From being one island too many, Taprobane therefore slowly became an island that doesn’t exist. Thomas More would treat it thus when he situated his Utopia “between Ceylon and America,” and Tommaso Campanella was to use Taprobane as the place where he built his City of the Sun.
Let us now turn to islands whose absence has encouraged (sometimes sporadic) research and an enduring nostalgia.
Ancient epics, of course, tell us about islands that may or may not have existed, so that the isles visited by Ulysses have produced a scholarly literature aimed at establishing which actual places they refer to. And the myth of Atlantis has led to an investigation that is not yet over (judging from the number of mystery magazines and second-rate television programs). But Atlantis was regarded rather more as an entire continent, and the idea was immediately accepted that it had sunk into the sea. It is therefore the subject of legend rather than research.
Navigatio Sancti Brendani was perhaps the first account of the quest for an island.
Saint Brendan and his mystical mariners visited many: the island of birds, the island of hell, the island reduced to a rock on which Judas is chained, and that bogus island that had already deceived Sinbad, on which Brendan’s ship lands—not until the following day, when the ship’s crew light fires and see the island stir in annoyance, do they realize it is not an island but a terrible sea monster called Jasconius.
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.