But the island that excited the imagination of those in later times is the Isle of the Blessed, a sort of earthly paradise on which our mariners land after seven years of adventure:
A land more precious than all the others for its beauty, for the marvelous and gracious and agreeable things within it, such as its beautiful and clear and precious rivers with waters most sweet and fresh and gentle, and trees most precious in every way with precious fruits, and many roses and lilies and flowers and violas and herbs and all things sweet-smelling and perfect in their bounty. And there were songbirds of every agreeable nature and all sang harmoniously in sweet and gentle song: and the climate seemed truly agreeable like sweet springtime. And there were roads and paths of every kind, precious stones, and there was so much good that greatly cheered the heart of all those who saw it with their own eyes, and there were tame and wild animals of every kind, and they moved about and lived at their own ease and as they pleased, and lived together in domesticity without wishing to cause any harm or disturbance to the other; and there were birds of the same kind who lived together similarly. And there were vineyards and pergolas always well supplied with fine grapes that its goodness and beauty exceeded all others.
The island paradise visited by Saint Brendan awakens a desire (something that hadn’t happened with Atlantis, Ogygia, or the island of the Phaeacians). Throughout the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance there is a firm belief that it exists. It appears on maps, such as the Ebersdorf globe. On a map prepared by Toscanelli for the king of Portugal, it appears in the middle of the sea, toward Japan, to be reached buscando el levante por el poniente, approaching the East via the west—and lies almost prophetically where America would later be discovered.
It is sometimes on the same latitude as Ireland, though on more modern maps the island moves farther south to the latitude of the Canaries or the Fortunate Isles, and sometimes the Fortunate Isles are confused with the island called Saint Brendan. Sometimes it is identified with Madeira and sometimes with another nonexistent island such as the mythical Antillia, as it was called in the sixteenth-century Arte del navegar by Pedro da Medina. In Martin Behaim’s globe of 1492 it was positioned much farther west, close to the equator. And it now had the name Lost Island, Insula Perdita.
Honorious of Autun, in his De imagine mundi (twelfth century), had described it as the most pleasant of islands, unknown to humans, which even when it had been found, had not been found (“Est quaedam Oceani insula dicta Perdita, amoenitate et fertilitate omnium rerum prae cunctis terris praestantissima, hominibus ignota. Quae aliquando casu inventa, postea quaesita non est inventa, et ideo dicitur Perdita”); and in the fourteenth century, Pierre Bersuire spoke in the same terms about the Fortunate Isles.
It is apparent from the Treaty of Évora of June 1519 that the Lost Island was expected to be rediscovered one day. Under the treaty, King Manuel I of Portugal passed all rights over the Canary Isles to Spain, and the terms of the treaty expressly included a Lost or Hidden Isle. In 1569, Gerardus Mercator still marked the mysterious island on his map, and in 1721 the last explorers set off in search of it.2
Saint Brendan’s island is not an island that doesn’t exist—someone has actually been there, but it is lost since no one has succeeded in returning to it. For this reason it becomes the subject of an unfulfilled desire and its story is an allegory of every real love story, the story of a Brief Encounter, of a mystical Doctor Zhivago who has lost his Lara. The agony of love is not the love we dream of that never happens (the island that we know doesn’t exist, the illusion of love for adolescent lovers), but the love that, having once happened, then vanishes forever.
But how did islands come to be lost?
From earliest antiquity, ships had no points of reference other than the stars. Using instruments like the astrolabe or the cross-staff, sailors could fix the height of a star from the horizon and calculate the distance from the zenith point; once they knew the declination, they knew on what parallel they were, given that the zenith distance plus or minus declination gives latitude. They therefore knew how far north or south they were from a given point. But to get back to an island (or any other point) the latitude was not enough—the longitude was also needed. We know that New York and Naples are on the same latitude but we also know they are not in the same place—their longitude is different and they are therefore on a different degree of the meridian.
And this is the problem that navigators faced until almost the end of the eighteenth century. There were no certain means for determining longitude, for saying how far east or west they were from a given point.
This is what happened with the Solomon Islands (an extraordinary example of insulae perditae). Álvaro de Saavedra Cerón went in search of these legendary islands in 1528, hoping to find King Solomon’s gold, but was sailing about between what are now called the Marshall and the Admiralty Islands. Álvaro de Mendaña arrived there, however, in 1568 and christened the Solomon Islands. But, after that, no one managed to find them again, not even Mendaña himself when he went back with Queiros, almost thirty years later, in search of them, though he only just missed them, landing instead on the island of Santa Cruz, to the southeast.
And the same happened to others after him. The Dutch set up their East Indies Company at the beginning of the seventeenth century and created the city of Batavia in Asia as a point of departure for many eastbound expeditions. They landed at a place they called New Holland, but never reached the Solomon Islands. Other lands, probably to the east of the Solomon Islands, were similarly discovered by English pirates whom the Court of Saint James hastened to reward with noble titles. But no one was able to find any trace of the Solomon Islands, and for a long time many believed them to be only a legend.
Mendaña had landed on them but had incorrectly fixed their longitude. And even if, through some celestial guidance, he had managed to fix them correctly, then other navigators looking for that longitude (and he himself on his second voyage) could not be entirely sure of their own longitude.
For several centuries the great European maritime powers strove to discover a way of establishing the fixed point—the punto fijo that Cervantes had joked about—and were prepared to pay enormous sums to anyone who found an effective method. Navigators, men of science, and cranks came up with all kind of answers—there was the method based on lunar eclipses, one that examined the variations of a magnetized needle, and the loch, or Dutchman’s log method; Galileo proposed a technique based on the eclipses of the satellites of Jupiter, which are so frequent that they can be seen several times each night.
But all turned out to be inadequate. There would, of course, have been one sure method: to keep a clock on board that tells the time at one known meridian, then to find out the time at place X at sea and, by working on the basis that the globe has been subdivided since antiquity into 360 degrees of longitude and that the sun moves 15 degrees in one hour, to work out the longitude of point X from the difference. In other words, if the clock on board showed that it was, let us say, noon in Paris, and that in place X it was six in the afternoon, by translating every hour of difference into 15 degrees, we would have known that the longitude of place X was 90 degrees from the Paris meridian.
Although it was not difficult to work out the time at the place where the calculation was being made, it was practically impossible to keep a mechanical clock on board that would function perfectly after months of sailing and the inevitable jolts, through winds and waves; hourglasses and water clocks were, of course, out of the question since they need to work on a flat motionless surface. And any clock would have to be of an extremely high precision: an error of four seconds would produce an error of one degree of longitude.
One suggestion mentioned in various chronicles of the time was the use of Powder of Sympathy.
This was a miraculous compound that, when applied to the weapon that had caused a wound, acted (through a sort of almost atomic continuity) on the particles of blood released into the air over the wound, even if the weapon and the injury were a great distance apart. This would heal the wound, allowing time to take its course, but as an immediate reaction it would cause irritation and pain.
It was therefore decided to wound a dog, to be kept on board the ship during the journey, and to rub the miraculous compound over the weapon each day at the same
