Need of Exploration
There seems still a good deal of vagueness about the matter, and Corvo might well be given a thorough overhauling for vestiges of ancient times. This naturally should be extended to the submerged area close to the shore, for the outlying reefs and ridges may mark the site of lower lands where human work once went on and where its traces and relics may remain. In expanse the island probably was not always what we find it now, six miles in length by at most three in breadth (seven square miles in all, as most accounts compute it) with fringes of rock running off from the shore, “lifting themselves high above the water in one place, blackening the surface in another, and again sinking to such a depth that the waves only eddy and bubble over them.” Mr. Henriques says elsewhere: “In many of the islands, but especially in Flores, there are vestiges clearly indicating that formerly as well as lately parts of the island have sunk or rather disappeared in the sea.” He cites for instance a notable loss of land in the summer of 1847.
There is reason to believe that Corvo has dwindled in this way much more, proportionately, than Flores. One striking indication is found in the comparison of the present map with those of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. For convenience sketches of these are appended ([Fig. 23]). The relative position of the islands is about the same in all. The form of Corvo varies from the pear shape of the Laurenziano map (1351),[283] and another shape[284] not much later slightly resembling an indented segment of a circle, to the three-lobed or clover-leaf form which was accepted as the final convention or standard and first clearly appears in the great Catalan atlas[285] of 1375, repeated by Beccario 1435[286], Benincasa 1482[287], and others; but all agree in making Corvo the main island and Li Conigi (Flores) a minor pendant. Corvo seems in every way to have commanded chief attention, and in size the difference was conspicuous and decisive. The difference certainly is great enough now, but conditions and proportions are reversed. Corvo has but one-eighth the area of Flores and less than one-tenth the population. In all ways it lacks advantages and conveniences, taking rather the place of a poor dependent.
Fig. 23—Representation of Corvo on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century maps as compared with its present outline. (The sources may be identified from the text.)
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. Apparently those lobes and their contents are just what might be most profitably dredged for and dived after.
Perhaps the island has not greatly changed since Mr. Henriques wrote his little sketch of it in the sixth decade of the last century:
The first part of the ride to it [the crater] is through steep and narrow lanes walled in with stones. Over those walls you can sometimes see the country right and left, which is divided into small and well-cultivated compartments by low stone walls. These small fields form narrow terraces, one above another, looking from the sea like steps in the hills. An hour’s ride brings you to an open mountain covered with heath where browse flocks of sheep and hogs, and about an hour and a half more to the crater on the summit, now a quiet green valley, with a dark, still pond in the center....
The Corvoites, particularly the women, are a happy and industrious people and have strong and healthy constitutions. The men in trade evince a remarkable shrewdness, proverbial among the other Azorians, but in private life their manners are simple and unassuming.... They are like a large family of little less than a thousand members, all living in the only village on the island.[288]
CHAPTER XII
THE SUNKEN LAND OF BUSS AND OTHER PHANTOM ISLANDS
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.
Several are linked to the idea of volcanic destruction or seismic engulfment. Of course the colossal and classical instance of Atlantis comes first into mind, it being the earliest as well as in every way the most imposing. Most likely the well-known story, repeated, if not originated, by Plato, developed naturally, as we have seen, from the insistent need to account for the obstructive weedy wastes of the Sargasso Sea beyond the Azores and recurrent facts of minor cataclysms among them.
The next oldest instance, perhaps, is supplied by Ruysch’s map of 1508,[289] an inscription on which avers that an island in the sea about midway between Iceland and Greenland had been totally destroyed by combustion in the year 1456. We do not know his authority for this startling announcement. The spot is where one would naturally look for Gunnbjörn’s skerries of the older Icelandic writings; and no one can find them now, unless they were, after all, but projecting points of the eastern Greenland coast. Also Iceland is at times tremendously eruptive; and this islet, or these islets, would not be far away. The assertion is not in itself incredible, but there seems no corroboration.