declared, in his "Image of the World," that there was in the ocean a
certain island agreeable and fertile beyond all others, now unknown to
men, once discovered by chance and then lost again, and that this island
was the one which Brandan had visited. In several early maps, before the
time of Columbus, the Madeira Islands appear as "The Fortunate Islands of
St. Brandan," and on the famous globe of Martin Behaim, made in the very
year when Columbus sailed, there is a large island much farther west than
Madeira, and near the equator, with an inscription saying that in the year
565, St. Brandan arrived at this island and saw many wondrous things,
returning to his own land afterwards. Columbus heard this island mentioned
at Ferro, where men declared that they had seen it in the distance. Later,
the chart of Ortelius, in the sixteenth century, carried it to the
neighborhood of Ireland; then it was carried south again, and was supposed
all the time to change its place through enchantment, and when Emanuel of
Portugal, in 1519, renounced all claim to it, he described it as "The
Hidden Island." In 1570 a Portuguese expedition was sent which claimed
actually to have touched the mysterious island, indeed to have found there
the vast impression of a human foot--doubtless of the baptized giant
Mildus--and also a cross nailed to a tree, and three stones laid in a
triangle for cooking food. Departing hastily from the island, they left
two sailors behind, but could never find the place again.

Again and again expeditions were sent out in search of St. Brandan's
island, usually from the Canaries--one in 1604 by Acosta, one in 1721 by
Dominguez; and several sketches of the island, as seen from a distance,
were published in 1759 by a Franciscan priest in the Canary Islands, named
Viere y Clarijo, including one made by himself on May 3, 1759, about 6
A.M., in presence of more than forty witnesses. All these sketches depict
the island as having its chief length from north to south, and formed of
two unequal hills, the highest of these being at the north, they having