onfert in eastern
Galway. The story of his voyage across the Atlantic to the "Promised
Land of the Saints," afterwards designated "St Brendan's Island,"[1]
ranks among the most celebrated of the medieval sagas of western Europe.
Its traditional date is 565-573. The legend is found, in prose or verse
and with many variations, in Latin, French, English, Saxon, Flemish,
Irish, Welsh, Breton and Scottish Gaelic. Although it does not occur in
the writings of any Arabian geographer, several of its incidents--such
as the landing on a whale in mistake for an island--belong also to
Arabic folk-literature. Many of Brendan's fabulous adventures seem to be
borrowed from the half-pagan Irish saga of Maelduin or Maeldune, and
others belong also to Scandinavian mythology. The oldest extant version
of the legend is the 11th century _Navigatio Brendani_.

St Brendan's island was long accepted as a reality by geographers. In a
Venetian map dated 1367, in the anonymous Weimar map of 1424, and in B.
Beccario's map of 1435, it is identified with Madeira. Columbus, in his
journal for the 9th of August 1492, states that the inhabitants of
Hierro, Gomera and Madeira had seen the island in the west; and Martin
Behaim, in the globe he made at Nuremberg in the same year, places it
west of the Canaries and near the equator. During the 16th century the
progress of exploration in these latitudes compelled many cartographers
to locate the island elsewhere; and it was marked about 100 m. west of
Ireland, or afterwards among the West Indies. But in Spain and Portugal
the older belief as to its situation was maintained. In 1526 an
expedition under Fernando Alvarez left Grand Canary in search of St
Brendan's island, which had again been reported as seen by many
trustworthy witnesses. In 1570 an official inquiry was held, and a
second expedition undertaken, by Fernando de Villalobos, governor of
Palma. Similar voyages of discovery were made by the Canarians in 1604
and 1721; and only in 1759 was the apparition of St Brendan's island
explained as an effect of mirage.

Among the numerous books which deal with the legend, the following are
important: _Die altfranzosische Prosaubersetzung von Brendans
Meerfahrt_, by C. Wahlund (Upsala, 1900); _La "Navigatio Sancti
Brendani" in antico Veneziano_, by F. Novati (Bergamo, 1892); _Zur
Brendanus-Legende_, &c., by G. Schirmer (Leipzig, 1888); _Les Voyages
merveilleux de St. Brendan_, &c., by F. Michel (