Brasil, also known as Hy-Brasil and several other variants,[2] is a phantom island said to lie in the Atlantic Ocean[3] west of Ireland. Irish myths described it as cloaked in mist except for one day every seven years, when it becomes visible but still cannot be reached.
Etymology
The etymology of the names Brasil and Hy-Brasil is unknown, but in Irish tradition it is thought to come from the IrishUí Breasail (meaning 'descendants/clan of Bresail'), a minor Gaelic clan of northeastern Ireland. Another possibility is Old Irishí 'island' + bres 'beauty, worth; great, mighty'.[1]
Nautical charts identified an island called "Bracile" west of Ireland in the Atlantic Ocean as far back as 1325, in a portolan chart by Angelino Dulcert. It also appeared on the Catalan Atlas, in 1375.[4]
One of the earliest appearances was on the Rex Tholomeus portolan chart dated to circa 1360.[5][6]
Later it appeared as Insula de Brasil in the Venetian map of Andrea Bianco (1436), attached to one of the larger islands of a group of islands in the Atlantic.[7] This was identified for a time with the modern island of Terceira in the Azores, where a volcanic mount at the bay of its main town, Angra do Heroismo, is still named Monte Brasil.[citation needed]
A Catalan chart of about 1480 labels two islands "Illa de brasil", one to the south west of Ireland (where the mythical place was supposed to be) and one south of "Illa verde" or Greenland.[8]
On maps the island was shown as being circular, often with a central strait or river running east–west across its diameter.[citation needed] Despite the failure of attempts to find it, this appeared regularly on maps lying south west of Galway Bay until 1865, by which time it was called Brasil Rock.[8]
Map gallery
Catalan atlas from 1375
Piri Reis' map of Europe and the Mediterranean Sea from 1513
Expeditions left Bristol in 1480 and 1481 to search for the island; and a letter written by Pedro de Ayala, shortly after the return of John Cabot (from his expedition in 1497), reports that land found by Cabot had been "discovered in the past by the men from Bristol who found Brasil".[9]
In 1674, a Captain John Nisbet claimed to have seen the island when on a journey from France to Ireland, stating that the island was inhabited by large black rabbits and a magician who lived alone in a stone castle, yet the character and the story were a literary invention by Irish author Richard Head.[10]Roderick O'Flaherty in A Chorographical Description of West or H-Iar Connaught (1684) tells us "There is now living, Morogh O'Ley (Murrough Ó Laoí), who imagines he was personally on O'Brasil for two days, and saw out of it the Aran Islands, Golamhead [by Lettermullen], Irrosbeghill, and other places of the west continent he was acquainted with."
Hy-Brasil has also been identified with Porcupine Bank, a shoal in the Atlantic Ocean about 200 kilometres (120 mi) west of Ireland[11] and discovered in 1862. As early as 1870, a paper was read to the Geological Society of Ireland suggesting this identification.[12] The suggestion has since appeared more than once, e.g., in an 1883 edition of Notes and Queries.[13]
In popular culture
Irish poet Gerald Griffin wrote about Hy-Brasail in the early nineteenth century.[14]
Mary Burke's short story uses the myth as an allegory of the breach caused by the Northern Irish Troubles. Mary Burke, “Hy-Brasil” in The Faber Best New Irish Short Stories, 2004-5 Ed. David Marcus. London: Faber & Faber, 2005, 101–05.[15]
In the 1989 film comedy film Erik the Viking, Hy-Brasil is the location of the Horn Resounding, said to allow mortals to enter Asgard and return home safely. In the film it is said that if blood should ever be spilled on its shores the land would sink beneath the waves.[17]
