"Look at your fax," he said. He had read a reference to the mythical island of Hy Brasil here a day or so before. And on the fax was a map of Ireland, rather Hibernia - inverted pear shape, with St Patrick's Purgatory at the top and, sure enough, off the south-west coast a large, roundish island called simply Brazil. Provenance so far untraced, but in shape not unlike a chart by Angelino Dulcert, 1339, produced in Shapes of Ireland by J. H. Andrews, published by Geography Publications in 1997. And Praeger, who gives two pages in The Way That I Went to Hy Brazil and other mythical islands off our west coast, tells us that Brasil survived in maps even into the 19th century. In one chart of the Atlantic, "corrected to 1830", Brazil Rock is plainly marked in latitude and longitude as taking the position of the earlier cartographers, i.e. about 300 miles west of Galway. Lovely thoughts and lovely stories but, says Praeger "with the aid of mirage alone can they be seen in these degenerate days; and under certain atmospheric conditions a fairy isle may still be observed off the West Coast."
He quotes from T. J. Westropp, who gave a paper to the Royal Irish Academy in 1912. "I myself," writes Westropp, "have seen the illusion some three times in my boyhood and even made a rough coloured sketch after the last event in the summer of 1872. It was a clear evening, with a fine golden sunset, when, just as the sun went down, a dark island suddenly appeared far out to sea, but not on the horizon. It had two hills, one wooded: between these, from a low plain, rose towers and curls of smoke. My mother, brother Ralph Hugh Westropp, and several friends saw it at the same time".
Rockall (away to the north), Praeger writes, "is still actually with us for a little while, a speck in the wide ocean where once a considerable island certainly existed". He had seen it, he had circumnavigated it. The rest is legend.
And still the mirage holds the memory. A woman who during the last war spent much time in the West has the memory, quite clear, of twice seeing this island near the horizon. No towers, just two hills, and to the right, trees. She was looking west from the Mannin Bay, Slyne Head area. Y