Sea Thoughts - 3

Sea Thoughts - 3

To the west stretched what was known as the Sea of Darkness, about which even the cool

knowledge of the geographers and astronomers could not think steadily. Nothing was

known about it, it did not lead anywhere, there were no people there, there was no trade

in that direction. The tides of history and of life avoided it; only now and then some

terrified mariner, blown far out of his course, came back with tales of sea monsters and

enchanted disappearing islands, and shores that receded, and coasts upon which no one

could make a landfall. The farthest land known to the west was the Azores; beyond that

stretched a vague and impossible ocean of terror and darkness, of which the Arabian

writer Xerif al Edrisi, whose countrymen were the sea-kings of the Middle Ages, wrote as

follows:

"The ocean encircles the ultimate bounds of the inhabited earth, and all beyond it is

unknown. No one has been able to verify anything concerning it, on account of its

difficult and perilous navigation, its great obscurity, its profound depth, and frequent

tempests; through fear of its mighty fishes and its haughty winds; yet there are many

islands in it, some peopled, others uninhabited. There is no mariner who dares to enter

into its deep waters; or if any have done so, they have merely kept along its coasts,

fearful of departing from them. The waves of this ocean, although they roll as high as

mountains, yet maintain themselves without breaking; for if they broke it would be

impossible for a ship to plough them."

It is another illustration of the way in which discovery and imagination had hitherto gone

by steps and not by flights, that geographical knowledge reached the islands of the

Atlantic (none of which were at a very great distance from the coast of Europe or from

each other) at a comparatively early date, and stopped there until in Columbus there was

found a man with faith strong enough to make the long flight beyond them to the

unknown West. And yet the philosophers, and later the cartographers, true to their

instinct for this pedestrian kind of imagination, put mythical lands and islands to the

westward of the known islands as though they were really trying to make a way, to sink

stepping stones into the deep sea that would lead their thoughts across the unknown

space. In the Catalan map of the world, which was the standard example of cosmography

in the early days of Columbus, most of these mythical islands are marked. There was the

island of Antilia, which was placed in 25 deg. 35' W., and was said to have been

discovered by Don Roderick, the last of the Gothic kings of Spain, who fled there after

his defeat by the Moors. There was the island of the Seven Cities, which is sometimes

identified with this Antilia, and was the object of a persistent belief or superstition on the

part of the inhabitants of the Canary Islands. They saw, or thought they saw, about ninety

leagues to the westward, an island with high peaks and deep valleys. The vision was

intermittent; it was only seen in very clear weather, on some of those pure, serene days of

the tropics when in the clear atmosphere distant objects appear to be close at hand. In

cloudy, and often in clear weather also, it was not to be seen at all; but the inhabitants of

the Canaries, who always saw it in the same place, were so convinced of its reality that

they petitioned the King of Portugal to allow them to go and take possession of it; and

several expeditions were in fact despatched, but none ever came up with that fairy land. It

was called the island of the Seven Cities from a legend of seven bishops who had fled

from Spain at the time of the Moorish conquest, and, landing upon this island, had

founded there seven splendid cities. There was the island of St. Brandan, called after the

Saint who set out from Ireland in the sixth century in search of an island which always

receded before his ships; this island was placed several hundred miles to the west of the

Canaries on maps and charts through out the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. There was

the island of Brazil, to the west of Cape St. Vincent; the islands of Royllo, San Giorgio,

and Isola di Mam; but they were all islands of dreams, seen by the eyes of many mariners

in that imaginative time, but never trodden by any foot of man. To Columbus, however,

and the mariners of his day, they were all real places, which a man might reach by special

good fortune or heroism, but which, all things considered, it was not quite worth the

while of any man to attempt to reach. They have all disappeared from our charts, like the

Atlantis of Plato, that was once charted to the westward of the Straits of Gibraltar, and of

which the Canaries were believed to be the last peaks unsubmerged.