It is pretty certain that the Fortunate Islands of ancient geography were our Canaries. Eudoxus of Cyzicus was said to have discovered off the West African coast an uninhabited island, so well provided with wood and water, that he intended to return there and settle for the winter. According to Plutarch, Sertorius (b.c. 80-72) is said to have been told by some sailors whom he met at the mouth of the Baetis[[138]] of two islands[[139]] in the ocean, from which they had just arrived. These they called the "Atlantic Islands," and described as distant from the shore of Africa 10,000 stadia (1,000 miles), and enjoying a perpetual summer. Sertorius wished to fly from his war with the Romans in Spain, and take refuge in these islands, but his followers would not agree to this.[[140]]
Leaving out of serious consideration the Atlantis story in Plato's Timaeus (which may possibly owe something to early Phœnician and Carthaginian discoveries among the Atlantic islands), it is noticeable that no such Western Ocean lands occur in Strabo (b.c. 30). On the other hand the Canaries are described by Statius Sebosus, as reported in Pliny[[141]] (b.c. 30-a.d. 70), and by King Juba the younger of Mauretania (fl. b.c. 1); are laid down under the name of Fortunate Islands by Ptolemy; and are adopted in his reckonings as the Western limit of the world. Sebosus mentions Junonia, 750 miles from Gades; near this, Pluvialia and Capraria; and 1,000 miles from Gades, off the South-west coast of Mauretania or Marocco, the Fortunatae, Convallis or Invallis, and Planaria.
Juba[[142]] again makes five Fortunate Isles: Ombrios, Nivaria, Capraria, Junonia, and Canaria, all fertile but uninhabited. Large dogs were found, however, in the last-named, and two of these had been brought to Juba himself, who called the island after them. Date-palms also abounded. Juba also, according to Pliny, discovered the Purple islands (Purpurariae) off the coast of Mauretania, which have been carelessly identified by some with the Madeira group, though wanting the two essential conditions of Juba's description: (1) producing Orchil; (2) lying very close to the shore of Mauretania. Lançarote and Fuerteventura agree with Juba's conditions on these points,[[143]] but then why are they made a separate group from Nivaria, etc., which are undoubtedly the main body of the Canaries? Juba's account is the most clear and valuable we have from ancient geography, dealing with the Canaries, and is far better than that[[144]] of the Alexandrian geographer. Ptolemy lays down the Fortunate Islands—assuming the Canaries to be meant—incorrectly both in latitude and longitude, in a position really corresponding better to that of the Cape Verdes. Hence it has been supposed that he confounded the two groups in one; whereas the Cape Verdes, lying out to sea 300 miles from the Continent, are not likely to have been known, even in his day. An error in position is so common with Ptolemy that it is quite unnecessary to be disturbed by it. But he clearly had some definite knowledge that islands existed in the ocean to the west of Africa, and in his map he probably reproduces the statements of others, without first-hand information of his own, assigning such a position as suited best with his theories. For he not merely brings the southernmost of the Fortunate Isles down to 11° N. lat., but scatters the group through 5° of latitude, placing the northernmost in latitude, 16° N. His names vary much from Juba's, for he gives us six: Canaria, the Isle of Juno, Pluïtala,[[145]] Aprositus (the Inaccessible), Caspiria, and Pinturia or Centuria; at the western extremity of these, after the example of Marinus, he drew the first meridian of longitude.[[146]]
The Arabs seem to have lost all definite knowledge of the Atlantic islands, an impossible possession to a race with such a deep horror of the Green Sea of Darkness. Masudi, indeed, tells us a story, already noticed, of one Khoshkhash, the young man of Cordova, who some years before the writer's time[[147]] had sailed off upon the Ocean, and after a long interval returned with a rich cargo; but nothing more definite is said about this venture.
Some tradition of the Canaries or the Madeira group seems to have been preserved among Moslem geographers, under the name of Isles of Khaledat, or Khaledad, but we have only one narrative from the collections of these authors which suggests a Musulman visit to the same. This is found in Edrisi, in its earlier form, and must refer to some time before 1147, when Lisbon finally became a Christian city. It probably belongs to a year of the eleventh century, and has perhaps left its impression in the Brandan legend as put forth in the oldest MS., of about 1070.
The Lisbon Wanderers, or Maghrurin, from Moslem Spain, commemorated by Edrisi and by Ibn-al-Wardi, did not apparently venture to the South of Cape Non, but they seem to have reached the Madeira group as well as the Canaries. The adventurers were eight in number, all related to one another. After eleven days' sail, apparently from Lisbon, they found themselves in a sea due[[148]] West of Spain, where the waters were thick, of bad smell, and moved by strong currents.[[149]] Here the weather became as black as pitch. Fearing for their lives they now turned South, and after twelve days sighted an island which they called El Ghanam, the Isle of Cattle,[[150]] from the sheep they saw there without any shepherd. The flesh of these cattle was too bitter for eating, but they found a stream of running water and some wild figs. Twelve more days to the South brought them to an island[[151]] with houses and cultivated fields. Here they were seized, and carried prisoners to a city on the sea-shore. After three days the King's interpreter, who spoke Arabic, came to them, and asked them who they were and what they wanted. They replied, they were seeking the wonders of the Ocean and its limits. At this the King laughed, and said: "My father once ordered some of his slaves to venture upon that sea, and after sailing it for a month, they found themselves deprived of sun-light and returned without any result." The Wanderers were kept in prison till a west wind arose, when they were blindfolded and turned off in a boat. After three days they reached Africa. They were put ashore, their hands tied, and left. They were released by the Berbers,[[152]] and returned to Spain, when a "street at the foot of the hot bath in Lisbon took the name of 'Street of the Wanderers.'"
El Ghanam has been identified by Avezac and others with Legname, the old Italian name for Madeira, and their description of the "bitter mutton" of that island has suggested to some the "coquerel" plant of the Canaries, which in more recent times gave a similar flavour to the meat of the animals who browsed upon it.[[153]]
Some have conjectured that the "White Man's Land" and "Great Ireland," which the Norsemen of Iceland professed to have seen in 983-4, 999, and 1029, was a name for the Canaries, rather than for any point of America, but this appears entirely conjectural—though it is probable enough that some of the Vikings in their wanderings may have visited these islands. In 1108-9, King Sigurd of Norway meets a Viking fleet in the Straits of Gibraltar ("Norva Sound");[[154]] and in the course of their many attacks on the "Bluemen" or Moors of "Serkland" (Saracen-land) the Northern rovers who reached the New World, Greenland, and the White Sea, may well have sighted and ravaged the Fortunate Islands of the Atlantic, beyond Cape Non.
No further reference, even conjectural, to the Atlantic Islands is known until the later thirteenth century, when the Mediæval revival in Christian lands, finding its expression in the Crusades and in the Asiatic land-travels of John de Plano Carpini, Simon de St. Quentin, Rubruquis, and the Polos, among others, led to attempts in search of a maritime route to India from the Mediterranean ports. The earliest of these followed immediately on the return of the elder Polos from Central Asia (1269).
In 1270 the voyage of the Genoese, Lancelot Malocello, already referred to as a possible reconnaissance on the African coast route to the Far East, resulted in a re-discovery of some of the Canaries. At any rate, he stayed[[155]] long enough to build himself a "castle" there; and the recognition of this island, as well as of the adjoining "Maloxelo," as Genoese on maps of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries,[[156]] was probably due to this. During Béthencourt's "Conquest," some of the followers of his colleague, Gadifer de la Salle, stored barley, we are told, in an old castle which had been built by Lancelot Maloisel. It has been supposed that Petrarch, writing c. 1335 a.d., and referring to the armed Genoese fleet which had penetrated to the Canaries a generation before (a Patrum memoria), was thinking of Malocello's venture, but the expression is better suited to the Expedition of 1291, led by Tedisio Doria and the Vivaldi.