“There is an abundance of legends and traditions concerning the passage of the Irish into America, and their habitual communication with that continent many centuries before the time of Columbus.  We should bear in mind that Ireland was colonized by the Phoenicians (or by people of that race).  An Irish Saint named Vigile, who lived in the eighth century, was accused to Pope Zachary of having taught heresies on the subject of the antipodes.  At first he wrote to the pope in reply to the charge, but afterward he went to Rome in person to justify himself, and there he proved to the pope that the Irish had been accustomed to communicate with a transatlantic world.”

“This fact,” says Baldwin, “seems to have been preserved in the records of the Vatican.”

The Irish annals preserve the memory of St. Brendan of Clonfert, and his remarkable voyage to a land in the West, made A.D. 545.  His early youth was passed under the care of St. Ita, a lady of the princely family of the Desii.  When he was five years old he was placed under the care of Bishop Ercus.  Kerry was his native home; the blue waves of the Atlantic washed its shores; the coast was full of traditions of a wonderful land in the West.  He went to see the venerable St. Enda, the first abbot of Arran, for counsel.  He was probably encouraged in the plan he had formed of carrying the Gospel to this distant land.  “He proceeded along the coast of Mayo, inquiring as he went for traditions of the Western continent.  On his return to Kerry he decided to set out on the important expedition.  St. Brendan’s Hill still bears his name; and from the bay at the foot of this lofty eminence be sailed for the ‘Far West.’  Directing his course toward the southwest, with a few faithful companions, in a well-provisioned bark, he came, after some rough and dangerous navigation, to calm seas, where, without aid of oar or sail, he was borne along for many weeks.”  He had probably entered upon the same great current which Columbus travelled nearly one thousand years later, and which extends from the shores of Africa and Europe to America.  He finally reached land; he proceeded inland until he came to a large river flowing from east to west, supposed by some to be the Ohio.  “After an absence of seven years he returned to Ireland, and lived not only to tell of the marvels he had seen, but to found a college of three thousand monks at Clonfert.”  There are eleven Latin MSS. in the Bibliotheque Imperiale at Paris of this legend, the dates of which vary from the eleventh to the fourteenth century, but all of them anterior to the time of Columbus.

The fact that St. Brendan sailed in search of a country in the west cannot be doubted; and the legends which guided him were probably the traditions of Atlantis among a people whose ancestors had been derived directly or at second-hand from that country.

This land was associated in the minds of the peasantry with traditions of Edenic happiness and beauty.  Miss Eleanor C. Donnelly, of Philadelphia, has referred to it in her poem, “The Sleeper’s Sail,” where the starving boy dreams of the pleasant and plentiful land: