Page:Legendaryislands00babcuoft.djvu/205

 CHAPTER XIII SUMMARY 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 properly be directed to some of its salient conclusions. In stating them posi- tively as below, here or elsewhere, I do not mean to be offensively dogmatic but to present concisely my own deductions from evi- dence which I have been at some pains to gather. Atlantis was a creation of philosophic romance, incited and aided by miscellaneous data out of history, tradition, and known physical phenomena, especially by rumors of the weed-encum- bered windless dead waters of the Sargasso Sea. There never was any such gorgeous and dominant Atlantic power as the Atlantis of Plato, able to overrun and conquer more than half of the Mediterranean and contend with Athens in a struggle of life and death. St. Brendan did not cross the Atlantic nor discover any island in its remoter reaches, where some maps show islands bearing his name. He seems, however, to have visited divers eastern Atlan- tic islands, now well known; and it is quite likely that most of the portolan maps of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries are right in linking his name especially to Madeira and her neighbors. Brazil Island is a conspicuously complex problem. Probably it represents the region around the Gulf of St. Lawrence, brought on the same parallel unduly near the Irish shore. Thus under- stood, it would be, presumably, but not necessarily, the carto- graphic record of some early Irish voyage far to the westward. It does not appear on any extant map before 1325, but maps showing the Atlantic and its remoter islands (apart from the hopeless distortions of Edrisi and certain monks) can hardly be said to have existed earlier.