TOSCANELLI'S MAP AS RESTORED IN DAS AUSLAND.
The passage westward.
It is said that in our own day, in the first stages of a belief in the practicability of an Atlantic telegraphic cable, it was seriously claimed that the vast stretch of its extension could be broken by a halfway station on Jacquet Island, one of those relics of the Middle Ages, which has disappeared from our ocean charts only in recent years.
Antillia.
Just in the same way all the beliefs which men had had in the island of Antillia, and in the existence of many another visionary bit of land, came to the assistance of these theoretical discoverers in planning the chances of a desperate voyage far out into a sea of gorgons and chimeras dire. Toscanelli's map sought to direct the course of any one who dared to make the passage, in a way that, in case of disaster to his ships, a secure harbor could be found in Antillia, and in such other havens as no lack of islands would supply.
Ferdinand claimed to have found in his father's papers some statements which he had drawn from Aristotle of Carthaginian voyages to Antillia, on the strength of which the Portuguese had laid that island down in their charts in the latitude of Lisbon, as one occupied by their people in 714, when Spain was conquered by the Moors. Even so recently as the time of Prince Henry it had been visited by Portuguese ships, if records were to be believed. It also stands in the Bianco map of 1436.
Fabulous islands of the Atlantic.
There are few more curious investigations than those which concern these fantastic and fabulous islands of the Sea of Darkness. They are connected with views which were an inheritance in part from the classic times, with involved notions of the abodes of the blessed and of demoniacal spirits. In part they were the aërial creation of popular mythologies, going back to a remoteness of which it is impossible to trace the beginning, and which got a variable color from the popular fancies of succeeding generations. The whole subject is curiously without the field of geography, though entering into all surveys of mediæval knowledge of the earth, and depending very largely for its elucidation on the maps of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, whose mythical traces are not beyond recognition in some of the best maps which have instructed a generation still living.
St. Brandan.