The Tiny Atlantic

Posted by Dave at 04:00 PM, November 18, 2004

(C) Greenpeace

At the weekend, we started sailing south from the Hatton Bank, back towards land. We stopped off for a little while in Bantry Bay, in the southwest of Ireland before heading for Vigo, the biggest city in Galicia, on Spain's Atlantic coast. By Tuesday we were west of the Bay of Biscay, a body of water that I'd always associated with unpleasant weather. For the Esperanza's journey across, it was flat-calm - barely a wave to be seen. After weeks of pounding by huge swells and 50-knot winds, nostalgia for the wild beauty of the high seas came as a surprise.

The Atlantic Ocean - especially between North America and Europe seems to be getting smaller and smaller. Airline passengers still complain about its size though - 'It's a WHOLE six hours on a plane!'. They must be withering away with boredom up there, oblivious to the thousands of miles of ocean that they're crossing. With such huge numbers of miles and kilometres involved, it's hard to comprehend the vastness of our oceans. Whenever I sit and look at the Atlantic from some of my favourite places on Ireland's wild west coast - Cape Clear, Achill, Killary or the Burren - I always find it hard to grasp the hugeness of it, that other lands exist further west, like Greenland and Newfoundland.

And in a way, this is our problem - a human problem. Our oceans are so huge; we find it difficult to understand how finite, how fragile, how easily they can be influenced by our mistreatments. The Atlantic is so big, we don't realise how small it is - if that makes any sense. Since October, the Esperanza has been halfway across the Atlantic and back - several times. The experience has made the Earth seem very tiny place.

Even after the 'discovery' of the Americas (before Columbus, the Vikings, Irish monks, the Chinese and even Basque fishermen had been visiting America), there was a tradition, a prevalent myth, or a school of thought that another land lay somewhere west of Ireland, and it had yet to be found. It was known as 'Hy-Brasil' - a phantom island in Celtic myths, cloaked in mist, appearing for one day every seven years - but always unreachable. Belief in the island was so strong that several expeditions went looking for it - in the late 15th century, a two-ship expedition, led by John Cabot, left Bristol, in search of Hy Brasil - and never found it. Some people did claim to have reached the enchanted island, and came back with stories of opulence, big farms and healthy people.

Apparently, some historians claim that when navigator Pedro Álvares Cabral discovered Brazil in 1500, he thought he had landed in Hy-Brasil (more popular theories refer to harvesting of valuable brazilwood timber - but where did that it gets name?). Hy Brasil regularly appeared on maps from 1325 until 1865, lying somewhere south west of Galway Bay. On some maps from the 15th century, an island called 'Isola de Brazil' was shown to be part of the Azores.

Apparently, researchers and even archaeologists have searched to the west of Ireland, and where there is said to be is evidence that some islands once existed. Shallow-water shells have been found at the Porcupine and Rockall Banks - both areas are father north than the supposed location of Hy Brasil.

The last alleged sighting of Hy-Brasil was in 1872. Author T. J. Westropp - with several companions - claimed that they saw the island appear and then vanish.

As if all this wasn't weird enough - we noticed while sailing the high seas, that a whole range of seamounts in the mid-Atlantic are named after places from Lord of the Rings. I don't know who named them - I'd be interested to find out. There's the Rohan Seamount, Gondor seamount, Fangorn Bank, Edoras Bank, Eriador Seamount, Lorien Knoll, and the Isengard Ridge. Which such evocative nomenclature, its difficult not to imagine the deep ocean as some beautiful, magical place, especially when we're floating 1000m or more above.

- Dave