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PROBABLE BASIS OF FACT 91 New York in I8I4 34 "Mayda" appears in longitude 20 W. and latitude 46 N. But these representations have no significance except as to human continuity. The evil reputation which was early established and seems to have hung about the island in later stages, assimilating the icy clashings and noises and terrors of the north as it had previously incorporated the monstrous fears of a warmer part of the ocean, is surely a curious phenomenon. I have fancied it may be responsible for the probably quite imaginary Devil Rock, which appears in some relatively recent maps, perhaps as a kind of substitute for Mayda, much in the fashion that Brazil Rock took the place of Brazil Island when belief in the latter became difficult. The present view of the U. S. Hydrographic Office, as expressed on its charts, is that Negra's Rock, Devil Rock, Green Island, or Rock, and all that tribe are unreal "dangers," probably reported as the result of peculiar appear- ances of the water surface. Whether the possibility has been wholly eliminated of a lance of rock jutting up to the surface from great depths and not yet officially recognized, I will not presume to say; but it seems highly improbable that there is anything of the sort in the North Atlantic Ocean except the lonely and nearly submerged peak of Rockall, some 400 miles west of Britain, and the well-known oceanic groups and archi- pelagoes. PROBABLE BASIS OF FACT UNDERLYING THIS LEGENDARY ISLAND What was this island, then, which held its place in the maps during half a millennium and more, under two chief names and occasional substitutes, designations apparently received from so many different peoples? One cannot easily set it aside as a "peculiar appearance of the surface" or as a mere figment of fancy. But there is nothing westward or southwestward of the Azores except the Bermudas and the capes and coast islands [E. M.) Blunt 's New Chart of the Atlantic or Western Ocean, New York, 1814.