but may easily have been believed so. IDENTITY OF ANTILLIA WITH THE ANTILLES A more difficult question is raised by the absence of Haiti and Porto Rico from these maps, with all the more eastward Antilles. But it is possible that they may not have been visited or even seen. We can imagine an expedition that would touch Great Abaco, coast along Florida and Cuba, and visit Jamaica, returning out of sight, or with little notice, of the Haitian coast and barely passing an islet or two of the Bahamas, which, if not sufficiently commemorated in a general way by Insula in Mar, might well be disregarded. A report of such an expedition, adding that Antillia was directly opposite Portugal and of about equal size, would account fairly for the map which for half a century was faithfully repeated even in details by many different hands and evidently confidently believed in. Unless we accept this explanation, we must assume an uncanny, almost an inspired, gift of conjecture in some one who, without basis, could imagine and depict the only array of great islands in the Atlantic. Certainly the outlines of Cuba, Jamaica, Florida, and one of the Bahamas will very well bear comparison with Scandinavia or the Hebrides and the Orkneys as given on maps of equal or even later date. Some glaring errors are to be expected in such work, as notoriously occurred in the sixteenth-century treatment of Newfoundland and Labrador. Applying the same tests and canons and making the same allowances as in these cases of distortion of undoubtedly actual lands, we may be reasonably confident that the Antillia of 1435 was really, as now, the Queen of the Antilles. CHAPTER XI CORVO, OUR NEAREST EUROPEAN NEIGHBOR Far at sea from Portugal, straggling in a long northwestward line toward America, lies the archipelago sometimes called the Islands of the Sun or the Western Islands but now generally known as the Azores. That line breaks into three divisions separated by wide gaps of sea: the most easterly pair, St. Michael and St. Mary; the main cluster of five islands, Pico being the loftiest and Terceira the most important; and the northwesterly pair, Flores and Corvo. These last make a little far-severed world of their own, sharing in none of the tremors and upheavals which from time to time more or less transform parts of the other two divisions. The remote origin of the pair was volcanic, and Corvo is little more now than an old crater lifted about 300 feet above the surface; but the fires have long been dead, and in historic times the lower strata have never shifted suddenly to produce any great earthquake. There have been changes, but they must be attributed for the most part to gradual subsidence.