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.