Geoffrey Ashe - Land to the West
St Brendan’s voyage to America
Long before Columbus brought his three little ships to the Bahamas, men had speculated about the existence of land over the Western Ocean. Probably indeed the Vikings actually crossed, by a different route, some centuries ahead of him. But even before the Vikings, there was a tradition set forth in writing which affirmed that the Irish sailor-saint Brendan had found his way in the sixth century to a mysterious coast far beyond the Atlantic. It is this tradition, and the basis underlying it, that Geoffrey Ashe examines in Land to the West. Was Brendan’s land real - the same in fact that later was to be called America.
No final conclusion is, perhaps ever can be, possible; but the case for an objective background of some kind is arresting and in itself fascinating. In the earliest full account of the voyage, the Navigatio Sancti Brendani, there are striking affinities between phenomena encountered by the saint and the real topography of the North Atlantic. Islands of sheep and birds, an isolated rock, an island of hellish fire and a crystal arch correspond closely with the Faeroes, Rockall, the volcano Hekla in Iceland, and a typical iceberg formation. How much of all this did St. Brendan see with his own eyes ? How much of the Brendan narrative is derived from the conceptions of the Greeks - Homer, Plato, Plutarch - and Arab geographers like Idrisi? And if it is derived from them, where did they in turn acquire their own information, some of it curiously correct ?
Having traversed the literary evidence, the author himself crossed the Atlantic in search of what there might be in the way of archeological proofs, investigating suspected megaliths in New Hampshire, Mexican ringed crosses oddly reminiscent of Ireland, and the famous bearded white men of South American sculpture and legend. Lastly he tried to establish whether the story of St. Brendan’s Voyage was a significant influence on the plans of Columbus.
Land to the West is not only a piece of exciting historical detection - in the manner of the author’s Arthurian studies - but a book to set the imagination speculating on man’s earliest exploration of the planet.
Jacket design by Kenneth Farnhill after a medieval German M.S.
Geoffrey Ashe - King Arthur's Avalon
Geoffrey Ashe - PDF
