found a strange continent beyond the western ocean before the Vikings even got to Greenland. Did Saint Brendan get there or did he not? What is the evidence?

Ireland had seagoing monks and anchorites, as Mr. Ashe remarks, as early as 600 A.D. They went islandhopping, impelled partly by missionary zeal and partly by a yearning for solitude—the same sort of impulse that drove the Egyptian hermits into the emptiness of the deserts of North Africa. They were, at that time, the best scholars in western Europe, they had a solid knowledge of geography, and they wanted to know what lay beyond the sunset. Did they just dream, or did they know something?

The evidence is mixed and contradictory. Early in the Christian era, Irish monks clearly prowled through the outlying islands in their flimsy coracles, going from landfall to landfall and embellishing their accounts with the richness of imagination that goes with Celtic storytelling. But sometime before the Vikings had got to Greenland, a body of lore about Saint Brendan had developed. Instead of a coracle he had an ocean-going ship made of wood, and the stories tell how he went forth, a month or more from land to land, going down the sunset path, and finding a strange earthly paradise far to the west.

As Mr. Ashe emphasizes, this legend probably does not tell about a real voyage; yet it seems to be based on genuine knowledge of such voyages. It is not like the earlier legends, where men hourly discovered new islands; it is full of details about distances, directions, landfalls, and times: somewhere back of it there does seem to be the discovery of a continent. It is a fantastic of the map of the Atlantic, and no one needs to believe the fantasy—and yet the map, somehow, is a good one. Whoever put these legends into writing knew something about the western ocean, about its currents and perils and distances. Brendan may not have been a pioneer, but he was (as Mr. Ashe says) a good listener; and he had been listening to someone who knew something.

“To take the legend seriously,” says Mr. Ashe, “is not to make Brendan the discoverer of America, but to remove the discovery back beyond him.” It seems to Mr. Ashe that when this story is followed down far enough, one is almost obliged to embrace the theory that someone actually crossed the Atlantic before the tenth century.

On a quest of this kind one never encounters certainty. On the other hand, one never quite encounters absolute disbelief either. The reality behind myth and legend is notoriously insecure—and yet, in the last analysis, myths and legends do not always come out of a complete vacuum. In his search for a proper background, Mr. Ashe goes far afield—even to the legends of the Lost Atlantis, to the odd tales which hang about the sea-wanderings of the early Phoenicians, to the mid-American tales of Quetzalcoatl and his

emergence from (and final departure into) the eastern sea, to the queer legends in meso-America of bearded white men who came, stayed, and then vanished, and, first and last, into the deep body of Irish legend which says that people went west, saw something, and sent back stories about it.

Nothing at all can be proved. There is no certainty anywhere. And yet—as Mr. Ashe says, “there is something there.” The infinite mystery beyond the horizon of the western ocean had been touched, just a little, had been explored by men who—heaven only knows why, or how—went on a voyage fully as perilous and hair-raising as the ventures of our present-day astronauts, and came back to tell, as best they could, what they had seen.

We live in a good time for this sort of discussion. We too are poised on the edge of a stupendous jumpoff. Our own horizons are being expanded, and the final effect upon us will be just as epoch-making as was the final effect, on men six hundred years ago, of the discovery that off beyond the gulf there is a land that ought to be explored and known. Just at the moment when we have felt ready to give way to despair, an outer door is swinging open. We face what Columbus himself faced: not so much the task to see what lies beyond the outer limits of human thought as to see just what it is, to bring back evidences of it, and to enable mankind to take one more long leap into the perilous, dismaying, and infinitely rewarding unknown.