William Henry Babcock

“ Kilda lay off the trade routes rather far away in the mists and myths of the ocean and might be a fairer field for exaggeration and shifting of place. But, with every allowance, it is hard to see how this small ultra-Hebridean rock pile could become a large island territory just short of America. Perhaps it is as well to treat Icaria as merely the unprovoked creation of the romantic brain of the younger Zeno. ”

“ Beside those legendary Atlantic islands that may cast some light on visits of white men to America before Columbus or have been at some time linked therewith by speculation or tradition—notably Antillia and its consorts, Brazil, Man or Mayda, Green Island, Estotiland and Drogio, the Island or Islands of St. Brendan, and the Island of the Seven Cities—there are numerous others, quite a swarm indeed, excusing Ptolemy’s and Edrisi’s extravagant estimate of 27,000. Sometimes, but not always, they are of more recent origin and are explainable in various ways. ”

“ Markland need not be conceived as of equal size, for in truth it represents at most only the wild and wooded interval between the hopelessly void and barren north and the great habitable, comfortable, and fruitful region stretching far below; but so much of parallelism holds as will forbid us to anchor the name to any one locality on the Newfoundland shore. Doubtless the long sea front of the great island as a whole is entitled to the name. ”

“ Humboldt was so impressed by this map of Bianco that he took the pains of measuring upon it the distance of Antillia from Portugal, making this about two hundred and forty leagues: an unreliable test, one would say, for the distances over the western waste of waters probably were not drawn to scale nor supposed to approach exactness. For that matter, the interval between Portugal and the Azores, as shown on maps for nearly a hundred years, was greatly underestimated, and the discrepancy becomes more glaring as the islands lie farther westward, Flores and Corvo being conspicuous examples. ”

“ There is no good reason for discrediting so many of the old maps. Their makers sometimes went wrong; but they tried to be accurate and would hardly, through a century or two, persist in making the northern island the greater one unless it was at first really so. Of course the most natural solution of the difficulty is that Corvo’s border has sunk or the sea has risen over it, completely drowning the territory which made the lobes or curved outline of the island form in the medieval maps and leaving only above water its rocky backbone, with the crater for a nucleus. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Unless we accept this explanation, we must assume an uncanny, almost an inspired, gift of conjecture in some one who, without basis, could imagine and depict the only array of great islands in the Atlantic. Certainly the outlines of Cuba, Jamaica, Florida, and one of the Bahamas will very well bear comparison with Scandinavia or the Hebrides and the Orkneys as given on maps of equal or even later date. Some glaring errors are to be expected in such work, as notoriously occurred in the sixteenth-century treatment of Newfoundland and Labrador. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Again, when Earl Zichmni and Antonio Zeno with their little flotilla, fired by the fisherman’s American experiences, strike westward from Frisland for Estotiland they, indeed, do not reach that goal but do attain by accident the mysterious Icaria and find themselves where Greenland can be and is reached without much difficulty. Now, on the map (Fig. 19) , Icaria, about the size of Shetland, is the most westerly of all the islands not distinctly American. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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;6 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. ”

“ The Ortelius map of 157070 (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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Lucas, writing some years afterward, with the benefit of recently discovered maps and information, has chosen this destructive alternative for nearly the whole Zeno narration: denying that Nicolò Zeno had any map of a former generation to restore; styling his own keenly critical and exhaustive production “an indictment,” and branding the book under consideration as a forgery throughout—with, necessarily, some true things in it. He has gone far toward making good his case. Some things not fully accounted for suggest that there may have been a basis of genuine material, a nucleus of truth ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 1375144 (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.” ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”