am more inclined to regard these
as, more or less, distorted legendary statements about Brendan's real
career, afterwards seized upon, magnified, and worked in by the
romancer, than as incidents of the romancer appropriated and
nationalized into comparative possibility by the biographer. Thus the
Land of Promise may have been a fond title for the imaginary site of a
monastery for which he was seeking in the Western Isles. But even in
Ireland the son of Finnlogh O' Alta seemingly obtained a character for
certain adventures which must have been taken from the fable, and the
Martyrology of Donegal gravely refers to the Voyage as well as to the
Life as an authority upon the subject, although I confess I can hardly
believe that Cuimin of Condeire was not jesting when he wrote the
verse--

'Brenainn loves constant piety,
According to the synod and congregation;
Seven years on a whale's back he spent;
It was a difficult mode of piety.'

It was, however, outside Ireland, in countries where less was known of
the facts, and the Voyage was isolated from other works of its class,
that this romance was most largely accepted as serious matter of fact.
The possession of St. Brendan's Isle whenever it should be discovered
was, according to M. Jubinal, actually made the subject of State
documents, and he names no less than four maritime expeditions which
were despatched in search of it, the last from Santa Cruz in Tenerife in
1721, at the instance of Don Juan de Mur, Governor of the Canaries, and
under the command of Caspar Dominguez. I must, however, avow that I have
great difficulty in believing that such an expedition as this could have
been motived by any other hypothesis than that the romance was the
legendary record of some really existing island in the Atlantic.

The mention of such a belief brings me to the consideration of another
and very different form of what I may call the naturalistic school of
interpretation. This theory throws overboard the whole of the elements
of the class commonly called supernatural, and even treats the identity
of the voyagers as a matter of comparative indifference, but it sees in
the wild narrative a distorted and legendary account of some actual
voyage and some actual adventures and discoveries in the Atlantic. By
some the Canary Archipelago, with perhaps Madeira, the Cape de Verde
Islands, and some parts of the African coast, if not even the Azores,
have been supposed to