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74 ISLAND OF THE SEVEN CITIES if they knew of them for a new abiding place. Of course the continuance of Portuguese language and civilization and the persistence of seven isolated towns through so many centuries must be ranked with the auriferous sands of Antillia as late products of the dreaming Iberian brain. MYTHICAL LOCATION OF THE SEVEN CITIES ON THE MAINLAND The citations thus far given identify the Island of the Seven Cities with some legendary, but generally believed-in patch of land afar out in the ocean sometimes with the Island of Brazil, more often with Antillia. But the earliest of them dates six or seven centuries after the supposed fact, and it may well be that a distinction was made at first, which became lost after- ward by blending. In a still later stage of development the name of the Seven Cities becomes separate and strangely migratory, not avoiding even the mainland. We know, for instance, what power the Seven Cities of Cibola had to draw Coronado and his followers northward through the mountains and deserts of our still arid Southwest until all that was real of them stood revealed as the even then antiquated and rather uncleanly terraced villages of sun-dried brick which are picturesquely familiar on railway folders and in the pages of illustrated magazines. But this was not the only part of North America on which the romantic myth alighted. The British Museum contains in MS. 2803 of the Egerton collection an anonymous world map, 17 (Fig. 8), forming part of a portolan atlas attributed by conjecture to 1508, which shows, somewhat as in La Cosa's map of 1500, the Atlantic coast distorted to a nearly westward trend, with the Seven Cities (Septem Civitates), represented by conventional in- dications of miters, scattered along a seaboard tract from a point considerably west of "terra de los bacalos" and the Bay of Fundy to a point nearly opposite the western end of Cuba. The car- tographer's ideas of geography were exceedingly vague, but appar- 17 E. L. Stevenson: Atlas of Portolan Charts: Facsimile of Manuscript in British Museum, Publs. Hispanic Soc. of Amer. No. 81, New York, 1911, folio ib.