been visible in their native land (Nat. Hist., vi, 22).

That there were islands or even a continent in the Western Ocean was a
tradition not infrequent in classical and medieval times, as we shall
presently see, but to place a continent in the Southern Ocean was a
greater stretch of imagination. The great outstanding problem of the
sources of the Nile probably suggested this Southern Continent to some.
Ptolemy, the great Egyptian geographer, even formed the conjecture that
the Southern Continent was joined to Africa by a broad isthmus, as
indicated in certain maps. Such a connection of the two continents
would at once dispose of the story that the Phenician sailors had
"doubled the Cape." In several maps after the time of Columbus,
Australia is extended westward in order to pass muster for the Southern
Continent.

[Illustration: Imaginary Continent, south of Africa and Asia. [The
cardinal points are shown by the four winds.] Beginning of the fifteenth
century. The word Brumae = the winter solstices.]

It is with a Western Continent, however, that we are now mainly
concerned. What lands were imagined by the ancients in the far West
under the setting sun? The mighty ocean beyond Spain was to the Greeks
and Latins a place of dread and mystery.

"Stout was his heart and girt with triple brass," says the Roman
poet, "who first hazarded his weak vessel on the pitiless ocean."

Even the western parts of the Mediterranean were shrunk from, according
to the Odyssey, without speaking of the horrors of the great ocean
beyond. "Beyond Gades," i. e., scarcely outside of the Pillars of
Hercules, the extreme limit of the ancient world, "no man," said Pindar,
"however daring, could pass; only a god might voyage those waters!"

In spite of the dread which the ancient mariners felt for the great
Western Ocean, their poets found it replete with charm and mystery. The
imagination rested upon those golden sunsets, and the tales of marvel
which, after long intervals, sea-borne sailors had told of distant lands
in the West. The poets placed there the happy home destined for the
souls of heroes. Thus (Odys. iv, 561):

No snow
Is there, nor yet great storm nor any rain,
But always ocean sendeth forth the breeze
Of the shrill West, and bloweth cool on men.

So far Homer. His contemporary, Hesiod, thus describes the Elysian
Fields as islands under the setting sun:

There on Earth