Perhaps these statements are influenced by present or recent conditions. It is obvious that giant ropelike seaweeds in masses would more than materially impede the action of the galley oars, which were the main reliance in time of calm of the ancient and medieval navigators. Also it is hardly to be believed that small sailing vessels could freely drive through them with an ordinary wind. If the weeds were so unobstructive, why all these complaints and warnings out of remote centuries? In the days of powerful steamships and when the skippers of sailing vessels have learned what area of sea it is best to avoid, there may well be a lack of formal reports of impediment; but it certainly looks as though there were some basis for the long established ill repute of the Sargasso Sea. SUMMARY For the genesis of Atlantis we have then, first, the great idealist philosopher Plato minded to compose an instructive pseudo-historical romance of statesmanship and war and actually making a beginning of the task; and, secondly, the fragmentary cues and suggestive data which came to him out of tradition and mariners’ tales, perhaps in part through Solon and intervening transmitters, in part more directly to himself. Of this material we may name foremost the vague knowledge of vast impeded regions in the Atlantic believed to be shallow and requiring a physical explanation; then rumors of cataclysms and sunken lands in the same ocean; then legends of ancient hostilities between dwellers beyond the Pillars of Hercules and the peoples about the Mediterranean; and finally the reflection of the Persian war on the shadowy ancient past of Athens--Athens the defender and victor, Athens the Queen of the Sea. Every solution of the Atlantis problem must be conjectural. The above is offered simply as the best conjecture to which I can see my way. CHAPTER III ST. BRENDAN’S EXPLORATIONS AND ISLANDS THE LISMORE VERSION OF THE SAINT’S ADVENTURES The fifteenth-century Book of Lismore, compiled from much older materials, tells us that St. Brenainn (evidently St. Brendan, the navigator) desired to leave his land and his country, his parents and his fatherland, and he urgently besought the Lord to give him a land secret, hidden, secure, delightful, separated from men. Now after he had slept on that night, he heard the voice of the angel from heaven, who said to him, “Arise, O Brenainn,” saith he, “for God hath given thee what thou soughtest, even the Land of Promise” ... and he goes alone to Sliab Daidche and he saw the mighty intolerable ocean on every side, and then he beheld the beautiful noble island, with trains of angels (rising) from it.[44]