Occurrence of the Name in the Azores
The exception noted is well worth considering. Just as Terceira retains her medieval name of Brazil to designate one headland, St. Michaels has still its valley of the Seven Cities. Brown’s guidebook presents the fact very casually: “St. Michaels. Ponta Delgada. Brown’s Hotel. About ten people. Among the chief sights are the lava beds coming from Sete Cidades.... At Sete Cidades, which is worth a visit, there is a great crater with two lakes at the bottom, one of which appears to be green, the other blue.”[135]
This naïve incuriousness in the presence of something so significant of course has not been shared by a different order of observers. Buache[136] found here as he thought the genuine and only Seven Cities of the legend. Humboldt[137] opposed this view with a reminder of the Seven Cities of Cibola. But it is fair to remember that New Mexico was quite impossible for the Portuguese of 711 or thereabout, whereas St. Michaels Island offered an accessible and tempting place of refuge. The name could not have been derived from settlement in the former; but it might really be derived from settlement in the latter. Granting that the fugitives might not be able to maintain themselves there in safety for many years after the Arabs had begun their tentative and always uneasy incursions into the western Sea of Darkness, it still may be that the town or towns of this hidden island valley might endure long enough and seem imposing enough and be visited often enough by Christians from the mainland to supply the nucleus of the most picturesque and adventurous of legends; and this tale might follow any later migration into the unknown, or survive and find new abiding places for the name and fancy long after the original colony—archbishop and bishops and congregations, military commanders, and mailed soldiery—had all been somehow destroyed or had melted apart and drifted away. All that remains certain is the continued presence of the name of the Seven Cities on that spot.
Some ruins are said to have marked it formerly, but very little is visible now, if we may trust the following description by an intelligent visitor in the middle of the last century:
Emerging from these sunken lanes, so peculiar to the island of St. Michael’s, we come to the green hills which border the village and the valley of the Seven Cities.... From these dull evergreen mountains, stretching before us without apparent end, we speedily had an unexpected change. Suddenly the mountain track up which we were climbing ended on the edge of a vast precipice, hitherto entirely concealed, and at a moment’s transition disclosed a wide and deeply sunk valley with a scattered village and a blue lake. The hills which hemmed them in were bold and precipitous, tent-shaped, rounded and serrated. Others swept in soft and gentle lines into a little plain where the small village was nestled by the water side. The lake was of the deepest blue and so calm that a sea bird skimming over its surface seemed two, so perfect was its image in the water. The clouds above were floating in this very deep lake, and the inverted tops of the hills on every side were perfectly reflected in its bosom. A few women on the shore seemed rooted there, so steady were their reflections in the water, and the cattle standing in the shallows stood like cattle in a picture.... The sides slope gradually from this part of the valley into the level ground where the village stands. It is a small collection of cottages, without a church or a wineshop or a store of any kind, and at the time I entered it was enveloped in clouds of wood smoke which rose from the fires used in the process of bleaching cloth. This and clothes washing are the chief occupations of the villagers....
A portion of the lake is separated from the larger one by a narrow causeway. It is singular to notice the difference made in the two pieces of water by this small embankment; for, while the large lake is clear and crystalline, this is thick, green, and muddy, and as gloomy as the Dead Sea, with no clouds or birds or bright sky reflected in it.[138]
Perhaps a little excavating archeology might not be amiss in the neighborhood of the causeway and the green dead lakelet. But at least it is satisfactory to have a good external account of the only site in the world, so far as I know, which still bears the legendary name. As elsewhere used, this name has certainly wandered widely and been affixed to many places. Whether any of these represent real refuges of the original emigrants or their descendants or others like them no one can quite certainly say; but there is no evidence for it, and the probabilities are against it. Certainly no Spanish nor Portuguese community, of Moorish or of any pre-Columbian times, established itself in western lands for any great period to make good the aspiration of the fugitives of Merida.
CHAPTER VI
THE PROBLEM OF MAYDA
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. Humboldt about 1836 remarked that, out of eleven such islands which he might mention, only two, Mayda and Brazil Rock, maintain themselves on modern charts.[139] In a note he instances the world map of John Purdy of 1834. However, this was not the end; for a relief map published in Chicago and bearing a notice of copyright of 1906 exhibits Mayda. Possibly this is intended to have an educational and historic bearing; but it seems to be shown in simple credulity, a crowning instance of cartographic conservation.