﻿10 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 59 



nation, and there are divers corroborative items, of various degrees 

 of cogency, to be considered, which go to make up a fair probability 

 that some of these early, half historic glimmerings were something 

 more than fancy-play or mere lucky conjectures of the truth. 



We should naturally expect the Phenicians of Cadiz and Carthage 

 to reach the Madeiras and the Azores, which lay out before them, and 

 were rather more accessible than Britain. Storms would drive them 

 there if they lacked the hardihood to try the chances of the open sea, 

 and one little island group would lead them on to another. In a 

 cavern of St. Michael's, 1 of the middle Azores, an inscription is said 

 to have been found by early explorers, which has been commonly 

 supposed to be Phenician because identified as Hebrew, a closely 

 allied script and tongue, by a " Moor, the son of a Jew," who was 

 with the party, but could not, or at least did not translate it. The tale 

 is from Thevet, cosmographer of Henry III, who* says that he 

 visited these islands long afterward. Remembering divers American 

 " Phenician inscriptions," called so before Norsemen were put for- 

 ward as our chief inscribers, one desires at least a better expert 

 opinion, and a more generally trusted transmitter than Thevet. 



The knowledge of these islands kept on through the centuries in an 

 intermittent, glimmering way. The ancient Irish legends of explora- 

 tion have much to say of islands to the southward which, in part, 

 must be the Azores, if real, and in particular of islands notable for 

 their fine sheep, their singing birds, or their dangerous monsters. 

 Then the Moors, conquering Africa and the Iberian peninsula, soon 

 came to the front as navigators, and we find again the Isle of Sheep, 

 the Isle of Birds, and the Isle of the Dragon in Edrisi's Atlantic 

 series, distinct from the Canaries which he had described already. 

 Furthermore, his twelfth century map shows a string of islands 

 stretching northward from below Gibraltar parallel to the western 

 shore of Europe, sadly out of place for accurate geography, but in 

 an arrangement fairly paralleled by the fifteenth century map of 

 Zuan da Napoli, who gives us the names of Corvo and the other 

 Azores. The chain of record seems reasonably complete, and early 

 visits, even to that mid- Atlantic island and its companion, Conigi or 

 Flores, must have been rather numerous. Who can believe that such 

 visitors would all pause there with the vision in their souls of other 

 islands equally probable, equally delightful out beyond ? 



1 Humboldt : Examen Critique, vol. - 2, p. 240. 



