Hy Brasil

The discovery and charting of the New World during the late 15th and early 16th centuries, reasonably, should have outdated whimsical medieval maritime maps and eyewitness reports of bizarre encounters whilst embarked upon astounding sea voyages. These credulous documents imparted vistas of magical, mythical neverlands abounding with improbable creatures, similarly to the space travel yarns of a later epoch. Rather than abolish the earlier phantasmagoric sagas, the creation of maps and globes plotting this terra nova and placing the old world in a fresh context merely relocated and enshrined storybook isles upon the retreating formless fringes of the unknown world. The tenacity of fantasy fascinates me. In fact, I think that the persistence of imaginary places was a "good thing". I regret the virtual disappearance of chimerical islands from our work-a-day sea charts. I've irrationally wished that these places really did exist and somehow would be re-discovered. So I welcome Margaret Elphinstone's novel Hy Brasil as a spirited, credible depiction of an alternate universe in which one of these enchanted eccentric archipelagoes resides. The legendary isle of Hy Brasil subsists thanks to her descriptive exactitude and deft verbal navigation. For the past two millennia islands - both real and imaginary - have beckoned the fireside dreamer, an alluring vision of desire and pleasure on the hazy horizon of Western awareness. Perhaps this phenomenon can be traced to Homer, Plato's Atlantean allegory, Aenias or the ancient tale of Jason and the Argonauts. It thrived through the fabled explorations of that self-proclaimed pragmatist Herodotus, the uncertain arctic expedition of Pytheas in Alexander's time, and the Dark Age adventures of half-mythical seafaring Celtic monks and the seven refugee Portuguese bishops fleeing Moslem cruelty. I lived on an Atlantic coast for most of my youth when I explored with a small duck punt among desolate inlets, bays and once (thanks to youthful recklessness, tidal malevolence and unseasonable storm) upon the great ocean itself. I secretly longed to lock on to the apparition of some remote mist-shrouded lighthouse, stow my oars, ride the surf and beach my tiny craft upon such a fairy-tale shoreline. My attention was long drawn to a cluster of islands that, up until the mid 19th century, adorned authoritative atlases of the Atlantic Ocean. They vary in their placement by several hundred miles, but invariably they are lodged somewhere in the watery void between the temperate Azores and frigid Newfoundland. Their names evoke Gulliver's Travels, Treasure Island, and Tolkien's Middle Earth: Frisland, Estotiland, Drogeo, Icaria, Buss, Isle of Demons, Antillia, and Hy Brasil. These places are enshrined in such literary hoaxes as the 16th century travelogue of the Zeno brothers and three spurious expeditions that cluttered and confused the knowledge of the elusive Northwest Passage, namely the "Voyages of Imagination"