cities. The ruins of towns lie under the
Zuyder Zee. Some inroad of the deep may be preserved in the legend of
Vineta, the fabled city beneath the Baltic near the Holstein coast.
There have been subsidences within historical time in the waters about
the British Isles, and the ocean has taken toll of the English coast
itself. The Channel shoal called the Goodwin Sands, and Seal Rock,
fragment of the Irish island of Inis Fitæ which was split into three
pieces in the eighth century, are tokens of these subsidences. In the
Azores group, scene of the Atlantis legend, four islands appeared in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and sank again. Expedition
Island, northwest of Australia, which Dutch naturalists visited within
a generation, lies under seven fathoms of water. The populous island
of Torca in the Indian Ocean went out of sight in a sheet of flame in
1693. Tuanaki, an island in South Polar waters, has not been seen in
ninety years. The cloud bank which Peary called Crocker Land has been
removed from maps of the Arctic region. Three new islands have been
born in the Aleutian group, one of them as late as 1909. The strange
stone images on Easter Island have given rise to conjecture that it
might be the remnant of a continent and a civilization lost beneath the
Pacific.
Thus there is a broad basis of fact for the legends of sunken cities.
Some of these are of great beauty. Whether the product of pagan or
Christian brooding, the sound of church bells is in them--peals that
come floating solemnly to the surface from towers through which deep
waters are moving. When the sunshine falls upon calm seas, so fisherman
say, they can discern these towers, and rising about them the peaked
roofs of houses like those of the Middle Ages.
Beyond all others the Celts are the people of the lost lands. These
seem part of the Celtic heritage of defeat and dreams. The legends of
Wales tell of a fair land sunken by the folly of a drunken prince.
The lost Lyonesse, a great promontory of Cornwall, was such another
land, and the Scilly Islands are the remnants. Tennyson and Swinburne
have rescued its memory from oblivion and Walter de la Mare pictures a
scene “in sea-cold Lyonesse, when the Sabbath eve shafts down on the
roofs, walls and belfries of the foundered town.” The story of Is, the
vanished Breton capital, has been told in folk-song, in poetry, in
stately music. It is one of the haunting fables of men, and back of it,
as of so many tales of ruin and overthrow, is the figure of a beautiful
and wicked woman.
The city of Is lay far in the west of France, where the coast of
Brittany makes its great thrust into the Atlantic. Peasants point out
the blocks, visible at low tide in the Bay of Douarnenez, which they
say are its foundations. The city was builded in a wide plain below
the level of the sea, and strong walls, controlled by sluice gates,
defended it from the encroaching waves. It was an habitation of vice
and pleasure, and it had a king as blameless as Arthur, and he a
daughter as cruel, as lustful, and as fair of face as Arthur’s sister,
Morgan le Fay. King Gradlon and Princess Dahut are the central figures
in the drama of Is.
Dahut dwelt in a tower, where she entertained a long train of lovers,
drowning each as she tired of him. To please a paramour she stole from
her father’s neck in his sleep the silver key which unlocked the sluice
gates and let in the sea. Awakened by the warning tumult of the waters,
Gradlon mounted a horse and fled, bearing his daughter with him. But
the floods moved after him and a voice bade him sacrifice to the sea
the beautiful demon who rode with him. Dahut fell to her death in the
waves, and their course was stayed. At Quimper the king rebuilt his
seat, but Is was lost forever beneath the Atlantic. Though it happened
fifteen centuries ago, there are Bretons who say that the faint chime
of bells still comes to them when wind and tide move shoreward together.
Nine is the number of islands under the sea to the west of Erin.
They appear above the surface once in seven years. Though a man may
descry them from the coast, yet might he go toward them in a currach
for two days and not come up with them. Some of them are larger than
Ireland itself. They have been seen by trustworthy observers,--Otway,
for example. In a paper read before the Royal Irish Society, Westropp
describes O Brasile, the best known of these, as he saw it in 1872: “It
was a clear evening with a fine golden sunset, when, just as the sun
went down, a dark island suddenly appeared far out to sea, but not on
the horizon. It had two hills, one wooded; between these, from a low
plain, rose towers and curls of smoke. My mother, brother, and several
friends saw it at the same time. One cried out that he could see New
York!”
Illusion, but for thousands of years Irish eyes have beheld these
phantom islands lift and fade in the west, and the Celtic glamour is
in the legends that tell them. “Lost Kilsapheen,” sighs the poet,
“its palaces and towers of pride ... all buried in the rushing tide
and deep sea waters green.” Churches and convents and castles are in
these islands, and those who have seen them or thought they saw them
report more intimate touches--an old woman coming out of a cabin to cut
a cabbage; the bleating of sheep and lambs heard in a fog on the open
sea; the apparition of “an old Scotch gentleman” wearing the raiment
of another century upon an enchanted shore. Sometimes a seeming of
tumult troubles these realms of shadow. There are flames and smoke and
fugitives. Then the spell passes and there is naught but the slant of
the gull’s wing and the roll of a porpoise on a distant billow.
The inhabitants of the islands are people of a vanished time, and
sealmen, and mermen, and giants, and the prisoners of giants. If you
can find the golden key to one of the sunken lands it will rise to the
surface and remain there; but the key has been hidden under a cairn
or is buried in the ruins of a Druid temple. There are other ways of
lifting the spell. Casting a clod of earth upon an island when it is
above water may disenchant it. Another way is by dropping a coal of
fire upon it, or knocking the glowing ashes from your pipe upon the
shore, or shooting a red-hot arrow from a boat, for “fire is hostile
to anything phantasmal.” So was Inishbofin fixed above the surface of
the sea. Fishermen landed upon it in a fog and lit a fire. Then the fog
cleared and they saw an old woman driving a white cow to drink. One of
them seized the cow’s tail and found in his hand a spray of seaweed;
and the woman and cow were turned into rocks. This was ages ago.
_Where Eden Lies_
Eden, Elysium, and the Fortunate Isles are one. They are upon the earth
and yet not of it. They are no part of the realm of shades and it is
not through the gates of death that one enters them. Mortal men have
dwelt in them, or may reach them, and thither the heroes pass without
leaving “the warm precincts of the cheerful day.” These are the ideal
lands of afternoon sunshine and airs that are at once a sigh and a
caress. The poetry and pity of men created them that there might be
some place of happiness with portals less somber than those of the
tomb, and without the sadness of irrevocable farewells upon the paths
that lead to it.
So the realms of bliss were placed afar, at the end of difficult
journeys which yet might be attained, or at least attempted. Eden lay
eastward. The Fortunate Isles of the Roman and the Elysian lands of
the Greek and Celt lay westward. In the conception of men these were
islands, Eden almost as much as the others. The four sacred rivers
flowed from it and around it, and in later times, what men who came
near to it particularly noticed was the sound of falling water.
It seemed to Columbus that the rushing current of the Orinoco flowed
down from Eden’s steeps. It seemed to men before him that paradise
might lie in the southern hemisphere, deemed “the noblest and happiest
part of the globe,” and perhaps in the South Seas. There were those
who made Eden a coast on the northern ocean, and others who placed it
among the fountains of Armenia. To most men the island of Ceylon was
its seat. There Carpini heard the plash of its waters, and Maundeville
drank thereof, as he reports, to his bodily betterment.
The Fortunate Isles, the Elysian abode of the heroes, were placed by
the Greeks in the extreme west, near the river Oceanus. Their position
receded with the advance of world-knowledge and finally was fixed in
the Canary and Madeira islands, furthest outpost of Roman discovery.
Satire though it is, the _True History_ of Lucian describes the Blessed
Islands in the very term men used when they were glad to believe.
As his party approached these islands, odorous airs came out from
shore, in which one could detect the mingled breath of the rose, the
narcissus, the hyacinth, and the lily. There was music from harp and
lute, and then, as the boat grounded on the beach, “the guardians of
the isle immediately chained us with manacles of roses, their only
fetters.”
These were the same islands which the Celts called by many beautiful
names and whither the coracles of legend journeyed. It is hard to tell
where the sunken islands of their history give way to the imaginary
islands of their geography, and these to the ideal lands of their
myths. The three groups seem to lie one behind the other in the outer
seas of the _Imrama_. The farthest group was the Celtic other-world,
and yet so near was it to the coasts of the New World, that a claim
for the discovery of America is based on St. Brendan’s voyage to the
Land of Promise. The group may best be called an archipelago where
pagan and Christian ideals shared dominion. Therein was not only the
Land of Promise, but “Magh Mell of many flowers,” the Land of Truth,
“whose truth was sung without falsehood.” There was the Land of the
Living, and the sensuous Land of Fair Women. In all these happy
islands music swelled, and laughter, and there was neither wailing nor
treachery, and death was not; and the magic food was unsalted pork, new
milk, and mead.
It was the singular fate of this god’s land of the Celt to become
confused with the geographical story of both Europe and America. The
memory of actual Irish voyages to the New World may be in the legend,
and inference from wreckage carried from afar, along with the stuff
of old dreams. Of the latter is a Spanish story wherein the Celtic
paradise masks itself as the Island of the Seven Cities to which seven
bishops had led their flocks to escape the Moor. Men whose hap it was
to sight this shadowy coast were carried in a barge to the shore and
entertained in a lofty hall by men who spoke their own tongue, though
with the antique accent. Europe credited the tale, nor guessed that the
barge was the same as that which bore the wounded Arthur unto Avalon.
These dream isles, at once aspiration and allegory, were found also,
or rather they were sought, in the eastern seas. It is recited in the
Buddhist records that the king of Udyana had a true report of the
silver walls and golden roofs of an island of the sages in distant
waters. The Chinese emperor, Tshe Huan Ti, of the third century before
Christ, heard of a happy land seven hundred miles to the eastward in
the Yellow Sea, and sent young men out to find it. They saw it on a far
horizon and a roseate light was upon it. But storms drove them back.
The Japanese tell of such a land lying toward the sunrise, and call it
Oraisan.
Maundeville knew of an island in the eastern ocean. It was something
like the places of eternal bliss in the far west, and yet was the home
of people who were much as other men are except that they were better.
When Alexander would have conquered them, an embassy bore him this
message, “Nothing may thou take from us but our good Peace,” and he let
them alone. In this isle of Bragman was “No Thief, nor Murderer, nor
common Woman, nor poor Beggar, nor ever was Man slain in that Country.
And because they be so true and so righteous, and so full of all good
Conditions, they were never grieved with Tempests, nor with Thunder,
nor with Lightning, nor with Hail, nor with Pestilence, nor with War,
nor with Hunger, nor with any other Tribulation, as we be, many Times,
amongst us, for our Sins.”
The island paradises of mankind lie upon many waters and in every
quarter of the earth. Alike for the Indians of Chile and of the
American Northwest, Elysium was in the distant Pacific. The natives
of Haiti believed it was in western valleys of their own island. The
natives of Australia called it “the gum-tree country.” The Semang of
the Malay Peninsula said it was across the sea in a land of screw
pines and thatch palms. It was their ancient island home, said the
people of the Celebes. It was northwest of Tonga, the Friendly
Islanders thought, and Bulotu was the name they gave it; yams and
breadfruit were plentiful there, hogs abounded, and there were reefs
for shark-catching. Many Kanaka tribes named it Havaika, which is
perhaps Java, or the Samoan island of Savaii, points of dispersion
in their migrations. The natives of Torres Straits called it the
island of Kibu; in its treetops ghosts sat twittering. But the Solomon
Islander could hear their laughter as they bathed in the surf of his
own sea-befriended paradise. “These Marquesas,” a nun said to Frederick
O’Brien, “make no more of death than of a journey to another island,
and much less than of a journey to Tahiti.”
Among races of higher culture Elysium takes on a more ordered beauty,
yet remains naïve. Annwfn is its Brythonic name and it lies at the end
of a long voyage; no infirmity is there, and sweeter than white wine is
the drink from its mighty well. Before men embarked for it, they said
in Babylon, there was a formidable land journey to take, over a high
pass guarded by scorpion men in the mountains of Masu, along a road
of black darkness, through a park of precious stones, across a bitter
river--and then the waters of death; these may have been the Atlantic,
or the sea of the Arabs. Elysium was far to the east in some mellow
clime beyond the ocean, so the Slavs thought; and thither the birds and
insects went in autumn. It is a land of lotus lakes in the west, and
its name is Sukhavati, say the Buddhists of Nippon; out of it comes a
continual harmony of flowing rivers, murmuring leaves, and soft bells
swung by softer winds. It is a kingdom in the northern ocean and its
name is Vaikuntha, some Hindus say. Others speak of a paradise which
they call Svetadvipa, “the white island” that is somewhere in the north
beyond the Sea of Milk.
For inland peoples the thought of a sea to be crossed, as every day
the sun crosses the sea to its rest, gave way at times to the thought
of a river with a difficult bridge, and paradise on the farther side.
Such in the Hindu classics was the land of the Uttarakarus which lay
on the shores of the northern ocean beyond the radiance of the sun and
the moon. A river that petrified whatever entered it flowed between it
and the countries of the south. Lakes with golden lotuses and tanks
of crystal water shimmered in the light airs of this favored land. In
its odorous orchards birds always sang, and beautiful maidens, hanging
by their long hair, grew among the blossom-burdened branches--another
glimpse of the enigmatic women of Wak-wak. Amid the sound of music and
laughter these Indian Hyperboreans did their pious deeds, nor shed the
god-unlawful tear, until ten thousand and ten hundred years had passed.
Then they died, and fowls with sharp beaks carried their bodies to
mountain caves.
An Irish myth of the Middle Ages holds closer to the facts of existence
than any of these stories of terrestrial felicity, and there is a
note of sadness in the beauty of it. In a lake in Munster were the
islands of life and death. There was no port for death to enter the
first island, but age and pain and sickness were there, and all the
wearinesses of years. Its inhabitants learned at last to look on the
opposite island as the place of repose, and, steering their barks to
its shore, they entered upon eternal rest.