The wanderings of Ulysses, as detailed in the “Odyssey” of Homer, are strangely connected with the Atlantic Ocean.  The islands of the Phoenicians were apparently in mid-ocean: 

     We dwell apart, afar
     Within the unmeasured deep, amid its waves
     The most remote of men; no other race
     Hath commerce with us.—­Odyssey, book vi.

The description of the Phaeacian walls, harbors, cities, palaces, ships, etc., seems like a recollection of Atlantis.  The island of Calypso appears also to have been in the Atlantic Ocean, twenty days’ sail from the Phaeacian isles; and when Ulysses goes to the land of Pluto, “the under-world,” the home of the dead, he

     “Reached the far confines of Oceanus,”

beyond the Pillars of Hercules.  It would be curious to inquire how far the poems of Homer are Atlantean in their relations and inspiration.  Ulysses’s wanderings were a prolonged struggle with Poseidon, the founder and god of Atlantis.

“The Hekatoncheires, or Cetimaeni, beings each with a hundred hands, were three in number—­Kottos, Gyges or Gyes, and Briareus—­and represented the frightful crashing of waves, and its resemblance to the convulsions of earthquakes.” (Murray’s “Mythology,” p. 26.) Are not these hundred arms the oars of the galleys, and the frightful crashing of the waves their movements in the water?

“The Kyklopes also were three in number—­Brontes, with his thunder; Steropes, with his lightning; and Arges, with his stream of light.  They were represented as having only one eye, which was placed at the juncture between the nose and brow.  It was, however, a large, flashing eye, as became beings who were personifications of the storm-cloud, with its flashes of destructive lightning and peals of thunder.”

We shall show hereafter that the invention of gunpowder dates back to the days of the Phoenicians, and may have been derived by them from Atlantis.  It is not impossible that in this picture of the Kyklopes we see a tradition of sea-going ships, with a light burning at the prow, and armed with some explosive preparation, which, with a roar like thunder, and a flash like lightning, destroyed those against whom it was employed?  It at least requires less strain upon our credulity to suppose these monsters were a barbarian’s memory of great ships than to believe that human beings ever existed with a hundred arms, and with one eye in the middle of the forehead, and giving out thunder and lightning.

The natives of the West India Islands regarded the ships of Columbus as living creatures, and that their sails were wings.