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