Corroboration is found in the utterances of a Chinese observer, later in date but apparently dealing with a continuing size and condition. “There is a great sea [the Mediterranean], and to the west of this sea there are countless countries, but Mu-lan-p’i [Mediterranean Spain] is the one country which is visited by the big ships.... Putting to sea from T’o-pan-ti [the Suez of today] ... after sailing due west for full an hundred days, one reaches this country. A single one of these (big) ships of theirs carries several thousand men, and on board they have stores of wine and provisions, as well as weaving looms. If one speaks of big ships, there are none so big at those of Mu-lan-p’i.”[4] This statement is credited to only a hundred years before Marco Polo. One naturally suspects some exaggeration. But a parallel account, nearly as expansive and very circumstantial, is given in the same work concerning giant vessels sailing in the opposite direction some six hundred years earlier. It begins: “The ships that sail the Southern Sea and south of it are like houses. When their sails are spread they are like great clouds in the sky.” Professor Holmes, drawing attention to these passages (which he quotes), very justly observes, “who shall say that the mastery of the sea known to have been attained in the Orient 500 A. D. had not been achieved long prior to that date?”[5] THE ATLANTIS LEGEND We may be safe in styling Atlantis (Ch. II) the earliest mythical island of which we have any knowledge or suggestion, since Plato’s narrative, written more than 400 years before Christ, puts the time of its destruction over 9,000 years earlier still. It seems pretty certain that there never was any such mighty and splendid island empire contending against Athens and later ruined by earthquakes and engulfed by the ocean. Atlantis may fairly be set down as a figment of dignified philosophic romance, owing its birth partly to various legendary hints and reports of seismic and volcanic action but much more to the glorious achievements of Athens in the Persian War and the apparent need of explaining a supposed shallow part of the Atlantic known to be obstructed and now named the Sargasso Sea. Perhaps Plato never intended that any one should take it as literally true, but his story undoubtedly influenced maritime expectations and legends during medieval centuries. It cannot be said that any map unequivocally shows Atlantis; but it may be that this is because Atlantis vanished once for all in the climax of the recital. PHOENICIAN EXPLORATION