Legendary Islands of the Atlantic: A Study of Medieval Geography

by William Henry Babcock

The Portuguese historian Faria y Sousa has yet another version. According to Stevens’ translation:

After Roderick’s defeat the Moors spread themselves over all the province, committing inhuman barbarities. * * * The chief resistance was at Merida. The defendants, many of whom were Portuguese, that being the Supreme Tribunal of Lusitania, were commanded by Sacaru, a noble Goth. Many brave actions passed at the siege, but at length there being no hopes of relief and provisions failing, the town was surrendered upon articles. The commander of the Lusitanians, traversing Portugal, came to a seaport town, where, collecting a good number of ships, he put to sea, but to which part of the world they were carried does not appear. There is an ancient fable of an island called Antilla in the western ocean, inhabited by Portuguese, but it could never yet be found, and therefore we will leave it until such time as it is discovered, but to this place our author supposes these Portugals to have been driven.[129]

It is plain that Captain Stevens paraphrases with comments rather than translates. The original[130] avers that the fugitives made sail for the Fortunate Islands (the Canaries), in order that they might preserve some remnants of the Spanish race, but were carried elsewhere. It also specifies that the legendary island which they are supposed to have reached is inhabited by Portuguese and contains seven cities—tiene siete cividades.

This last account lacks positive mention of the emigrating bishops and for the first time names a definite though rather remote goal as aimed at by their effort. But the movement from Merida is well accounted for, and a trusted military commander would seem a natural leader for such an enterprise of wholesale escape. The bishops, implied by the seven cities, might well gather to him at Oporto or be picked up on the way. On the whole it seems the most easily believable version of the story; though of course it does not necessarily follow that they really chose any land so remote as Teneriffe and its neighbors—if they knew of them—for a new abiding place. Of course the continuance of Portuguese language and civilization and the persistence of seven isolated towns through so many centuries must be ranked with the auriferous sands of Antillia as late products of the dreaming Iberian brain.

Mythical Location of the Seven Cities on the Mainland

The citations thus far given identify the Island of the Seven Cities with some legendary, but generally believed-in patch of land afar out in the ocean—sometimes with the Island of Brazil, more often with Antillia. But the earliest of them dates six or seven centuries after the supposed fact, and it may well be that a distinction was made at first, which became lost afterward by blending. In a still later stage of development the name of the Seven Cities becomes separate and strangely migratory, not avoiding even the mainland. We know, for instance, what power the Seven Cities of Cibola had to draw Coronado and his followers northward through the mountains and deserts of our still arid Southwest until all that was real of them stood revealed as the even then antiquated and rather uncleanly terraced villages of sun-dried brick which are picturesquely familiar on railway folders and in the pages of illustrated magazines.

But this was not the only part of North America on which the romantic myth alighted. The British Museum contains in MS. 2803 of the Egerton collection an anonymous world map,[131] ([Fig. 8]), forming part of a portolan atlas attributed by conjecture to 1508, which shows, somewhat as in La Cosa’s map of 1500, the Atlantic coast distorted to a nearly westward trend, with the Seven Cities (Septem Civitates), represented by conventional indications of miters, scattered along a seaboard tract from a point considerably west of “terra de los bacalos” and the Bay of Fundy to a point nearly opposite the western end of Cuba. The cartographer’s ideas of geography were exceedingly vague, but apparently he conceived of Portuguese episcopal domination for the coastal country between lower New England and Florida as we know them now. Perhaps, however, he merely meant to set down his cities somewhere on the eastern shore of temperate North America and has strewn them along at convenience.

Fig. 8—Section of the world map in the portolan atlas of about 1508 known as Egerton MS. 2803 in the British Museum, placing the Seven Cities in North America and the name “Antiglia” in South America. (After Stevenson’s photographic facsimile.)

Incidentally, this map is also interesting as one of a few which inscribe Antillia, with slight changes of orthography, on some part of the mainland of South America. In this instance “Antiglia” occupies a tract of the northwestern coastal country apparently corresponding to contiguous portions of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.