“The thirteenth day of May we passed by the Island of Paris, and the Island of the bankes of Helicon, and the Island called Ditter, where are many boares and the women bee witches.” This glimpse of Mediterranean travel from one of the sixteenth-century wanderers whose voyages are recorded in Hakluyt might be paralleled from the outer Atlantic, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, or the South Seas. In the Arabian Nights, for example, Sayf Al-Muluk and his companions came in turn to the isle of the old men of the sea; to the isle of ghouls who sleep under cover of their ears; to the isle of gigantic blackamoors with protruding eyeteeth; and to the isle of trained apes “bigger than he-mules.”

Such folk seem at home in the wilderness of waters. These distant spaces of the sea are little worlds of their own which imagination feels free to dower with peculiar institutions and stock with peculiar peoples. In islands of reality or fantasy men place their ideal states, their pirate realms, their abodes of exile, their refuges from the restraints and traditions of life—the sanctuaries of pursuits and companionships other than those of which they have tired. In them, also, they place the regions of repose; to reach felicity one must cross water.

On journeys thither one might sight the shores of the folk of prodigy. There were islands of men, and islands of women, and islands of hermits, and islands of witches, and islands of satyrs, and islands of giants, and islands of dwarfs, and islands of dog-headed, ox-worshiping cannibals. The impulse thus to set aside a maritime domicile for the nondescript nations was strongest with Arab geographers and Celtic story-tellers. It culminates in the romancing narrative of Maundeville, who dotted the eastern seas with the archipelagoes of his fancy and settled them with the creatures of fable.

When the spell of terror woven in classic times began to lift from the Atlantic, its islands swam into sight as to the strains of harp music. They appeared to belong equally to geography and to poetry. Of Madeira, the discovery of which is associated with the romance of fugitive English lovers, an old writer declared that such a delightful land “could only have been discovered by love.” For reasons as yet unexplained, nearly all the newly found islands of the eastern Atlantic bore the names of animals or birds. About them, Sir John Hawkins wrote, “are certaine flitting Ilands which have been oftentimes seene, and when men approched neere them, they vanished.” The older maps show one such island which was called St. Brendan’s. It is a memory of the Irish sea epics, and the latter are themselves a review of the entire island story.

In these five wander-tales the empty spaces of the Atlantic are filled in with islands which were loaned to the Irish by Homer from the Odyssey and Plato from his Atlantis; by the Greek, Lucian, from his Rabelaisian True History; by the Roman, Seneca, with his vision of a continent in the west; by him who saw the Sea of Glass from the rock of Patmos; by Arab story-tellers, and by early Moorish and Spanish chroniclers from their narratives of the shadowy Antillia, the Isle of the Seven Bishops, and the legendary journey of the Deluded Folk. Celtic fancy passed a wand over this jumble of material, and a strange new world appeared. Headlands of snow and ice and islands of perpetual summer were within a day’s sail of one another, pagan fables and monkish marvels were domiciled together, there was much mist and much sunshine, and around all was “the mighty and intolerable ocean” which St. Brendan saw at Sliabh Daidche.

Tennyson has set one of these tales, The Voyage of Mældune, to his own music. It was a journey of revenge a chieftain made with his men to slay the man who has slain his father. They came to the Silent Isle, where their voices were thinner and fainter than any flittermouse shriek; to the Isle of Shouting where wild birds cried from its summit till the steer fell down at the plow and the harvest died in the field; to the Isle of Flowers where were blossom and promise of blossom and never a fruit; to the Isle of Fruits, and in every berry and fruit the poisonous pleasure of wine; to the Isle of Fire, which shuddered and shook like a man in a mortal affright; to the Bounteous Isle, where the men began to be weary, to sigh and to stretch and yawn; to the Isle of Witches, naked as heaven, who bosomed the burst of the spray; to the Isle of the Double Towers, that shocked on each other and butted each other with clashing of bells; and to the Isle of a Saint, who told the men, “Go back to the Isle of Finn, and suffer the past to be past.”

This narrative may stand with variations for all of the Irish sea tales. Under the sway of some overmastering motive the hero puts forth upon the deep—for revenge, or to save a comrade condemned, or to seek a woman, or to reach the Land of Promise, or to find the Lord upon the sea. The voyagers pass from island to island. Complaisant Circes greet them from one shore and indignant female virtue repels them from another. They come to the isle called the Delicious, to the Isle of Sheep, to the Isle of Laughter, to the Moving Isle which was a whale’s back, to the isle which is the mouth of hell. They see demons racing their horses on a magic course, and red-hot swine issuing from caves, and stinging cats, and Judas on his rock, and ants the size of foals. A griffin assaults them, the Cyclopes threaten them, birds sing psalms to them. Repentant, or triumphant, or prophetic, or stricken in years, they come back at last to an Ireland that has forgotten them.

Who fares on from island to island with these Celtic dreamers may visit the whole realm of fable.

The Sunken Lands

Gazing into the ocean depths in warm latitudes one sees the fronds of tall aquatic plants sway slightly as if a slow breeze stirred them. Walls of coral rise there with a wavering semblance to palaces. The purple mullet swims in and out of sunken grottos. Such sunlight as reaches them is subdued to softness, like that admitted by cathedral windows when it is late afternoon. These seem to be groves and gardens and habitations under the sea. Beings like one’s fellow mortals, but more beautiful and gentle, might live there and rove in the dim peace of meadows beneath the foam and tumult of the reefs.

Such thoughts come without bidding. Always men have sought the land of heart’s desire, and sometimes they told themselves that it was under the sea; or perhaps that what they saw there was not the promise of what should be but the wreck of what had been.

The sea is a mirror as well as a window. It repeats the curves of shore and sky and all that is between—cornfields, and grazing cattle, and the burden of orchards, and cottage smoke, and the loom of church towers. Here is an underworld, though it be but the simple magic of light upon smooth water. There is a subtler magic of mist and water and uncertain sun gleams when one stands on the west coast of Ireland and looks seaward through the eyes of a people in whom wonder never flickered down in doubt.

Dwelling alone on the outer coast of the world as the ancients knew it, these folk had beheld strange things in the great waters that roared along their cliffs. Shadowy islands showed themselves in thick weather, and, though no trace of them remained when the cloud bank lifted, these were no tricks of mirage wrought by fog and muffled sunlight. They were isles of enchantment that might have floated out of sight, but more likely had sunk beneath the wave, not to emerge again until another seven years were gone. The glints of splendor upon the distant sea were not the track of the sun in broken water. They came from the golden roofs and spires of a sunken city.

So out of things seen—as in a glass darkly—upon, above, and under the billow, and out of things imagined or hoped for, men have wrought the legend of cities that sleep beneath the ocean. The tale of Atlantis is the oldest form of the legend. But the tales of lost cities are not legend altogether and the tale of Atlantis may not be legend altogether. There are submerged ruins on which romance bases itself as upon reality, there are authentic historical happenings, and there are local traditions which, it may be, retain the memory of cities that were upon islands or coasts engulfed by the sea.

Along the Italian coast the columns of sunken Roman villas have given rise to stories of drowned cities. The ruins of towns lie under the Zuyder Zee. Some inroad of the deep may be preserved in the legend of Vineta, the fabled city beneath the Baltic near the Holstein coast. There have been subsidences within historical time in the waters about the British Isles, and the ocean has taken toll of the English coast itself. The Channel shoal called the Goodwin Sands, and Seal Rock, fragment of the Irish island of Inis Fitæ which was split into three pieces in the eighth century, are tokens of these subsidences. In the Azores group, scene of the Atlantis legend, four islands appeared in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and sank again. Expedition Island, northwest of Australia, which Dutch naturalists visited within a generation, lies under seven fathoms of water. The populous island of Torca in the Indian Ocean went out of sight in a sheet of flame in 1693. Tuanaki, an island in South Polar waters, has not been seen in ninety years. The cloud bank which Peary called Crocker Land has been removed from maps of the Arctic region. Three new islands have been born in the Aleutian group, one of them as late as 1909. The strange stone images on Easter Island have given rise to conjecture that it might be the remnant of a continent and a civilization lost beneath the Pacific.

Thus there is a broad basis of fact for the legends of sunken cities. Some of these are of great beauty. Whether the product of pagan or Christian brooding, the sound of church bells is in them—peals that come floating solemnly to the surface from towers through which deep waters are moving. When the sunshine falls upon calm seas, so fisherman say, they can discern these towers, and rising about them the peaked roofs of houses like those of the Middle Ages.

Beyond all others the Celts are the people of the lost lands. These seem part of the Celtic heritage of defeat and dreams. The legends of Wales tell of a fair land sunken by the folly of a drunken prince. The lost Lyonesse, a great promontory of Cornwall, was such another land, and the Scilly Islands are the remnants. Tennyson and Swinburne have rescued its memory from oblivion and Walter de la Mare pictures a scene “in sea-cold Lyonesse, when the Sabbath eve shafts down on the roofs, walls and belfries of the foundered town.” The story of Is, the vanished Breton capital, has been told in folk-song, in poetry, in stately music. It is one of the haunting fables of men, and back of it, as of so many tales of ruin and overthrow, is the figure of a beautiful and wicked woman.

The city of Is lay far in the west of France, where the coast of Brittany makes its great thrust into the Atlantic. Peasants point out the blocks, visible at low tide in the Bay of Douarnenez, which they say are its foundations. The city was builded in a wide plain below the level of the sea, and strong walls, controlled by sluice gates, defended it from the encroaching waves. It was an habitation of vice and pleasure, and it had a king as blameless as Arthur, and he a daughter as cruel, as lustful, and as fair of face as Arthur’s sister, Morgan le Fay. King Gradlon and Princess Dahut are the central figures in the drama of Is.

Dahut dwelt in a tower, where she entertained a long train of lovers, drowning each as she tired of him. To please a paramour she stole from her father’s neck in his sleep the silver key which unlocked the sluice gates and let in the sea. Awakened by the warning tumult of the waters, Gradlon mounted a horse and fled, bearing his daughter with him. But the floods moved after him and a voice bade him sacrifice to the sea the beautiful demon who rode with him. Dahut fell to her death in the waves, and their course was stayed. At Quimper the king rebuilt his seat, but Is was lost forever beneath the Atlantic. Though it happened fifteen centuries ago, there are Bretons who say that the faint chime of bells still comes to them when wind and tide move shoreward together.

Nine is the number of islands under the sea to the west of Erin. They appear above the surface once in seven years. Though a man may descry them from the coast, yet might he go toward them in a currach for two days and not come up with them. Some of them are larger than Ireland itself. They have been seen by trustworthy observers,—Otway, for example. In a paper read before the Royal Irish Society, Westropp describes O Brasile, the best known of these, as he saw it in 1872: “It was a clear evening with a fine golden sunset, when, just as the sun went down, a dark island suddenly appeared far out to sea, but not on the horizon. It had two hills, one wooded; between these, from a low plain, rose towers and curls of smoke. My mother, brother, and several friends saw it at the same time. One cried out that he could see New York!”

Illusion, but for thousands of years Irish eyes have beheld these phantom islands lift and fade in the west, and the Celtic glamour is in the legends that tell them. “Lost Kilsapheen,” sighs the poet, “its palaces and towers of pride ... all buried in the rushing tide and deep sea waters green.” Churches and convents and castles are in these islands, and those who have seen them or thought they saw them report more intimate touches—an old woman coming out of a cabin to cut a cabbage; the bleating of sheep and lambs heard in a fog on the open sea; the apparition of “an old Scotch gentleman” wearing the raiment of another century upon an enchanted shore. Sometimes a seeming of tumult troubles these realms of shadow. There are flames and smoke and fugitives. Then the spell passes and there is naught but the slant of the gull’s wing and the roll of a porpoise on a distant billow.

The inhabitants of the islands are people of a vanished time, and sealmen, and mermen, and giants, and the prisoners of giants. If you can find the golden key to one of the sunken lands it will rise to the surface and remain there; but the key has been hidden under a cairn or is buried in the ruins of a Druid temple. There are other ways of lifting the spell. Casting a clod of earth upon an island when it is above water may disenchant it. Another way is by dropping a coal of fire upon it, or knocking the glowing ashes from your pipe upon the shore, or shooting a red-hot arrow from a boat, for “fire is hostile to anything phantasmal.” So was Inishbofin fixed above the surface of the sea. Fishermen landed upon it in a fog and lit a fire. Then the fog cleared and they saw an old woman driving a white cow to drink. One of them seized the cow’s tail and found in his hand a spray of seaweed; and the woman and cow were turned into rocks. This was ages ago.

Where Eden Lies

Eden, Elysium, and the Fortunate Isles are one. They are upon the earth and yet not of it. They are no part of the realm of shades and it is not through the gates of death that one enters them. Mortal men have dwelt in them, or may reach them, and thither the heroes pass without leaving “the warm precincts of the cheerful day.” These are the ideal lands of afternoon sunshine and airs that are at once a sigh and a caress. The poetry and pity of men created them that there might be some place of happiness with portals less somber than those of the tomb, and without the sadness of irrevocable farewells upon the paths that lead to it.

So the realms of bliss were placed afar, at the end of difficult journeys which yet might be attained, or at least attempted. Eden lay eastward. The Fortunate Isles of the Roman and the Elysian lands of the Greek and Celt lay westward. In the conception of men these were islands, Eden almost as much as the others. The four sacred rivers flowed from it and around it, and in later times, what men who came near to it particularly noticed was the sound of falling water.

It seemed to Columbus that the rushing current of the Orinoco flowed down from Eden’s steeps. It seemed to men before him that paradise might lie in the southern hemisphere, deemed “the noblest and happiest part of the globe,” and perhaps in the South Seas. There were those who made Eden a coast on the northern ocean, and others who placed it among the fountains of Armenia. To most men the island of Ceylon was its seat. There Carpini heard the plash of its waters, and Maundeville drank thereof, as he reports, to his bodily betterment.

The Fortunate Isles, the Elysian abode of the heroes, were placed by the Greeks in the extreme west, near the river Oceanus. Their position receded with the advance of world-knowledge and finally was fixed in the Canary and Madeira islands, furthest outpost of Roman discovery. Satire though it is, the True History of Lucian describes the Blessed Islands in the very term men used when they were glad to believe. As his party approached these islands, odorous airs came out from shore, in which one could detect the mingled breath of the rose, the narcissus, the hyacinth, and the lily. There was music from harp and lute, and then, as the boat grounded on the beach, “the guardians of the isle immediately chained us with manacles of roses, their only fetters.”

These were the same islands which the Celts called by many beautiful names and whither the coracles of legend journeyed. It is hard to tell where the sunken islands of their history give way to the imaginary islands of their geography, and these to the ideal lands of their myths. The three groups seem to lie one behind the other in the outer seas of the Imrama. The farthest group was the Celtic other-world, and yet so near was it to the coasts of the New World, that a claim for the discovery of America is based on St. Brendan’s voyage to the Land of Promise. The group may best be called an archipelago where pagan and Christian ideals shared dominion. Therein was not only the Land of Promise, but “Magh Mell of many flowers,” the Land of Truth, “whose truth was sung without falsehood.” There was the Land of the Living, and the sensuous Land of Fair Women. In all these happy islands music swelled, and laughter, and there was neither wailing nor treachery, and death was not; and the magic food was unsalted pork, new milk, and mead.

It was the singular fate of this god’s land of the Celt to become confused with the geographical story of both Europe and America. The memory of actual Irish voyages to the New World may be in the legend, and inference from wreckage carried from afar, along with the stuff of old dreams. Of the latter is a Spanish story wherein the Celtic paradise masks itself as the Island of the Seven Cities to which seven bishops had led their flocks to escape the Moor. Men whose hap it was to sight this shadowy coast were carried in a barge to the shore and entertained in a lofty hall by men who spoke their own tongue, though with the antique accent. Europe credited the tale, nor guessed that the barge was the same as that which bore the wounded Arthur unto Avalon.

These dream isles, at once aspiration and allegory, were found also, or rather they were sought, in the eastern seas. It is recited in the Buddhist records that the king of Udyana had a true report of the silver walls and golden roofs of an island of the sages in distant waters. The Chinese emperor, Tshe Huan Ti, of the third century before Christ, heard of a happy land seven hundred miles to the eastward in the Yellow Sea, and sent young men out to find it. They saw it on a far horizon and a roseate light was upon it. But storms drove them back. The Japanese tell of such a land lying toward the sunrise, and call it Oraisan.

Maundeville knew of an island in the eastern ocean. It was something like the places of eternal bliss in the far west, and yet was the home of people who were much as other men are except that they were better. When Alexander would have conquered them, an embassy bore him this message, “Nothing may thou take from us but our good Peace,” and he let them alone. In this isle of Bragman was “No Thief, nor Murderer, nor common Woman, nor poor Beggar, nor ever was Man slain in that Country. And because they be so true and so righteous, and so full of all good Conditions, they were never grieved with Tempests, nor with Thunder, nor with Lightning, nor with Hail, nor with Pestilence, nor with War, nor with Hunger, nor with any other Tribulation, as we be, many Times, amongst us, for our Sins.”

The island paradises of mankind lie upon many waters and in every quarter of the earth. Alike for the Indians of Chile and of the American Northwest, Elysium was in the distant Pacific. The natives of Haiti believed it was in western valleys of their own island. The natives of Australia called it “the gum-tree country.” The Semang of the Malay Peninsula said it was across the sea in a land of screw pines and thatch palms. It was their ancient island home, said the people of the Celebes. It was northwest of Tonga, the Friendly Islanders thought, and Bulotu was the name they gave it; yams and breadfruit were plentiful there, hogs abounded, and there were reefs for shark-catching. Many Kanaka tribes named it Havaika, which is perhaps Java, or the Samoan island of Savaii, points of dispersion in their migrations. The natives of Torres Straits called it the island of Kibu; in its treetops ghosts sat twittering. But the Solomon Islander could hear their laughter as they bathed in the surf of his own sea-befriended paradise. “These Marquesas,” a nun said to Frederick O’Brien, “make no more of death than of a journey to another island, and much less than of a journey to Tahiti.”

Among races of higher culture Elysium takes on a more ordered beauty, yet remains naïve. Annwfn is its Brythonic name and it lies at the end of a long voyage; no infirmity is there, and sweeter than white wine is the drink from its mighty well. Before men embarked for it, they said in Babylon, there was a formidable land journey to take, over a high pass guarded by scorpion men in the mountains of Masu, along a road of black darkness, through a park of precious stones, across a bitter river—and then the waters of death; these may have been the Atlantic, or the sea of the Arabs. Elysium was far to the east in some mellow clime beyond the ocean, so the Slavs thought; and thither the birds and insects went in autumn. It is a land of lotus lakes in the west, and its name is Sukhavati, say the Buddhists of Nippon; out of it comes a continual harmony of flowing rivers, murmuring leaves, and soft bells swung by softer winds. It is a kingdom in the northern ocean and its name is Vaikuntha, some Hindus say. Others speak of a paradise which they call Svetadvipa, “the white island” that is somewhere in the north beyond the Sea of Milk.

For inland peoples the thought of a sea to be crossed, as every day the sun crosses the sea to its rest, gave way at times to the thought of a river with a difficult bridge, and paradise on the farther side. Such in the Hindu classics was the land of the Uttarakarus which lay on the shores of the northern ocean beyond the radiance of the sun and the moon. A river that petrified whatever entered it flowed between it and the countries of the south. Lakes with golden lotuses and tanks of crystal water shimmered in the light airs of this favored land. In its odorous orchards birds always sang, and beautiful maidens, hanging by their long hair, grew among the blossom-burdened branches—another glimpse of the enigmatic women of Wak-wak. Amid the sound of music and laughter these Indian Hyperboreans did their pious deeds, nor shed the god-unlawful tear, until ten thousand and ten hundred years had passed. Then they died, and fowls with sharp beaks carried their bodies to mountain caves.

An Irish myth of the Middle Ages holds closer to the facts of existence than any of these stories of terrestrial felicity, and there is a note of sadness in the beauty of it. In a lake in Munster were the islands of life and death. There was no port for death to enter the first island, but age and pain and sickness were there, and all the wearinesses of years. Its inhabitants learned at last to look on the opposite island as the place of repose, and, steering their barks to its shore, they entered upon eternal rest.