Indeed the buccaneer, Cowley, writing of one suchisland which he had visited, says: "My fancy led me to call it Cowley'sEnchanted Isle, for we having had a sight of it upon several points of thecompass, it appeared always in so many different forms; sometimes like aruined fortification; upon another point like a great city."If much of this is true even now, it was far truer before the days ofColumbus, when men were constantly looking westward across the Atlantic,and wondering what was beyond. In those days, when no one knew withcertainty whether the ocean they observed was a sea or a vast lake, it wasoften called "The Sea of Darkness." A friend of the Latin poet, Ovid,describing the first approach to this sea, says that as you sail out uponit the day itself vanishes, and the world soon ends in perpetualdarkness:-- "Quo Ferimur? Ruit ipsa Dies, orbemque relictum Ultima perpetuis claudit natura tenebris."Nevertheless, it was the vague belief of many nations that the abodes ofthe blest lay somewhere beyond it--in the "other world," a region halfearthly, half heavenly, whence the spirits of the departed could not crossthe water to return;--and so they were constantly imagining excursionsmade by favored mortals to enchanted islands. To add to the confusion,actual islands in the Atlantic were sometimes discovered and actually lostagain, as, for instance, the Canaries, which were reached and called theFortunate Isles a little before the Christian era, and were then lost tosight for thirteen centuries ere being visited again.
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