The Un-Discovered Islands

by Malachy Tallack

  For poets and explorers, cartographers and historians, Iceland has seemed to fulfil the most important requirements of a Thule: namely, that it is far away and strange. But in accepting this they have chosen to ignore two factors. First, that reaching Iceland from Britain in six days, more than 2,000 years ago, would have been extraordinarily difficult. And second, that according to Strabo and others, Thule was populated by farmers who brewed a drink from honey; but at the time Pytheas travelled, Iceland was uninhabited. It had no people and no bees.

  The problem, for those who have sought to pin Thule down, is that nowhere is quite right. The few clues available add up only to contradictions, and to a vague, uncertain shape. To try and unravel these contradictions or to add detail to the image is to fail almost at once. Pytheas may have travelled to Shetland or to Faroe; he may have reached Norway, Iceland or the Baltic; he may even have constructed his story entirely out of rumours and fantasy. In the end it matters little. For the legacy of his voyage has not been the discovery of an island, it has been the creation of a space: a mysterious, unfathomable hole into which, for two millennia and more, dreams of the north have been poured. And while the desire to erase uncertainty has now wiped it from the map, Thule still exists in the cartography of the mind.

  Fusang

  THE KINGS AND EMPERORS of ancient China were much concerned with the idea of immortality. For all their wealth and power they remained nonetheless human, and thus were as helpless in the face of death as even the lowliest of men. The fangshi were Taoist scholars whose role was something akin to that of a shaman; they were spiritual teachers, physicians, alchemists and conjurers. It was the fangshi to whom these anxious nobles would turn, for medicine and for advice.

  According to tradition, the elixir of life, a potion bringing immortality, could be found on five islands in the East China Sea. These islands were home to the Eight Immortals, and were also the location of the ‘spirit mountains’, Penglai, Fangzhang, and Yingzhou. There, all plants and animals were white, and all the palaces were made of gold. The problem was that any boat approaching them would be driven off course by the wind.

  The difficulties of reaching these islands did not prevent leaders from sending out expeditions in search of them. The most famous of these journeys was led by the fangshi Xu Fu in 219BC and again in 210BC. Xu Fu did not travel light. On the second of these journeys he took with him 3,000 boys and girls, on sixty ships, but neither he nor they ever returned. Some believe that the travellers reached Japan, and that, bringing with him the technology of Chinese agriculture, Xu Fu was directly responsible for the great advancement of Japanese civilisation that took place a few decades later.

  Seven centuries after this failed expedition, news of another mysterious land was heard. According to the Book of Liang, a Buddhist monk called Hui Shen arrived in Jingzhou in 499AD. He had come, he said, from Fusang, a place 20,000 li (Chinese miles) away.

  Fusang was a word that people knew. It was already part of their mythology. The Fusang was a kind of mystical tree – a red mulberry and tree-of-life – that grew somewhere far to the east. Ten three-footed ravens perched in its branches, and each day one of these birds would carry the sun upon its back. Fusang was the place at which each day was born, at the foot of the Valley of the Sun.

  The description Hui Shen gave of this place, however, was rather more prosaic than might be expected. The land of Fusang was indeed named after the tree, which grew there in abundance. But the tree he described was less mythical, more practical. On its branches hung pear-like fruit, and from its bark was made a kind of cloth. The inhabitants of Fusang also used the tree to make paper, for they had a written language. The monk went on to outline other aspects of this society, which had been converted to Buddhism just forty years previously. He explained the marriage and death rituals of the people, and the forms of punishment for those who had committed crimes. According to Hui Shen, Fusang was a hierarchical society, with a king – Yigi – at the top, and three levels of noblemen and aristocrats beneath. The people reared long-horned cows, as well as horses and deer, from the milk of which they made yoghurt. This was a society without money, he said, in which gold and silver had no value.

  Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this account is its apparent plausibility. Nothing stands out as obviously false, and aside from its name Fusang seems unconnected to myth. There is, though, a caveat. For Hui Shen also described another land, further east, which was populated only by women. According to the monk, these women fertilised themselves by running into sacred water, and gave birth just six months later. Mothers fed their newborns from special hairs on the back of their necks – they had no breasts – and children reached adulthood by the age of four. From a biological perspective at least, this part of the tale does not stand up to scrutiny. But what about the rest?

  If Fusang was indeed a real place – an island – it was certainly a long way from Jingzhou. As a unit of measurement the li is still in use, but its precise length has changed much over time. Fifteen hundred years ago it stood at around 400 metres, making Fusang 8,000 kilometres or 5,000 miles away. It is hardly surprising, then, that some European scholars have located it at the other side of the Pacific. This theory came to prominence first in the eighteenth century, and was quickly accepted by some French cartographers, who placed the name where British Columbia today lies.

  There are problems with this theory though, of course, not least the fact that horses were then extinct on the American continent. Other commentators have offered numerous suggestions for Fusang’s whereabouts, some more reasonable than others. North-eastern Siberia, Sakhalin Island, Mongolia, Kamchatka, Hokkaido: all have been proposed as possible solutions to the riddle left by Hui Shen.

  In Chinese poetry, Fusang became synonymous with the far east, in much the same way as Thule did in Europe with the north. Occasionally it was associated with Penglai, the ancient spirit mountain towards which Xu Fu set sail more than 2,000 years ago. But always it was identified most closely with Japan, or an island somewhere between the two countries.

  As Japan itself absorbed elements of Chinese language and culture in the centuries after Hui Shen, it absorbed, too, this idea of itself as Fusang. One of the early names for the country was Fuso_ – a Japanese rendering of that very word. And just as Fusang was, in its mythical origins, the place from which each day began, so Japan imagined itself from the outside, from the west. It became, and remains, Nippon: the land of the rising sun.

  St Brendan’s Island

  THE EARLY CHRISTIAN MONKS of Ireland sought out remote places in which to contemplate the glory of God, where prayers would be undisturbed and where faith could be strengthened through solitude and silence. They wanted isolation, and they found it on the islands of western and northern Scotland, where they began to settle in the middle of the first millennium AD. The monastery at Iona was founded in the year 563 by St Columba, but other monks went further afield, to Orkney and Shetland and beyond, becoming the first people to settle in Faroe and in Iceland, many years before the arrival of the Vikings.

  Not all of these wanderers went north, though. Some, in fact, took no particular direction at all, but instead launched themselves into the ocean and let God (or the wind and currents) do the navigating. The lucky ones hit land eventually. Many others must have perished.

  The best known of the travelling monks was St Brendan, who lived from 484 to 577, and was responsible for founding, among other institutions, the monastery at Clonfert in the west of Ireland. But it was not his work within the church for which he is principally remembered, it was his adventures overseas.

  There are several versions of the Brendan story, each of them differing slightly from the others. Those that have survived were largely written between the tenth and twelfth centuries, but were based on earlier texts. This was a tale that was widely known across northern Europe in the High Middle Ages.

  Depending on which version you read, the saint set off from Ireland in the yea
r 512 with sixty followers, or perhaps sixteen, or fourteen. He was prompted to go by news of a glorious island – the Land of Promise of the Saints – described to him by a returning priest (or else an angel). On the journey that ensued, the monks met other holy men, as well as demons, and even the tormented soul of Judas Iscariot. They were chased by a sea serpent and a griffin; they encountered a dragon and landed on the back of a whale, mistaking it for an island. Elsewhere, they alighted on several new lands, including one known as the Paradise of Birds, and another that was home to sheep larger than oxen. The monks saw islands of smoke and fire, which surely must have been volcanoes, as well as a huge column ‘the colour of silver’ and ‘hard as marble’, consisting ‘of the clearest crystal’. It could only have been an iceberg.

  After seven long years, the travellers finally reached the place they had been seeking. It was, like the rest of their journey, extraordinary.

  When they had disembarked, they saw a land, extensive and thickly set with trees, laden with fruits, as in the autumn season. All the time they were traversing that land, during their stay in it, no night was there, but a light always shone, like the light of the sun in the meridian, and for the forty days they viewed the land in various directions, they could not find the limits thereof.

  This, clearly, was an Isle of the Blessed wrapped up in Christian language. It was a paradise on earth, to which good people would ultimately find their way. According to a young man ‘of resplendent features’ whom the monks met on the island: ‘“After many years this land will be made manifest to those who come after you, when days of tribulation may come upon the people of Christ.”’

  The story of St Brendan is a muddle of fact and fiction. Though it is impossible now to fully untangle its various threads, the tale has its roots in Irish sea sagas, or Imrama – particularly The Voyage of Bran – as well as in the Arabic story of Sinbad the Sailor and, further back, in Homer. It combines both supernatural and natural elements in a way that invites credulity yet stretches plausibility. The volcanoes, the iceberg, the giant whale, the islands of birds and of sheep: these things could easily have been seen by monks roaming the North Atlantic. Even on the final, holy island, the perpetual light could, conceivably, be that of an Icelandic summer.

  But despite the northern imagery of the story, the conflation with the Isles of the Blessed and its trees laden with fruit suggested a more temperate location, and as the age of cartography arrived, mapmakers concluded that St Brendan’s Island must lie further south. It appeared first in 1275 on what is known as the Hereford Map, where five islands bearing Brendan’s name correspond to the Canaries, off the coast of North Africa. In the following century, many maps considered Madeira to be the holy island. Later, the Azores sometimes took the name. Cartographers, it seems, were unwilling to let go of the story (or unwilling to contradict a saint) and so they attached it to whicheverisland was most mysterious to them.

  But at some point the mystery became more important than the geography, and the island was untangled from the known world. St Brendan’s Isle began to appear on maps where no land had yet been found. And so, as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries arrived, Brendan’s name drifted westward towards the newly discovered continent. In the late sixteenth century it was there, mid-Atlantic, detached entirely from any genuine piece of land, perhaps on the assumption that it would later be rediscovered.

  St Brendan may well have wandered the ocean, like other Irish monks, though nothing now could allow us to be sure. The fact he is buried at Clonfert suggests he did not go far enough to be entirely lost, but that has not prevented some from suggesting the saint may have reached the coast of North America. That theory, outlandish though it may seem, is promoted by those who argue that the Irish, not the Scandinavians, were the first Europeans to visit the New World. Fifteen hundred years later, some still put their faith in Brendan.

  The Island of

  Seven Cities

  IN 711AD, A SMALL army led by Tariq Ibn Ziyad crossed from North Africa to Mons Calpe, the rock now known as Gibraltar. This was, at first, just one of a series of raids by Berbers on the Iberian peninsula, but this time things went further. Tariq’s army pushed forward into what is now Spain, and in July of that year they fought a major battle against the Visigoth troops of King Roderic. Though outnumbered, the Berbers defeated their Christian opponents, and Roderic was killed. In the years that followed, the Muslim forces were augmented by recruits from the south, and they continued their expansion through the peninsula. Virtually all of Iberia fell to the Umayyad caliphate, and much of it remained under Muslim rule for the next five centuries.

  For most of the inhabitants, life did not change to any great extent. Their faith, language and laws were largely respected, as was their property. But this was not universally true, and many Christians were forced to flee the caliphate and find shelter elsewhere. Most, naturally, went north – across the Pyrenees – but others took more desperate measures and set sail into the ocean.

  Among the escapees, it is said, were seven Iberian bishops, including the Bishop of Porto. Sailing due west, together with some of their followers, the holy men stumbled across a hitherto unknown island, far out in the Atlantic. There they burned the ships that had brought them to safety, and each bishop founded his own city: Ansalli, Ansolli, Ansodi, Ansesseli, Anhuib, Aira and Con.

  This island began to appear on maps in the early fifteenth century, and was most commonly called Antillia, or some variant of that name. On the charts of Pizzigano in 1424, and Beccario in 1435, it is shown as the largest of a group of four islands, and takes the shape in which it would remain for much of its cartographic life: a rectangle, more or less vertically aligned, with six small bays cut into its long sides and one great bite out of the southern shore. On later maps, each of these bays was given the name of one of the supposed cities.

  The origins of these names are long lost, and they may simply have been the invention of a mapmaker. But the word Antillia itself is more interesting, and has several possible interpretations. Most commonly it has been assumed to mean ‘the opposite island’, derived from the Portuguese. This makes sense, since it sits at the opposite side of the ocean, roughly at the latitude of Gibraltar. Other theories, however, link the name to the Arabic word for dragon, or to Plato’s story of Atlantis. Yet another intriguing possibility is that Antillia may be a corruption of ante Tile – ‘the island before Thule’ – though that would hardly help to pin it down geographically.

  Whatever its origins, Antillia was widely known in the fifteenth century. There was at least one report of a ship reaching the island, around 1430, and finding it still populated by Portuguese speakers. According to later writers, the ship returned to Europe with Antillian sand on board (sand was used in cooking boxes while at sea), which was found to contain gold. But when Prince Henry the Navigator demanded the crew return to the west to find more of that sparkling sand, they refused. Their time on the island had been unpleasant, and the strange, isolated inhabitants had left them feeling afraid. Rather than risk their lives again, or incur the prince’s anger, the sailors fled.

  Decades later, when Christopher Columbus was planning his ambitious voyage to China, he entered into correspondence with the physician and astronomer, Paolo Toscanelli. Labouring under the belief that the earth was rather smaller than turned out to be the case, Columbus thought he could reach Asia by sailing due west. He was seeking reassurance that such a journey was possible, and Toscanelli gave it to him. Asia could indeed be found at the far side of the Atlantic, he claimed, and if additional supplies were needed, it would be possible to stop en route at Antillia. Encouraged by this news, the explorer felt ready for his journey.

  The story of the Island of Seven Cities almost certainly evolved independently from that of Antillia. One has its roots in eighth-century Iberia; the other, perhaps, hints at some early awareness of the North American continent. Though the two became entangled and then synonymous with the advent of medieval cartog
raphy, they did not remain so for long. After Columbus had sailed to the New World (an achievement he never accepted, arguing until the end of his days that he had reached Asia, as planned) the map of the Atlantic began to change. With a few notable exceptions, Antillia and the seven cities parted company. The former morphed into the Antilles – the Caribbean islands where Europeans first made landfall – but the latter drifted further afield.

  On at least one map of the early sixteenth century, the seven cities were spread out over the east coast of North America, but more famously they became associated with a mythical land of plenty located somewhere on that continent. Stories of Cíbola and the Seven Cities of Gold brought the Spanish conquistadores into what is now New Mexico and Arizona in 1540. Finding only the adobe towns of the pueblo tribes, the Spaniards pushed onward to Quivira, most likely in central Kansas. Led by Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, the expedition found no gold, but it marked the beginning of European exploration in the interior of the continent, and it remains one of the founding stories of the United States.

  The Age of Exploration

  Hy Brasil

  Frisland

  Davis Land

  The Auroras

  The Age of Exploration