Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic | Page 2

as if no one but yourself had ever landed there; and yet, perhaps, even there, looking straight downward, you see below you in some crevice of the rock a mast or spar of some wrecked vessel, encrusted with all manner of shells and uncouth vegetable growth. No matter how distant the island or how peacefully it seems to lie upon the water, there may be perplexing currents that ever foam and swirl about it --currents which are, at all tides and in the calmest weather, as dangerous as any tempest, and which make compass untrustworthy and helm powerless. It is to be remembered also that an island not only appears and disappears upon the horizon in brighter or darker skies, but it varies its height and shape, doubles itself in mirage, or looks as if broken asunder, divided into two or three. Indeed the buccaneer, Cowley, writing of one such island which he had visited, says: "My fancy led me to call it Cowley's Enchanted Isle, for we having had a sight of it upon several points of the compass, it appeared always in so many different forms; sometimes like a ruined fortification; upon another point like a great city."
If much of this is true even now, it was far truer before the days of Columbus, when men were constantly looking westward across the Atlantic, and wondering what was beyond. In those days, when no one knew with certainty whether the ocean they observed was a sea or a vast lake, it was often called "The Sea of Darkness." A friend of the Latin poet, Ovid, describing the first approach to this sea, says that as you sail out upon it the day itself vanishes, and the world soon ends in perpetual darkness:--
"Quo Ferimur? Ruit ipsa Dies, orbemque relictum Ultima perpetuis claudit natura tenebris."
Nevertheless, it was the vague belief of many nations that the abodes of the blest lay somewhere beyond it--in the "other world," a region half earthly, half heavenly, whence the spirits of the departed could not cross the water to return;--and so they were constantly imagining excursions made by favored mortals to enchanted islands. To add to the confusion, actual islands in the Atlantic were sometimes discovered and actually lost again, as, for instance, the Canaries, which were reached and called the Fortunate Isles a little before the Christian era, and were then lost to sight for thirteen centuries ere being visited again.
The glamour of enchantment was naturally first attached by Europeans to islands within sight of their own shores--Irish, Welsh, Breton, or Spanish,--and then, as these islands became better known, men's imaginations carried the mystery further out over the unknown western sea. The line of legend gradually extended itself till it formed an imaginary chart for Columbus; the aged astronomer, Toscanelli, for instance, suggesting to him the advantage of making the supposed island of Antillia a half-way station; just as it was proposed, long centuries after, to find a station for the ocean telegraph in the equally imaginary island of Jacquet, which has only lately disappeared from the charts. With every step in knowledge the line of fancied stopping-places rearranged itself, the fictitious names flitting from place to place on the maps, and sometimes duplicating themselves. Where the tradition itself has vanished we find that the names with which it associated itself are still assigned, as in case of Brazil and the Antilles, to wholly different localities.
The order of the tales in the present work follows roughly the order of development, giving first the legends which kept near the European shore, and then those which, like St. Brandan's or Antillia, were assigned to the open sea or, like Norumbega or the Isle of Demons, to the very coast of America. Every tale in this book bears reference to some actual legend, followed more or less closely, and the authorities for each will be found carefully given in the appendix for such readers as may care to follow the subject farther. It must be remembered that some of these imaginary islands actually remained on the charts of the British admiralty until within a century. If even the exact science of geographers retained them thus long, surely romance should embalm them forever.
CAMBRIDGE, MASS.

Contents
I. The Story of Atlantis
II. Taliessin of the Radiant Brow
III. The Swan-Children of Lir
IV. Usheen in the Island of Youth
V. Bran the Blessed
VI. The Castle of the Active Door
VII. Merlin the Enchanter
VIII. Sir Lancelot of the Lake
IX. The Half-Man
X. King Arthur at Avalon
XI. Maelduin's Voyage
XII. The Voyage of St. Brandan
XIII. Kirwan's Search for Hy-Brasail
XIV. The Isle of Satan's Hand
XV. Antillia, the Island of the Seven Cities
XVI. Harald the Viking
XVII. The Search for Norumbega
XVIII. The Guardians of the St. Lawrence
XIX. The Island of Demons
XX. Bimini and the Fountain of Youth
Notes

I
THE STORY OF ATLANTIS
The Greek sage Socrates, when