For the genesis of Atlantis we have then, first, the great idealist philosopher Plato minded to compose an instructive pseudo-historical romance of statesmanship and war and actually making a beginning of the task; and, secondly, the fragmentary cues and suggestive data which came to him out of tradition and mariners’ tales, perhaps in part through Solon and intervening transmitters, in part more directly to himself. Of this material we may name foremost the vague knowledge of vast impeded regions in the Atlantic believed to be shallow and requiring a physical explanation; then rumors of cataclysms and sunken lands in the same ocean; then legends of ancient hostilities between dwellers beyond the Pillars of Hercules and the peoples about the Mediterranean; and finally the reflection of the Persian war on the shadowy ancient past of Athens—Athens the defender and victor, Athens the Queen of the Sea.
Every solution of the Atlantis problem must be conjectural. The above is offered simply as the best conjecture to which I can see my way.
CHAPTER III
ST. BRENDAN’S EXPLORATIONS AND ISLANDS
The Lismore Version of the Saint’s Adventures
The fifteenth-century Book of Lismore, compiled from much older materials, tells us that St. Brenainn (evidently St. Brendan, the navigator)
desired to leave his land and his country, his parents and his fatherland, and he urgently besought the Lord to give him a land secret, hidden, secure, delightful, separated from men. Now after he had slept on that night, he heard the voice of the angel from heaven, who said to him, “Arise, O Brenainn,” saith he, “for God hath given thee what thou soughtest, even the Land of Promise” ... and he goes alone to Sliab Daidche and he saw the mighty intolerable ocean on every side, and then he beheld the beautiful noble island, with trains of angels (rising) from it.[44]
Thus far, in the rather redundant style of such literature, from the Life of Brenainn in the Lives of the Saints of this old manuscript. After a century and a half of disappearance this manuscript was accidentally discovered in 1814, in a walled-up recess, by workmen engaged on repairs.
Mr. Westropp holds that this Lismore version is the “simplest and probably the earliest;”[45] but its full-blown development of certain marvels (such as the spending of every Easter for at least five years on the back of a vast sea monster as a substitute for an island) may well awaken a question as to the validity of this conjecture.
However, the suggestion of the voyage by a dream seems likely enough, and his mood was in keeping with the anchorite enthusiasm of his time. Of course he promptly set forth to find his “promised land;” at first, in a hide-covered craft, with failure in spite of long endeavor; afterward, by advice of a holy woman, in a large wooden vessel, built in Connaught and manned by sixty religious men, with final success.