What Is Hy-Brasil?

On a clear evening on the Aran Islands or the coast of Connemara, a fisherman looks out to the west and sees land where no land should be: a low island on the horizon, with hills and what might be towers, just beyond the edge of the known sea. He looks away for a moment, and when he looks back, it is gone.

That is Hy-Brasil, the phantom island of the Atlantic. Irish tradition held that it lay somewhere to the west of Ireland, wrapped in mist, and rose into view only once every seven years. Even then, it could not be reached.

What makes Hy-Brasil unique among Ireland’s legendary places is that for more than five hundred years, it was not only a legend. It was on the map.

Where the Name Comes From

The name appears in many spellings, including Brasil, Brazil, O’Brasil, Hy-Breasail, and Hy-Brasail. In Irish, it is usually given as Uí Bhreasail. That form looks like an ordinary Irish family or territorial name, meaning “the descendants of Breasal,” in the same way that many Irish districts were named after the people who held them. Breasal was a common name in early Ireland, and later writers linked it to a legendary high king. Others explained the name as “the island of Breasal,” or connected it to an Irish word meaning great or noble. No explanation is certain.

The country of Brazil is not named after Hy-Brasil, whatever some websites say. Most historians agree that Brazil takes its name from brazilwood, a tree that produces a valuable red dye, and whose name comes from an old word for glowing embers. The similarity of the names is a coincidence.

Hy-Brasil on the Map

The island first appears on a portolan chart, a type of medieval sea chart, made by the Genoese mapmaker Angelino Dulcert around 1325. There, west of Ireland, is a round island labeled “Bracile.” Over the next centuries, it appeared on chart after chart, often in the same distinctive shape: a near-perfect circle split in two by a straight channel. It went on to appear in the work of some of the most respected mapmakers of the Renaissance, including Abraham Ortelius.

The island never stayed in one place. It drifted south-west toward the Azores on some charts, appeared twice on others, and slowly shrank. By the nineteenth century, it had dwindled to a rock, and it is said to have made its last appearance on a chart in 1865, as “Brasil Rock.”

Why would careful mapmakers keep drawing an island nobody could find? Medieval charts were copied from earlier charts, and a mapmaker had little reason to remove an island that his predecessors had recorded. Proving that an island did not exist was much harder than drawing it. And the open Atlantic was still largely unexplored, so an island could always be just beyond where the last ship had sailed.

The Bristol Voyages

People did go looking for it. In July 1480, according to the English antiquarian William Worcestre, a ship set out from Bristol to find “the island of Brasil” to the west of Ireland. After about nine weeks at sea, battered by storms, it returned without finding it. Another Bristol expedition sailed the following year, with no better luck.

The Bristol sailors kept searching, and their voyages became part of the story of the European discovery of North America. In a letter written in the winter of 1497 to 1498, the English merchant John Day told Christopher Columbus about John Cabot’s voyage across the Atlantic, and noted that the land Cabot reached was believed to have been found earlier by the men of Bristol “who found Brasil.” What those earlier sailors actually found, if anything, is still debated.

The Man Who Went to O’Brasil

The strangest Hy-Brasil story comes from the west of Ireland itself. In 1684, the Galway historian Roderick O’Flaherty wrote about a man then still living, Murrough Ó Laoí, from a family of hereditary physicians in Connemara. Ó Laoí claimed that in April 1668, while walking alone and in low spirits after a quarrel with his wife, he was seized by two or three strangers and carried by boat, blindfolded, to O’Brasil. The people there, he said, spoke both Irish and English. After two days, he was left on the shore near Galway, very ill, with no idea how he had gotten there.

According to later tradition, Ó Laoí came back with a book of medicine, or the knowledge to practice medicine and surgery, though he had never studied either. The Royal Irish Academy in Dublin now holds a medical manuscript from the Ó Laoí family, known as the Book of the O’Lees or the Book of Hy-Brasil. The manuscript itself dates from the fifteenth century, long before Murrough’s journey, which suggests that the family’s old medical book became attached to his story.

Captain Nisbet: A Hoax

Many articles about Hy-Brasil describe a Scottish sea captain, John Nisbet, who supposedly landed on the island in 1674 and found black rabbits, a lonely magician in a stone castle, and an old gentleman who gave his crew gold and silver. The story comes from a pamphlet published in London in the 1670s, O-Brazile, or the Inchanted Island. It was not a true account. Historians attribute it to the writer Richard Head, who invented it, and the captain and his voyage were fiction.

The Last Sighting

The best-known modern sighting is also the most respectable. The Irish antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, a careful scholar of Irish monuments, wrote that he had seen a phantom island off the coast of County Clare three times, the last in 1872, when his mother and friends watched it with him. Each time, the island appeared on the horizon and then faded away. In 1912, he published a long study of the legendary Atlantic islands in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy.

Westropp’s sighting, and many earlier ones, are now usually explained as a mirage called a Fata Morgana. When layers of warm and cold air lie over the sea, light bends between them and can make distant objects, or even the sea itself, appear as towering cliffs and islands on the horizon. It is a real and striking effect, and it appears and vanishes exactly as Hy-Brasil was said to.

Hy-Brasil and the Irish Otherworld

The legend fits into a much older Irish tradition. Irish mythology placed the Otherworld on islands far out in the western sea, lands of eternal youth and plenty, like Tír na nÓg. In the medieval voyage tales, heroes sailed west past one wonderful island after another. Hy-Brasil seems to be where that tradition met the world of real sailors and mapmakers. The Otherworld island of the stories became a place with coordinates, and for five hundred years, people half expected to find it.

In the nineteenth century, the poet Gerald Griffin gave the legend a romantic form in his poem “Hy-Brasail, the Isle of the Blest.”

Is Hy-Brasil Real?

No island exists where the old maps placed it. Modern surveys of the Atlantic west of Ireland have found only open sea. Some writers have linked Hy-Brasil with the Porcupine Bank, a shallow area of seabed about 200 kilometers west of Ireland, but it lies well underwater, and there is no evidence that it was ever an island within human memory. The most likely explanation for the legend is a blend of Otherworld tradition, mirages, sailors’ mistakes, and maps copied from older maps. The island was never there, but the belief in it was real enough to send ships across the ocean.