The essays are best known, but the New Atlantis is the book that you will best like to read, for it is something of a story, and of it I will tell you a little in the next chapter.

Chapter LIII BACON—­THE HAPPY ISLAND

ATLANTIS was a fabled island of the Greeks which lay somewhere in the Western Sea.  That island, it was pretended, sank beneath the waves and was lost, and Bacon makes believe that he finds another island something like it in the Pacific Ocean and calls it the New Atlantis.  Here, as in More’s Utopia, the people living under just and wise laws, are happy and good.  Perhaps some day you will be interested enough to read these two books together and compare them.  Then one great difference will strike you at once.  In the Utopia all is dull and gray, only children are pleased with jewels, only prisoners are loaded with golden chains.  In the New Atlantis jewels and gold gleam and flash, the love of splendor and color shows itself almost in every page.

Bacon wastes no time in explanation but launches right into the middle of his story.  “We sailed from Peru,” he says, “(where we had continued by the space of one whole year) for China and Japan, by the South Sea, taking with us victuals for twelve months.”  And through all the story we are not told who the “we” were or what their names or business.  There were, we learn, fifty-one persons in all on board the ship.  After some month’s good sailing they met with storms of wind.  They were driven about now here, now there.  Their food began to fail, and finding themselves in the midst of the greatest wilderness of waters in the world, they gave themselves us as lost.  But presently one evening they saw upon one hand what seemed like darker clouds, but which in the end proved to be land.

“And after an hour and a half’s sailing, we entered into a good haven, being the port of a fair city, not great indeed, but well built, and that gave a pleasant view from the sea.

“And we, thinking every minute long till we were on land, came close to the shore, and offered to land.  But straightways we saw divers of the people, with bastons in their hands, as it were forbidding us to land; yet without any cries or fierceness, but only as warning us off by signs that they made.  Whereupon being not a little discomforted, we were advising with ourselves what we should do.  During which time there made forth to us a small boat, with about eight persons in it; whereof one of them had in his hand a tipstaff* of a yellow cane, tipped at both ends with blue, who came aboard our ship, without any show of distrust at all.  And when he saw one of our number present himself somewhat before the rest, he drew forth a little scroll of parchment (somewhat yellower than our parchment, and shining like the leaves of writing-tables, but otherwise soft and flexible), and delivered it to our foremost man.