that once upon a time a vast island lay off the coasts
of Africa; he calls it Atlantis, and it was, he says,
sunk below the sea by an earthquake. The Phoenicians were
wonderful sailors; their ships had gone out of the
Mediterranean into the other sea, and had reached the
British Isles, and in all probability they sailed as far
west as the Canaries. We find, indeed, in classical
literature many references to supposed islands and
countries out beyond the Atlantic. The ancients called
these places the Islands of the Blessed and the Fortunate
Isles. It is, perhaps, not unnatural that in the earlier
writers the existence of these remote and mysterious
regions should be linked with the ideas of the Elysian
Fields and of the abodes of the dead. But the later
writers, such as Pliny, and Strabo, the geographer, talked
of them as actual places, and tried to estimate how many
Roman miles they must be distant from the coast of Spain.

There were similar legends among the Irish, legends
preserved in written form at least five hundred years
before Columbus. They recount wonderful voyages out into
the Atlantic and the discovery of new land. But all these
tales are mixed up with obvious fable, with accounts of
places where there was never any illness or infirmity,
and people lived for ever, and drank delicious wine and
laughed all day, and we cannot certify to an atom of
historic truth in them.

Still more interesting, if only for curiosity's sake,
are weird stories that have been unearthed among the