Antillia

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For the plant genus, see Antillia (genus).

Antillia (or Antilia) was a phantom island said to lie in the Atlantic Ocean far to the west of Spain. This mythical island had several other names such as Isle of Seven Cities, Ilha das Sete Cidades (Portuguese), Septe Cidades, Sanbrandan (or St Brendan), etc. Antillia was also identified with islands including the Isles of the Blest and the Fortunate Islands.

The origin of the name is quite uncertain. The oldest suggested etymology (1455) fancifully connects it with the name of the Platonic Atlantis, while later writers have endeavoured to derive it from the Latin anterior (i.e. the island that is reached "before" Cipango), or from the Jezirat al Tennyn, "Dragon's Isle," of the Arabian geographers.

1 Plutarch
2 Medieval beliefs
3 Current beliefs
4 See also
5 References

[edit] Plutarch

The legend of the islands seems to have arisen at the latest in pre-Christian Roman times when Plutarch chronicled (in 74 AD, chapter 8 refers) the life of the Roman military commander and Consul of Spain Quintus Sertorius (died 75 BC). After returning by sea to Spain after a campaign in "Mauretania" (modern northern Morocco), Sertorius "met some sailors who had recently come back from the Atlantic Islands." It was from these men that Sertorius learned facts so beguiling that he made it his life's ambition to find the islands and retire there. According to Plutarch:

The islands are said to be two in number separated by a very narrow strait and lie 10,000 furlongs from Africa. They are called the Isles of the Blessed. They enjoy moderate rains and long intervals of winds which for the most part are soft, and precipitate dew, so that the islands not only have a rich soil excellent for ploughing and planting but also produce a natural fruit that is plentiful and wholesome enough to feed, without toil or trouble, a leisured folk.

Moreover an air that is salubrious, owing to the climate and the moderate changes in the seasons, prevails on the islands. The North and East winds which blow out from our part of the world plunge into fathomless space and, owing to the distance, dissipate themselves and lose their power before they reach the islands, while the South and West winds that envelop the islands sometimes bring in their train soft and intermittent showers, but for the most part cool them with moist breezes and gently nourish the soil. Therefore a firm belief has made its way, even to the barbarians, that here are the Elysian Fields and the abode of the Blessed of which Homer sang.

[edit] Medieval beliefs

A Portuguese legend tells how the island was settled by the Archbishop of Porto accompanied by six bishops and their parishioners in either 714 or 734 in the face of the Moorish conquest of Iberia. The archbishop and bishops each founded a city, known as Aira, Anhuib, Ansalli, Ansesseli, Ansodi, Ansolli and Con. A similar Spanish tradition claims that these bishops were all Spanish.

Antilia is first marked in an anonymous map which is dated 1424 and preserved in the grand-ducal library at Weimar. It reappears in the maps of the Genoese B. Beccario or Beccaria (1435), and of the Venetian Andrea Bianco (1436), and again in 1455 and 1476. In most of these it is accompanied by the smaller and equally legendary islands of Royllo, St Atanagio, and Tanmar, the whole group being classified as insulae de novo repertae, "newly discovered islands". The Florentine Paul Toscanelli, in his letters to Columbus and the Portuguese court (1474), takes Antilia as the principal landmark for measuring the distance between Lisbon and the island of Cipango or Zipangu (Japan).

One of the chief early descriptions of Antilia is that inscribed on the globe which the geographer Martin Behaim made at Nuremberg in 1492 (see map: History). Behaim relates that in 734--a date which is probably a misprint for 714--and after the Moors had conquered Spain and Portugal, the island of Antilia or "Septe Cidade" was colonized by Christian refugees under the archbishop of Oporto and six bishops. The inscription adds that a Spanish vessel sighted the island in 1414, while a Portuguese crew claimed to have landed on Antillia in the 1430s. According to an old Portuguese tradition each of the seven leaders founded and ruled a city, and the whole island became a Utopian commonwealth, free from the disorders of less favoured states. Later Portuguese tradition localized Antilia in the island of Sao Miguel, the largest of the Azores. It is impossible to estimate how far this legend commemorates some actual but imperfectly recorded discovery, and how far it is a reminiscence of the ancient idea of an elysium in the western seas which is embodied in the legends of the Isles of the Blest or Fortunate Islands.

Many expeditions were launched in an attempt to find the island, and in 1492 Christopher Columbus planned to stop there on his journey to Asia.

On maps, Antillia was typically shown as being almost the size of Portugal, lying around two hundred miles west of the Azores. It was an almost perfect rectangle, its long axis running north-south, but with seven or eight trefoil bays shared between the east and west coasts. This has made some scholars to identify the island as Puerto Rico. Each city lay on a bay. The similar island of Saluaga was shown north of Antillia, while Taumar and Ymana (or Roillo) lay nearby.

[edit] Current beliefs

Some, the first being Peter Martyr d'Anghiera in 1493, believe that Antillia represented a previous discovery of the West Indies (and more specifically either Puerto Rico or Trinidad), and as a result the Caribbean islands became known as the Antilles. The island's shape on Behaim's globe is similar to that of Trinidad. A less popular theory identifies the island with Sao Miguel in the Azores, where seven villages around twin lakes are known as Sete Cidades. Either way, this and the improving knowledge of the Atlantic led to Antillia shrinking on maps and disappearing entirely after 1587.

Sixteenth-century explorers such as Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and Francisco Vásquez de Coronado continued to look for the Seven Cities, but located them in the American Southwest rather than the Caribbean (the "Seven Cities of Cibola").

A controversial book titled The Island of Seven Cities by Canadian architect and amateur archeologist Paul Chiasson (St. Martin's Press, 2006) presents the hypothesis that the Island of Seven Cities was in fact Cape Breton Island, settled in Cape Dauphin by sailors from China who had rounded Africa and sailed up the Atlantic.[1] Some of those Chinese sailors, Chiasson writes, may have been Nestorian Christians. He cites a broad range of gathered evidence, including potentially unexplained stone ruins and many interesting cultural features of the Mi'kmaw peoples native to the Canadian Maritimes and New England States, in support of this idea. Chiasson's claims were recently refuted by a team of five Nova Scotian provincial archeologists visiting the site in summer 2006. [2]