Page:Legendaryislands00babcuoft.djvu/15

THE ATLANTIS LEGEND 3 This statement is credited to only a hundred years before Marco Polo. One naturally suspects some exaggeration. But a parallel account, nearly as expansive and very circumstantial, is given in the same work concerning giant vessels sailing in the opposite direction some six hundred years earlier. It begins: "The ships that sail the Southern Sea and south of it are like houses. When their sails are spread they are like great clouds in the sky." Professor Holmes, drawing attention to these passages (which he quotes), very justly observes, "who shall say that the mastery of the sea known to have been attained in the Orient 500 A. D. had not been achieved long prior to that date?" 5 THE ATLANTIS LEGEND We may be safe in styling Atlantis (Ch. II) the earliest mythi- cal island of which we have any knowledge or suggestion, since Plato's narrative, written more than 400 years before Christ, puts the time of its destruction over 9,000 years earlier still. It seems pretty certain that there never was any such mighty and splendid island empire contending against Athens and later ruined by earthquakes and engulfed by the ocean. Atlantis may fairly be set down as a figment of dignified philosophic romance, owing its birth partly to various legendary hints and reports of seismic and volcanic action but much more to the glorious achievements of Athens in the Persian War and the apparent need of explaining a supposed shallow part of the Atlantic known to be obstructed and now named the Sargasso Sea. Perhaps Plato never intended that any one should take it as literally true, but his story undoubt- edly influenced maritime expectations and legends during medi- eval centuries. It cannot be said that any map unequivocally shows Atlantis; but it may be that this is because Atlantis van- ished once for all in the climax of the recital. PHOENICIAN EXPLORATION It may be that Phoenician exploration in Atlantic waters was well developed before noo B.C., when the Phoenicians are s W. H. Holmes: Handbook of Aboriginal American Antiquities, Bur. of Amer. Ethnology, Bull. 60, Part I, Smithsonian Instn., Washington. D. C., 1919. P- 27-