Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic | Page 2

to understand the
legends of enchantment which ages have collected around such spots.
Climb to its heights, you seem at the masthead of some lonely vessel,

kept forever at sea. You feel as if no one but yourself had ever landed
there; and yet, perhaps, even there, looking straight downward, you see
below you in some crevice of the rock a mast or spar of some wrecked
vessel, encrusted with all manner of shells and uncouth vegetable
growth. No matter how distant the island or how peacefully it seems to
lie upon the water, there may be perplexing currents that ever foam and
swirl about it --currents which are, at all tides and in the calmest
weather, as dangerous as any tempest, and which make compass
untrustworthy and helm powerless. It is to be remembered also that an
island not only appears and disappears upon the horizon in brighter or
darker skies, but it varies its height and shape, doubles itself in mirage,
or looks as if broken asunder, divided into two or three. Indeed the
buccaneer, Cowley, writing of one such island which he had visited,
says: "My fancy led me to call it Cowley's Enchanted Isle, for we
having had a sight of it upon several points of the compass, it appeared
always in so many different forms; sometimes like a ruined fortification;
upon another point like a great city."
If much of this is true even now, it was far truer before the days of
Columbus, when men were constantly looking westward across the
Atlantic, and wondering what was beyond. In those days, when no one
knew with certainty whether the ocean they observed was a sea or a
vast lake, it was often called "The Sea of Darkness." A friend of the
Latin poet, Ovid, describing the first approach to this sea, says that as
you sail out upon it the day itself vanishes, and the world soon ends in
perpetual darkness:--
"Quo Ferimur? Ruit ipsa Dies, orbemque relictum Ultima perpetuis
claudit natura tenebris."
Nevertheless, it was the vague belief of many nations that the abodes of
the blest lay somewhere beyond it--in the "other world," a region half
earthly, half heavenly, whence the spirits of the departed could not
cross the water to return;--and so they were constantly imagining
excursions made by favored mortals to enchanted islands. To add to the
confusion, actual islands in the Atlantic were sometimes discovered
and actually lost again, as, for instance, the Canaries, which were
reached and called the Fortunate Isles a little before the Christian era,
and were then lost to sight for thirteen centuries ere being visited again.
The glamour of enchantment was naturally first attached by Europeans

to islands within sight of their own shores--Irish, Welsh, Breton, or
Spanish,--and then, as these islands became better known, men's
imaginations carried the mystery further out over the unknown western
sea. The line of legend gradually extended itself till it formed an
imaginary chart for Columbus; the aged astronomer, Toscanelli, for
instance, suggesting to him the advantage of making the supposed
island of Antillia a half-way station; just as it was proposed, long
centuries after, to find a station for the ocean telegraph in the equally
imaginary island of Jacquet, which has only lately disappeared from the
charts. With every step in knowledge the line of fancied
stopping-places rearranged itself, the fictitious names flitting from
place to place on the maps, and sometimes duplicating themselves.
Where the tradition itself has vanished we find that the names with
which it associated itself are still assigned, as in case of Brazil and the
Antilles, to wholly different localities.
The order of the tales in the present work follows roughly the order of
development, giving first the legends which kept near the European
shore, and then those which, like St. Brandan's or Antillia, were
assigned to the open sea or, like Norumbega or the Isle of Demons, to
the very coast of America. Every tale in this book bears reference to
some actual legend, followed more or less closely, and the authorities
for each will be found carefully given in the appendix for such readers
as may care to follow the subject farther. It must be remembered that
some of these imaginary islands actually remained on the charts of the
British admiralty until within a century. If even the exact science of
geographers retained them thus long, surely romance should embalm
them forever.
CAMBRIDGE, MASS.

Contents
I. The Story of Atlantis
II. Taliessin of the Radiant Brow
III. The Swan-Children of Lir
IV. Usheen in the Island of Youth
V. Bran the Blessed
VI. The Castle of the Active Door
VII. Merlin the Enchanter

VIII. Sir Lancelot of the Lake
IX. The Half-Man
X. King Arthur at Avalon
XI. Maelduin's Voyage
XII. The Voyage