Hy-Brasil

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West of the Aran Islands, past the last fishing ground a Galway boat would work, the chart-makers of medieval Europe drew a circle in the open Atlantic and split it down the middle with a single river. They labeled it Brasil. It was not a guess at where America lay, nor a sounding of any reef. It was an island the Irish already knew — a country of the mist that surfaced one day in seven years and then went under again, taking its towers and orchards with it. For five centuries the cartographers kept it on the water. They moved it, doubled it, shrank it to a rock, and only in 1873 did an admiralty finally lift the pen and leave that stretch of sea blank.

A name that is not Brazil

The island’s name belongs to Ireland, not to the New World, and the resemblance to the South American nation is an accident of sound. In the older forms — Uí Bhreasail, Hy-Breasal, O’Brazile — the word is a clan-name: the Uí Bhreasail, the descendants of Bresal, a minor Gaelic sept of the northeast. Folk reckoning attached the island instead to Breasal, named in tradition as a high king of the world, whose seat lay out beyond the western horizon. A second derivation reads the Old Irish í, island, with bres — beauty and worth, the great and the mighty — making it simply the Isle of the Blessed, or the Fortunate Isle, a sense that draws it near the Greco-Roman afterlife-realm of the Fortunate Isles without sharing their pedigree.

The country called Brazil took its name by a wholly separate road. Portuguese navigators first christened that coast Ilha de Vera Cruz and then Terra de Santa Cruz; the lasting name came from pau-brasil, the red dyewood shipped home from its forests, the word brasil itself rooted in the Latin and Romance vocabulary for live coals, for ember-red. Two unrelated words arrived at the same six letters. The phantom in the Atlantic is older, and it is Irish.

The map as the legend’s spine

Hy-Brasil is unusual among legendary places in that its primary record is not a text but a sequence of charts. It enters the documentary world on the portolan chart of Angelino Dulcert, the Italian-Majorcan cartographer also recorded as Angelino de Dulceto, whose 1325 chart — the so-called Dalorto chart — sets an island called Bracile in the sea off Ireland; it recurs on his 1339 chart. Half a century later the great Catalan Atlas, made about 1375 in the Majorcan workshop of Abraham Cresques, carries the Illa de brasil — and carries it twice, once near Ireland and once farther south, the same name worn by two different patches of sea. The Venetian Andrea Bianco labels it Sola de Brasil in 1436.

From there it settles into a convention. The island is drawn as an almost perfect circle, very often divided by a strait or channel running east to west, splitting it into two halves like a coin scored across its face. The circularity is its signature; later cartographers copied it from one another more faithfully than they copied any coastline, because no coastline existed to correct them. Brasil joined a cluster of Atlantic phantoms that the portolan tradition treated as real estate — the rectangular Antillia that surfaced on the Pizzigano chart of 1424, the Isle of Mam, the moving island of Saint Brendan — and unlike most of them it would not go away. It passed out of the hand-drawn portolans into the printed atlases of the age of the middle ages and beyond, into a European geography that was also absorbing the recovered coordinates of Ptolemy and learning to grid the world in latitude and longitude. The grid did not dislodge it. By the count assembled in the modern scholarship, the island shows on the order of three hundred charts across roughly seven centuries — longer than most real kingdoms held their borders.

The island in the Irish imagination

Behind the charts lies an older country of the mind. The western sea of Irish mythology is crowded with islands that are not quite of this world: realms of the ever-young, lands of women, plains beneath the waves, fortunate isles where no one ages and the apple trees bear and blossom at once. Hy-Brasil is one of these — an island paradise of plenty and peace whose inhabitants are spared death, a fragment of the Celtic Otherworld pinned, unusually, to a fixed bearing on the open Atlantic. In the Christian recasting it became Tír Tairngire, the Land of Promise, or Terra Repromissionis Sanctorum, the Promised Land of the Saints — an Eden held in reserve in the ocean, a cousin to the Garden of Eden relocated past the edge of the map and reserved for the worthy.

That recasting was the work of the Irish church. The seafaring monasticism of the early-medieval island sent its anchorites out across the same water in skin boats, seeking the desert in the ocean, and the literature it produced — the immrama, the voyage-tales — turned the pagan Otherworld isles into stations on a Christian pilgrimage. The voyage of Saint Brendan, set down in the Latin Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis by perhaps the ninth century, has the abbot away seven years at sea before he reaches the Land of Promise, an island wrapped in fog that opens only when its time has come. The number is the same number that governs Hy-Brasil. This was the world of the Celtic Rite, the distinct Irish church of the centuries before Roman conformity, and of the Druidism it had partly displaced, whose feeling for a sacred geography of islands it inherited rather than erased. Onto that imagination the Vikings wrote their own Atlantic — the real landfalls of Faroe, Iceland, Greenland, Vinland — so that the same ocean held, side by side, islands a longship had actually reached and islands no keel ever would.

Seven years, and the trick of the air

The defining rule of Hy-Brasil is its timing. The island is wrapped in mist and unreachable except for a single day once in seven years, when the fog draws back and the watcher on the Clare or Galway shore sees it stand clear on the western horizon at sunset — green, towered, close enough to name and too far to gain before it dissolves again. Boats that put out for it find the water empty. The seven-year withdrawal is not incidental to the legend; it is the legend. It makes the island a thing of cycle rather than place, governed by a calendar instead of a coastline, present and absent on a schedule no navigator can outwait.

The west coast of Ireland obliges this story with its own optics. Over the cold Atlantic, when a layer of warm air lies above a layer of colder air, light bends as it passes between them, and a distant object — a far shore, a low bank of cloud, the loom of a real island below the curve of the earth — is lifted and stacked and stretched into the shape of cliffs and walls hung above the sea. This is the fata morgana, the superior mirage, and it raises spectral coasts out of empty water with a regularity that the bearing west of Ireland would supply often enough to feed a tradition. The mirage does not explain the island away so much as explain how a country of mist could keep its appointment: the air itself builds the towers, holds them for an evening, and lets them fall.

The sea-captain who never sailed

The legend’s most quoted eyewitness is a fabrication, and a knowing one. In 1674 a Captain John Nisbet was reported to have made landfall on Hy-Brasil while running from France to Ireland: a fog closed over his ship, lifted to show rocks dead ahead, and a boat’s crew rowed to a shore peopled by great black rabbits and ruled by a magician alone in a stone castle, until an old man on the island broke the enchantment and sent them home with gold and silver. The account reads as testimony. It is, in fact, prose fiction by the Anglo-Irish satirist Richard Head, who wrote it in the deadpan idiom of the sworn traveler’s report — the relation set down as sober news — and circulated it as such. Head had been working the same vein for two years: The Western Wonder; or, O-Brazeel appeared in 1674, and O-Brazile; or, The Inchanted Island — “being a perfect Relation of the late Discovery, and wonderful Dis-Inchantment of an Island on the North of Ireland” — in 1675. The captain was the author’s instrument. That he was so widely believed, and so durably repeated, is itself a measurement of how solid the island had become.

A quieter and more revealing tale clung to a real manuscript. The historian Roderic O’Flaherty, writing his Ogygia (1685) and his account of West or H-Iar Connaught (1684), reported that a neighbor of his, Morogh O’Ley — a physician of the O’Lee family, hereditary doctors to the O’Flahertys — claimed to have been carried off by boat in 1668 to the island of O’Brasil, where an old man gave him a book and forbade him to open it for seven years; when the term was up, the book gave O’Ley his healing skill. The book survives. It is a fifteenth-century Irish vellum medical manuscript, an Irish rendering of a Latin medical compendium — itself translated in thirteenth-century Sicily from an eleventh-century Arabic original of Baghdad — its pages ruled into tabular grids and lit with decorated initials, now held by the Royal Irish Academy as the Book of the O’Lees, also called the Book of Hy-Brasil. The legend and the object touch: a real book of medicine, with a genuine and traceable pedigree across three languages and four centuries, acquired in folk memory an origin on an island that was never there.

The last sighting and the erasing of the rock

The island’s documented appearances thin toward the modern era and then stop. The Bristol merchants treated it as a destination worth the freight: in 1480 the chronicler William Worcestre recorded a voyage in search of Brasil under a master he calls Thloyde — most likely the pilot John Lloyd, reckoned the most skilled seaman of his day — who quartered the ocean for nine weeks and came home empty; in 1481 the ships Trinity and George left Bristol on the same errand with the same result. When John Cabot reached North American waters, the Spanish envoy Pedro de Ayala reported to his sovereigns in 1497 that the land had been found before by the Bristol men who sought Brasil. The island had become a working hypothesis of the early Atlantic, a place expected to be there until the sea was crossed and it was not.

The last person to claim he saw it set the date at 1872. Thomas Johnson Westropp, the Irish antiquary who would later write the standard study of the legend, recounted that on a clear evening that year he watched the island rise on the horizon in the company of his mother and others — and that it was not his first sighting, only his last. By then Brasil had already dwindled on the charts from a circular kingdom to a single hazard. On nineteenth-century admiralty surveys it appears as “Brazil Rock,” a shoal placed roughly a hundred and twenty miles out from the Irish coast, marked as exposed at the lowest tides — the great island contracted to a wash of stone. It was carried that way to 1865. Then a survey ran the bearing, found neither rock nor island nor any reason for either, and in 1873 the British Admiralty struck Brazil Rock from the chart.

Among the phantom isles

Hy-Brasil is one island in a long European habit of drowned and hidden lands, and its kind matters. It is not a city sunk for a sin or a kingdom overtaken by the sea — not the Breton Ys lost to Dahut’s pride, nor Lyonesse gone under between Land’s End and Scilly, nor holy Kitezh hidden beneath its Russian lake to escape an army. Those are catastrophes of drowning. Hy-Brasil never drowned; it cycles, present and absent on a calendar, a country of intermittence rather than loss. Nor is it a golden lure of the conquering imagination, the way El Dorado and Cíbola drew expeditions into the New World after metal that the legends never held. Its nearest kin are the cartographic ghosts and the philosophers’ islands: Norumbega, the phantom city of the northeastern American coast that lived on maps before it was unmasked, and Panchaia, the invented sacred island a Greek thinker used to argue that the gods were once mortal kings. Like them, Hy-Brasil was real chiefly as a mark on paper — but it was Irish before it was ever drawn, and the chart only inherited what the sea-poets had already placed beyond the sunset.

The scholarship of an island that was not

The legend’s standard study is the work of its last witness. Thomas Johnson Westropp gathered the maps, the voyages, and the folk reports into Brasil and the Legendary Islands of the North Atlantic: Their History and Fable, read to the Royal Irish Academy and printed in its Proceedings, vol. 30 (1912) — the paper that fixed the cartographic sequence and supplied the count of charts on which the island survives. Westropp wrote it as the man who had himself seen the island in 1872, and the document is the rare case of an eyewitness turning antiquary to disprove his own sighting. The fullest modern treatment is Barbara Freitag’s Hy Brasil: The Metamorphosis of an Island (Rodopi, 2013), which traces the legend’s mutation from Otherworld isle to portolan convention to navigational rock, and argues against the temptation to collapse it into Atlantis or into a memory of America.

The legend’s physical residue can still be handled. The fifteenth-century medical codex that folk memory attached to the island — RIA MS 23 P 10 (ii), the Book of the O’Lees, the Book of Hy-Brasil — is cataloged and conserved by the Royal Irish Academy, its grid-ruled pages a working physician’s reference book that the legend made into a gift from a vanishing shore. For the documentary thread that runs from Dulcert’s chart through the Bristol voyages to the admiralty’s deletion, the popular synthesis in History Ireland, “An island called Brazil”, assembles the record in brief. Together they hold the legend’s two halves apart and intact: the country of the mist, rendered as the western imagination rendered it, and the paper trail of dates and surveys that can be checked.

What the 1873 survey erased was the last physical claim the island had made on the sea. The legend had spent seven centuries hardening from a country of the Otherworld into a paradise of the saints, then into a circle of ink copied chart to chart, then into a navigational rock with a sounding and a position — each stage more measurable than the last, and the last measurable enough to be disproved. The withdrawal was always written into Hy-Brasil; its whole nature was to surface and submerge, to be there for an evening and gone by morning. The 1873 deletion was the final exercise of that habit. The island kept its appointment with disappearance, and this time the sea did not give it back.

→ Related: Mythology · Celtic Rite · Monasticism · Vikings · Middle Ages · Ptolemy · Garden Of Eden · Druidism · The Fortunate Isles · Lyonesse · Ys Sunken City · Kitezh · Norumbega · El Dorado · Cibola · Panchaia