ATLANTIC LEGEND 65 



ments advanced in more than a thousand volumes of this 

 search into the past. But it is well known to most students of 

 literature that the Welsh had their tale of the drowned city of 

 Llion, and the Bretons of the lost kingdom of Lyonesse some- 

 where undersea off the Point du Raz. The Irish talk of the 

 Island of St. Brandon, of Hi Brazil west, always west, and the 

 Gauls at the time of Caesar said their ancestors came from the 

 sea southwest, off the Iberian coast. Oddly enough the Mayans 

 and other Mexican peoples, even the Peruvian Indians, all 

 have legends of bearded white men who came from oversea 

 bearing their cultures from the East. There certainly would be 

 no particular physical reason why these prehistoric migrations 

 could not have happened. A great belt of good weather and 

 favoring trade winds blow from the Canaries to the Antilles; 

 and from the Azores or Canaries to Gibraltar is a feasible jour- 

 ney. And we might add that the blond Guanches of Tenerife, 

 the pre-Spanish native race, practiced mummification much as 

 did the Egyptians, and claimed ancestry from a source other 

 than the Canaries. 



Tracing the rumors of a lost Atlantis is moving inward from 

 a circumference that covers the shores of the whole Atlantic 

 Ocean toward a hub along many spokes, but the spokes slowly 

 disappear under the sea and no hub has yet been found and 

 charted. Yet even certain of the creatures seemed obsessed 

 with this old memory. The familiar story of the lemmings of 

 Norway comes to mind — how these small rodents periodi- 

 cally migrate in great numbers to the Atlantic shore and swim 

 blindly west to their ultimate exhaustion and death. The eels 

 and the salmon also obey a strange concentric instinct in their 

 breeding habits. From both the American and European 

 shores washed by the Atlantic Stream, the mature eels swim 

 back to the neighborhood of the central undersea Atlantic 

 ridge near the Sargasso Sea and there, deep down in this par- 

 ticularly warm and tranquil body of salt water, breed and die. 



