The evil reputation which was early established and seems to have hung about the island in later stages, assimilating the icy clashings and noises and terrors of the north as it had previously incorporated the monstrous fears of a warmer part of the ocean, is surely a curious phenomenon. I have fancied it may be responsible for the probably quite imaginary Devil Rock, which appears in some relatively recent maps, perhaps as a kind of substitute for Mayda, much in the fashion that Brazil Rock took the place of Brazil Island when belief in the latter became difficult. The present view of the U. S. Hydrographic Office, as expressed on its charts, is that Negra’s Rock, Devil Rock, Green Island, or Rock, and all that tribe are unreal “dangers,” probably reported as the result of peculiar appearances of the water surface. Whether the possibility has been wholly eliminated of a lance of rock jutting up to the surface from great depths and not yet officially recognized, I will not presume to say; but it seems highly improbable that there is anything of the sort in the North Atlantic Ocean except the lonely and nearly submerged peak of Rockall, some 400 miles west of Britain, and the well-known oceanic groups and archipelagoes. PROBABLE BASIS OF FACT UNDERLYING THIS LEGENDARY ISLAND What was this island, then, which held its place in the maps during half a millennium and more, under two chief names and occasional substitutes, designations apparently received from so many different peoples? One cannot easily set it aside as a “peculiar appearance of the surface” or as a mere figment of fancy. But there is nothing westward or southwestward of the Azores except the Bermudas and the capes and coast islands of America. The identification with some outlying island of the Azores, as Corvo, for example, is an old hypothesis; and the grotesquery of that rocky islet seems to have deeply impressed the minds of early navigators, lending some countenance to the idea. But the Laurenziano map of 1351[173] and the Book of the Spanish Friar[174] show that all the islands of the Azores group were known before the middle of the fourteenth century, and Corvo in particular had been given the name which it still holds. Man, afterward Mayda, appears on many maps of the fifteenth century, which show also the Azores in full. Perhaps this is not conclusive, for there are strange blunders and duplications on old maps; but it is at least highly significant. If Man, or Mayda, were really Corvo or another island of the Azores group, surely someone would have found it out in the course of the fifteenth or sixteenth century, just as it came to be perceived after a time that the Azores had been located too near to Europe and just as Bianco’s duplication of the Azores in 1448 had finally to be rejected. Mayda, if real, must have been something more remote and difficult to determine than Corvo.