Chapter One

Vikings and Basques appear, the first shipwreck is recorded, and "cattel & swyne" are deposited there

When Europe was overrun by the Celtic and Hunnish barbarians, its inhabitants sank back into the cultural stupor now known as the Dark Ages and seemed to lose all interest in geography, as they did in the physical world itself, steeping themselves instead in religion, into which were stirred purgative doses of superstition and the mysteries of magic. The geographic knowledge of antiquity was fortunately transferred to the Islamic world, where it was preserved and embellished-the Arabs of the eighth to the twelfth centuries were great travelers and indefatigable mapmakers. As the Middle Ages waned, around the end of the twelfth century and at the beginning of the thirteenth, this repository of knowledge was gradually reintroduced to western Europe by translation from the Arabic treatises, and from the remaining Greek texts, into Latin. It was part of an intellectual revival that was to persist for centuries, and it renewed western Europeans' interest in geographic exploration and expanded their knowledge of the physical world. "Distant islands, which had remained hidden from view because of the terrors of the ocean, now began to be revealed. Chronicles of visits replaced recollections of occasional chance encounters. By 1350, almost all the Atlantic islands were known to the historians and geographers of western Europe, though their information was vague, often confused, and lacking in precise detail