But these wonderful isles of the sea differed widely, some being very horrible and some being delightful. “Oh,” sings Thomas Moore—
“Oh, for some fair Formosa, such as he,
The young Jew fabled of in the Indian sea,
By nothing but its name of Beauty known,
And which Queen Fancy might make all her own,
Her fairy kingdom—take its peoples, lands,
And tenements into her own bright hands,
And make at least one earthly corner fit
For love to live in, pure and exquisite!”
Such an island as this was discovered and duly reported. First by a monk, who after sailing three days due east beheld a dark cloud, which when it cleared, revealed an island where “was joy and mirthe enough.” This monk had apparently been induced to put to sea by the assurance of a mariner that he had met Judas floating on a rock! It was reserved for St. Brandau, however, to christen this delectable spot, and he called it the Blessed Island. Though its existence was fully believed in, its reputation faded as the years rolled by and nobody came home to say he had seen it. Then, all on a sudden, a Lisbon pilot stumbled upon it in a gale of wind, and so excited the appetite of a Spanish nobleman for its felicities that his lordship fitted out an expedition for no other purpose than to find it. Happier for him had it remained a secret of the deep! he was wrecked upon it, fell into a trance that lasted some years, woke up mad, and returned to Spain with a long story of its being populated and ruled by a descendant of the last King of the Goths. The Spanish nobleman’s experiences of its blessedness did not weaken the general faith in this ocean paradise; search was made for it so late as 1721, after which it disappears. Possibly it was the account of some such an island as this that addled the brains of King Gavran and sent him seeking for the enchanted fairy meadows which floated upon the sea. He took his family with him, and he and they were never heard of more. But does not one see in all this how real those islands were, how seductive or repellant, and how delightfully different from the plain discoveries of the modern mariner, whether fancied or real?