Читать книгу Legendary Islands of the Atlantic: A Study of Medieval Geography онлайн

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The discoveries of Columbus, Vespucius, and Cabot, with their immediate followers, heralded the opening of an effective knowledge of the western world and the ocean world to the centers of civilization. Thereafter the delineation of new islands did not cease but for a long time rather multiplied; yet they had little significance or importance, being chiefly the products of fancy, optical illusion, or error in reckoning. One of the latest worth considering is the island of Buss (Ch. XII), reported where there is no land by a separated vessel of Frobisher’s expedition near the end of the sixteenth century. Afterward it was known as the Sunken Land of Bus, or Buss, to the grave concern of mariners.

We are reasonably secure against such imposition now, though perhaps it is not yet impossible. The old mythical or apocryphal islands, too, are gone from standard maps and most others, though you may yet find in cartographic work of little authority one or two of the more tenacious specimens making a final stand.