Brazil Island
The Brazil Island ( Hy Brasil ) is one of the so-called phantom islands , which are marked on maps from the Renaissance and the early modern period , but never existed.
myth
The location of the Brazilian island was shown differently on different maps. Once it was supposed to be west of Ireland , then much further south, another time off Newfoundland . The name comes from the Irish of Uí Breasail ("descendants of Breasal", the name of a clan in the north-east of Ireland). The Brazilian island has nothing to do with Brazil .
The island was supposedly discovered by Celtic monks in the sixth century and became a place of longing for Europeans, since according to the descriptions of the monks all plants bore flowers and all trees, fruits and stones were precious stones. The legend of the island emphasized that the island was completely surrounded by fog and could only be seen on one day every seven years.
In 1498 a British agent wrote in a letter to Christopher Columbus that the land that the Venetian navigator Giovanni Caboto had discovered on behalf of Henry VII of England ( Newfoundland ) was the island of Brazil. As Columbus already knew, it had already been discovered by seafarers from Bristol .
It was not until 1865 that the island was finally removed from the atlases.
Modern reception
Margaret Elphinstone moved the plot of her novel Island Notes to Hy Brasil. "Hy-Brazil" was also the name of an island in the adventure film Erik the Viking , which sank in the course of the plot (but only in the English original, in the German dubbing the island was called "Atlantis-West", since the myth of the Brazilian island in Germany wasn't that widespread). The author Alan Moore and the draftsman JH Williams III used a fantasy world called "Hy Brasil" in their comic series Promethea , which, however, is fictitious and has no connection to Phantom Island.
Individual evidence
- ↑ David B. Quinn: The Argument for the English Discovery of America between 1480 and 1494. In: The Geographical Journal 127, no. 3 (1961), pp. 277-285; see. The John Day Letter on the Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage Website , accessed January 31, 2019.
literature
- Urs Bitterli : The discovery of America. From Columbus to Alexander von Humboldt. Beck, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-406-42122-9 , p. 32 f.
- Barbara Freitag: Hy Brasil: the metamorphosis of an island: from cartographic error to Celtic elysium. Rodopi, Amsterdam [u. a.] 2013 ( Textxet: studies in comparative literature 69), ISBN 978-90-420-3641-3 .