Persistence of Mayda on Maps Down to the Modern Period
There would be little profit in listing the maps of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries which persisted by inertia and convention in the nearly stereotyped delineation of Mayda but, of course, with slight variations in location and name. Thus Nicolaas Vischer in a map of Europe of 1670 (?)[170] shows “L’as Maidas” in the longitude of Madeira and the latitude of Brittany; a world map in Robert’s “Atlas Universel” (1757)[171] gives “I. Maida” about the longitude of Madeira and the latitude of Gascony; and on a chart of the Atlantic Ocean published in New York in 1814[172] “Mayda” appears in longitude 20° W. and latitude 46° N. But these representations have no significance except as to human continuity.
The evil reputation which was early established and seems to have hung about the island in later stages, assimilating the icy clashings and noises and terrors of the north as it had previously incorporated the monstrous fears of a warmer part of the ocean, is surely a curious phenomenon. I have fancied it may be responsible for the probably quite imaginary Devil Rock, which appears in some relatively recent maps, perhaps as a kind of substitute for Mayda, much in the fashion that Brazil Rock took the place of Brazil Island when belief in the latter became difficult. The present view of the U. S. Hydrographic Office, as expressed on its charts, is that Negra’s Rock, Devil Rock, Green Island, or Rock, and all that tribe are unreal “dangers,” probably reported as the result of peculiar appearances of the water surface. Whether the possibility has been wholly eliminated of a lance of rock jutting up to the surface from great depths and not yet officially recognized, I will not presume to say; but it seems highly improbable that there is anything of the sort in the North Atlantic Ocean except the lonely and nearly submerged peak of Rockall, some 400 miles west of Britain, and the well-known oceanic groups and archipelagoes.