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Legendary islands of the Atlantic; a study in medieval geography

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Autolocus
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« Reply #105 on: July 19, 2009, 03:45:34 am »

and in size the difference was conspicuous and decisive. The
difference certainly is great enough now, but conditions and
proportions are reversed. Corvo has but one-eighth the area of
Flores and less than one-tenth the population. In all ways it
lacks advantages and conveniences, taking rather the place of
a poor dependent.

19 A. E. Nordenskiold, Periplus, PI. n (not shown on Fig. 5).

20 Gustavo Uzielli: Mappamondi, carte nautiche e portolani del medioevo e dei
secoli delle grandi scoperte marittime construiti da italiani o trovati nelle biblio-
teche d'ltalia, Part II (pp. 280-390) of "Studi Bibliografici e Biografici sulla Storia
della Geografia in Italia," published on the occasion of the Second International
Geographical Congress, Paris, 1875. by the Societa Geografica Italiana, Rome,
1875; reference on PI. 8 (the second edition, Rome, 1882, does not contain the
plates). Also Babcock, Early Norse Visits to North America, PI. 4. See our Fig. 20.

21 Konrad Kretschmer: Die Entdeckung Amerika's in ihrer Bedeutung fur die
Geschichte des Weltbildes, 2 vols. (text and atlas), Berlin, 1892; reference in atlas,
PI. 4. See our Fig. 22.



NEED OF EXPLORATION 173

There is no good reason for discrediting so many of the old
maps. Their makers sometimes went wrong; but they tried to
be accurate and would hardly, through a century or two, persist
in making the northern island the greater one unless it was at
first really so. Of course the most natural solution of the difficulty
is that Corvo's border has sunk or the sea has risen over it,
completely drowning the territory which made the lobes or
curved outline of the island form in the medieval maps and
leaving only above water its rocky backbone, with the crater for
a nucleus. Apparently those lobes and their contents are just
what might be most profitably dredged for and dived after.

Perhaps the island has not greatly changed since Mr. Henriques
wrote his little sketch of it in the sixth decade of the last cen-
tury:

The first part of the ride to it [the crater] is through steep and narrow
lanes walled in with stones. Over those walls you can sometimes see the
country right and left, which is divided into small and well-cultivated
compartments by low stone walls. These small fields form narrow ter-
races, one above another, looking from the sea like steps in the hills.
An hour's ride brings you to an open mountain covered with heath where
browse flocks of sheep and hogs, and about an hour and a half more to
the crater on the summit, now a quiet green valley, with a dark, still
pond in the center. . . .

The Corvoites, particularly the women, are a happy and industrious
people and have strong and healthy constitutions. The men in trade
evince a remarkable shrewdness, proverbial among the other Azorians,
but in private life their manners are simple and unassuming. . . .
They are like a large family of little less than a thousand members, all
living in the only village on the island. 22

25 Borges de F. Henriques, pp. 35-36.
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