merely kept along its coasts, fearful of
departing from them. The waves of this ocean, although they roll as
high as mountains, yet maintain themselves without breaking; for if
they broke it would be impossible for a ship to plough them."

It is another illustration of the way in which discovery and imagination
had hitherto gone by steps and not by flights, that geographical
knowledge reached the islands of the Atlantic (none of which were at a
very great distance from the coast of Europe or from each other) at a
comparatively early date, and stopped there until in Columbus there was
found a man with faith strong enough to make the long flight beyond them
to the unknown West. And yet the philosophers, and later the
cartographers, true to their instinct for this pedestrian kind of
imagination, put mythical lands and islands to the westward of the known
islands as though they were really trying to make a way, to sink stepping
stones into the deep sea that would lead their thoughts across the
unknown space. In the Catalan map of the world, which was the standard
example of cosmography in the early days of Columbus, most of these
mythical islands are marked. There was the island of Antilia, which was
placed in 25 deg. 35' W., and was said to have been discovered by Don
Roderick, the last of the Gothic kings of Spain, who fled there after
his defeat by the Moors. There was the island of the Seven Cities,
which is sometimes identified with this Antilia, and was the object of a
persistent belief or superstition on the part of the inhabitants of the
Canary Islands. They saw, or thought they saw, about ninety leagues to
the westward, an island with high peaks and deep valleys. The vision was
intermittent; it was only seen in very clear weather, on some of those
pure, serene days of the tropics when in the clear atmosphere distant
objects appear to be close at hand. In cloudy, and often in clear
weather also, it was not to be seen at all; but the inhabitants of the
Canaries, who always saw it in the same place, were so convinced of its
reality that they petitioned the King of Portugal to allow them to go and
take possession of it; and several expeditions were in fact despatched,
but none ever came up with that fairy land. It was called the island of
the Seven Cities from a legend of seven bishops who had fled from Spain
at the time of the Moorish conquest, and, landing upon this island, had
founded there se