To place the island of the Irish St. Brandan—whose coming there with his monks is spoken of as taking place in the sixth century—in the catalogue of insular entities is to place geography in such a marvelous guise as would have satisfied the monk Philoponus and the rest of the credulous fictionmongers who hang about the skirts of the historic field. But the belief in it long prevailed, and the apparition sometimes came to sailors' eyes as late as the last century.
Antillia, or the Seven Cities.
The great island of Antillia, or the Seven Cities, already referred to, was recognized, so far as we know, for the first time in the Weimar map of 1424, and is known in legends as the resort of some Spanish bishops, flying from the victorious Moors, in the eighth century. It never quite died out from the recognition of curious minds, and was even thought to have been seen by the Portuguese, not far from the time when Columbus was born. Peter Martyr also, after Columbus had returned from his first voyage, had a fancy that what the Admiral had discovered was really the great island of Antillia, and its attendant groups of smaller isles, and the fancy was perpetuated when Wytfliet and Ortelius popularized the name of Antilles for the West Indian Archipelago.
Brazil Island.
Another fleeting insular vision of this pseudo-geographical realm was a smaller body of floating land, very inconstant in position, which is always given some form of the name that, in later times, got a constant shape in the word Brazil. We can trace it back into the portolanos of the middle of the fourteenth century; and it had not disappeared as a survival twenty or thirty years ago in the admiralty charts of Great Britain. The English were sending out expeditions from Bristol in search of it even while Columbus was seeking countenance for his western schemes; and Cabot, at a little later day, was instrumental in other searches.
Travelers in the Orient.
Foremost among the travelers who had excited the interest of Toscanelli, and whose names he possibly brought for the first time to the attention of Columbus, were Marco Polo, Sir John Mandeville, and Nicolas de Conti.
MODERN EASTERN ASIA, WITH THE OLD AND NEW NAMES.
[From Yule's Cathay.