There on Earth's utmost limits Zeus assigned
A life, a seat, distinct from human kind,
Beside the deepening whirlpools of the Main,
In those blest Isles where Saturn holds his reign,
Apart from Heaven's immortals calm they share,
A rest unsullied by the clouds of care:
And yearly thrice with sweet luxuriance crown'd
Springs the ripe harvest from the teeming Ground.
The poet Pindar places in the same mysterious West "the castle of Chronos" (i. e., "Old Time"), "where o'er the Isles of the Blest ocean breezes blow, and flowers gleam with gold, some from the land on glistening trees, while others the water feeds; and with bracelets of these they entwine their hands, and make crowns for their heads."
Vesper, the star of evening, was called Hesperus by the Greeks; and hence the Hesperides, daughters of the Western Star, had the task of watching the golden apples planted by the goddess Hera in the garden of the gods, on the other side of the river Oceanus. One of the labors of Hercules was to fetch three of those mystic apples for the king of Mycenae. The poet Euripides thus refers to the Gardens of the West, when the Chorus wish to fly "over the Adriatic wave":
Or to the famed Hesperian plains,
Whose rich trees bloom with gold,
To join the grief-attunèd strains
My winged progress hold;
Beyond whose shores no passage gave
The Ruler of the purple wave.
Of all the lands imagined to lie in the Western Ocean by the Greeks, the most important was "Atlantis." Some have thought it may possibly have been a prehistoric discovery of America. In any case it has exercised the ingenuity of a good many modern scientists. The tale of Atlantis we owe to Plato himself, who perhaps learned it in Egypt, just as Herodotus picked up there the account of the circumnavigation of Africa by the Phenician mariners.
"When Solon was in Egypt," says Plato, "he had talk with an aged priest of Sais who said, 'You Greeks are all children: you know but of one deluge, whereas there have been many destructions of mankind both by flood and fire.'... In the distant Western Ocean lay a continent larger than Libya and Asia together."...
In this Atlantis there had grown up a mighty state whose kings were descended from Poseidon and had extended their sway over many islands and over a portion of the great continent; even Libya up to the gates of Egypt, and Europe as far as Tyrrhenia, submitted to their sway.... Afterward came a day and night of great floods and earthquakes; Atlantis disappeared, swallowed by the waves.
Geologists and geographers have seriously tried to find evidence of Atlantis having existed in the Atlantic, whether as a portion of the American continent, or as a huge island in the ocean which could have served as a stepping-stone between the Western World and the Eastern. From a series of deep-sea soundings ordered by the British, American, and German Governments, it is now very well known that in the middle of the Atlantic basin there is a ridge, running north and south, whose depth is less than 1,000 fathoms, while the valleys east and west of it average 3,000 fathoms. At the Azores the North Atlantic ridge becomes broader. The theory is that a part of the ridge-plateau was the Atlantis of Plato that "disappeared swallowed by the waves." (Nature, xv, 158, 553, xxvii, 25; Science, June 29, 1883.)
Buffon, the naturalist, with reference to fauna and flora, dated the separation of the new and old world "from the catastrophe of Atlantis" (Epoques, ix, 570); and Sir Charles Lyell confessed a temptation to "accept the theory of an Atlantis island in the northern Atlantic." (Geology, p. 141.)
The following account "from an historian of the fourth century B. C." is another possible reference to a portion of America—from a translation "delivered in English," 1576.