Legendary Islands of the Atlantic: A Study of Medieval Geography

We cannot tell at what early era the men of the eastern Mediterranean first ventured through the Strait of Gibraltar out on the open ocean, nor even when they first allowed thei...

About 2,300 years ago Plato wrote of a great and populous island empire in the outer (Atlantic) ocean, which had warred against Athens more than 9,000 years before his time and...

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 fro...

So far as we know, the first appearance of the island of Brazil in geography was on the map of Angellinus Dalorto,[71] of Genoa, made in the year 1325. There it appears as a dis...

The mythical islands of the Atlantic (_les îles fantastiques_) on the old maps have had divers origins, instructive to study. Perhaps only one of them derives its name and being...

Of all the legendary islands and island names on the medieval maps, Mayda has been the most enduring. The shape of the island has generally approximated a crescent; its site mos...

He interviewed in 1069 the enterprising king Sweyn of Denmark, and acquired from him divers Scandinavian and other northern items which Adam embodied about 1076 in his work “Des...

region. These two islands strikingly resemble in general situation and arrangement the Greenland and Estotiland (Labrador) in a map (Fig. 14) illustrating Torfaeus’ early eighte...

The name Markland, meaning Forest Land, must be, in one language or another, among the oldest geographical designations known among men. Nothing could be more natural to even th...

Some of the well-known mythical or dubious map islands of the North Atlantic make their entry into cartography very early indeed, apparently as the contribution or record of oth...

There are two names still in common use for American regions, which long antedate Columbus and most likely commemorate achievements of earlier explorers. They are Brazil and the...

Far at sea from Portugal, straggling in a long northwestward line toward America, lies the archipelago sometimes called the Islands of the Sun or the Western Islands but now gen...

Beside those legendary Atlantic islands that may cast some light on visits of white men to America before Columbus or have been at some time linked therewith by speculation or t...

It seems neither practicable nor desirable to recapitulate minutely in this final chapter the rather numerous distinctive features of the present work; but attention may properl...