Читать книгу Legendary Islands of the Atlantic: A Study of Medieval Geography - William Henry Babcock - Страница 23

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Professor Schuchert, reviewing the paper of Termier above quoted, agrees in part and partly disagrees. He says:

The Azores are true volcanic and oceanic islands, and it is almost certain that they never had land connections with the continents on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. If there is any truth in Plato’s thrilling account, we must look for Atlantis off the western coast of Africa, and here we find that five of the Cape Verde Islands and three of the Canaries have rocks that are unmistakably like those common to the continents. Taking into consideration also the living plants and animals of these islands, many of which are of European-Mediterranean affinities of late Tertiary time, we see that the evidence appears to indicate clearly that the Cape Verde and Canary Islands are fragments of a greater Africa.... What evidence there may be to show that this fracturing and breaking down of western Africa took place as suddenly as related by Plato or that it occurred about 10,000 years ago is as yet unknown to geologists.22

Termier puts in evidence as biological corroboration the researches of Louis Germain, especially in the mollusca, which have convinced him of the continental origin of this fauna in the four archipelagoes, the Azores, Madeira, the Canaries, and Cape Verde. He also notes a few species still living in the Azores and the Canaries, though extinct in Europe, but found as fossils in Pliocene rocks of Portugal. He deduces from this a connection between the islands and the Iberian Peninsula down to some period during the Pliocene.23

Dr. Scharff has devoted some space and assiduous effort to similar considerations. He reviews the insular flora and fauna, pointing out that some of the forms common to the islands, or some of them, and a now distant continent could hardly have reached there over sea. He comes to the following conclusion: “I believe they [the islands] were still connected, in early Pleistocene times, with the continents of Europe and Africa, at a time when man had already made his appearance in western Europe, and was able to reach the islands by land.”24

He also points out that the Azores Islands were first known and named for their hawks, which feed largely on small mammalia, that presumably would have come thither overland, and also points out that some of the islands were named in Italian on old maps Rabbit Island, Goat Island, etc., before the Portuguese rediscovery in the fifteenth century.25 Those names (on several fifteenth-century maps St. Mary’s is Louo, Lovo, or Luovo—“Wolf Island,” cf. Portuguese lobo) are certainly interesting, but they may have been given for some supposed resemblance of outline or other fancy. There is this in favor of Dr. Scharff’s supposition: the name Corvo in its original form Corvis Marinis (Island of the Sea Crows) appears to have been prompted by the abundance of birds of a particular species—possibly cormorants, possibly black skimmers—and not by any typical bird form of the island itself. Also Pico, now named for its peak, was called the Isle of the Doves, and wild doves or pigeons are said to abound still on its mountain side. But, if we assume by analogy that Li Conigi (Rabbit Island) and Capraria (Goat Island) were so named by reason of the pre-Portuguese wild rabbits and goats, these may be the donations of earlier visitants or settlers—Italian, Carthaginians, or what not. We cannot well believe that wolves were voluntarily brought by man to Lovo (Lobo), now St. Mary’s; but here there may have been some mistake, as of dogs run wild or some play of imitative fancy, as before indicated. In any case these archaic island names are a long way from being convincing evidence of former land connection with any continent, still less of the former existence of Atlantis.

More recently Navarro, in an argument mainly geological, has also called attention to the continental character of some species of the fauna and flora of the eastern Atlantic islands, with the same implications as his predecessors.26 But there seems to be little real addition to the evidence of this nature; and no one has made it more apposite to the existence of Atlantis Island 12,000 or so years ago.