Selenus told Midas that without this worlde there is a continent or percell of dry lande which in greatnesse (as hee reported) was unmeasureable; that it nourished and maintained, by the benifite of the greene meadowes and pasture plots, sundrye bigge and mighty beastes; that the men which inhabite the same climate exceede the stature of us twise, and yet the length of there life is not equale to ours.
The historian Plutarch, in his Morals, gives an account of Ogygia, with an illusion to a continent, possibly America:
An island, Ogygia, lies in the arms of the Ocean, about five days' sail west from Britain.... The adjacent sea is termed the Saturnian, and the continent by which the great sea is circularly environed is distant from Ogygia about 5,000 stadia, but from the other islands not so far.... One of the men paid a visit to the great island, as they called Europe. From him the narrator learned many things about the state of men after death—the conclusion being that the souls of men arrive at the Moon, wherein lie the Elysian Fields of Homer.
The Greek historian, Diodorus Siculus, has a similar account with curious details of an "island" which might very well have been part of a continent. Columbus believed to the last that Cuba was a continent.
In the ocean, at the distance of several days' sailing to the west, there lies an island watered by several navigable rivers. Its soil is fertile, hilly, and of great beauty.... There are country houses handsomely constructed, with summer-houses and flower-beds. The hilly district is covered with dense woods and fruit-trees of every kind. The inhabitants spend much time in hunting and thus procure excellent food. They have naturally a good supply of fish, their shores being washed by the ocean.... In a word this island seems a happy home for gods rather than for men (v. 19).
Another Greek writer, Lucian, in one of his witty dialogues, refers to an island in the Atlantic, that lies eighty days' sail westward of the Pillars of Hercules—the extreme limit of the ancient world, as has already been seen. Readers of Henry Fielding and admirers of Squire Westers will remember how in the London of the eighteenth century the limits of Piccadilly westward was a tavern at Hyde Park corner called the Hercules' Pillars, on the site of the future Apsley House.[1]
Although neither Greek nor Roman navigators were likely to attempt a voyage into the ocean beyond the Straits of Gibraltar, yet a trading vessel from Carthage or Phenicia might easily have been driven by an easterly gale into, or even across, the Atlantic. Some involuntary discoveries were no doubt due to this chance, and the reports brought to Europe were probably the germs of such tales as the poets invented about the fair regions of the West. In Celtic literature, moreover, "Avalon" was placed far under the setting sun beyond the ocean—Avalon or "Glas-Inis" being to the bards the Land of the Dead, marvelous and mysterious.
In English literature of the middle ages there is a remarkable passage relating to our present subject, which was written long before that rise of the New Learning mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. It is a statement made by Roger Bacon, the greatest of Oxonian scholars of the thirteenth century, who, long before the Renascence, did much to restore the study of science, especially in geography, chronology, and optics. In his Opus Majus, the elder Bacon wrote:
More than the fourth part of the earth which we inhabit is still unknown to us.... It is evident therefore that between the extreme West and the confines of India, there must be a surface which comprises more than half the earth.
Though Roger Bacon, to use his own words, died "unheard, forgotten, buried," our recent historians place his name first in the great roll of modern science.