The Eternal Isles

The rediscovery during the Middle Ages of the Canary Islands - the "Islands of the Blessed" of the clas?sical geographers, the "Eternal Isles" of the Arabs-not only represented, to Arabs and Europeans alike, the confirmation of the truth of a classical text, but also served as a spur to search for other islands said to lie to the west.

The Arabs were the first to sight the Canaries, driven there by chance; they may have landed on one of the islands as early as the 10th century. The Vivaldi brothers, out of Genoa, may have landed in the Canaries during their voyage south in 1291. A French ship, caught in a gale, was driven onto one of the Canaries in 1334, although a Portuguese expedition of about the same date failed to find them. Their existence was well-enough known by this time for a man named Juan de la Cerda, a grandson of the Spanish monarch Alfonso the Wise, to have himself crowned King of the Canaries, although he was never able to raise the financial backing to make his pre?tentious title a reality.

There were other voyages to the Canaries which have left no traces in the European sources. One of these, which must have taken place about 1350, is de?scribed by Ibn Khaldun, the most original of late Islamic thinkers, in al-Muqaddimah, the introductory volume to his comprehensive history. This passage is also impor?tant because it contains one of the few descriptions in a literary source of the portulan charts, as well as a clear explanation of the difficulties of Atlantic navigation.

"We have heard," says Ibn Khaldun, "that Frankish ships reached the Eternal Isles in the middle of this century. They attacked and plundered the natives, capturing some whom they sold on the coast of Morocco. These captives entered the service of the Sultan, and after learning Arabic were able to tell about life on their island. They said that they tilled the earth with horn tools, for they had no iron in their country. They ate barley bread and raised goats. They fought with stones, which they flung over their shoulders. They bowed down before the rising sun and had no scriptural religion. Muslim missionaries had not reached them."

All these details are confirmed by later European sources, including the peculiar method of hurling stones, which the Guanche did with extreme accuracy. It is unfortunate that Ibn Khaldun says nothing about their original language, for this is a subject that has been much discussed. Ibn Khaldun con?tinues with an important passage on the practice of late medieval sailors; everything he says applies equally well to the Mediterranean sailors of antiquity:

"The place where these islands lie cannot be found by intention, but only by chance, because ships sail on the sea where the winds take them, and navigation is dependent upon knowing the direction the wind blows, and where it blows from. A direct course is laid between two places that lie in the path of a particular wind. When the wind shifts to another quarter and the direction it is blowing is known, the
sails are adjusted and the?ship sails according to the practices of sailors accustomed to sea voyages.

"The lands on the two shores of the Mediterranean are marked on a chart; their true positions on the coast are marked in order. The directions of the different winds are also noted. This chart is called the kanbas [compass]. Sailors depend upon these charts on their voyages.

"But no charts exist for the All-Encompassing Sea [the Atlantic]; that is why ships do not sail it, for if they were to lose sight of the coast, they would be hard put to return to it, for if they were to lose sight of the coast, they would be hard put to return to it. The surface of this sea is also covered with mist, which prevents ships from making their way.... Therefore it is difficult to lay a course for the Eternal Isles and find out more about them."

This is an excellent description of the coast-hugging tech?nique of the Mediterranean sailor. The use of kanbas to indi?cate a mariner's chart, rather than the pair of dividers used to measure distance, or the magnetic compass, is interest?ing, and may throw light on the obscure origins of this word.

Shortly after Ibn Khaldun wrote this passage, and largely as a result of the discovery of the Canary Islands, Portuguese and Spanish sailors discovered how to use the current and wind patterns of the Atlantic to reach destinations across open seas. The technique was called the volta da mar, or the "sea turn," and went against reason, for it meant sailing well to the northwest of the Canaries in order to pick up the easterlies and return home. This was the discovery that made Atlan?tic navigation, far out of sight of land, possible. The Ottoman naval officer Piri Reis, a practical sailor himself, was quick to realize the significance of the discovery, and in his Kitab-i Bahriye gives good descriptions of the wind systems of the north and south Atlantic.

The rediscovery of the Canary islands not only unlocked the secret of Atlantic navigation, thus opening the way to the New World, but set the pattern for conquest, settlement and economic exploitation of the Caribbean Islands. The Guanches, the indigenous inhabitants of the Canaries, were the first "primitive" people encountered by Europeans in modern times! Armed with the most rudimentary weapons, they heroically resisted their conquerors for more than a century and a half. In the end they succumbed, annihilated by superior weapons and unfamiliar diseases. Many were enslaved the rest were assimilated into the new dominant population. The same sad story was to be repeated in the New World.

Columbus knew the Canaries well and was familiar with the Guanches. When he first encountered the inhabitants of the New World, it was to the Guanches that he compared them, noting the many physical similarities. And here he may unconsciously touched upon a mystery to which the Canary Islands may once have held the key.

One of the few relics of the Guanches' material culture is a characteristic clay or wood seal, with a wide variety of designs, which was used to stamp colored patterns on the skin. These seals, called pintaderas in Spanish, are by no means unique to the Canaries. They are found in North and West Africa, the Balkans - where the earliest examples, dating from the fifth millennium BC, have been found - and even Japan. But they have also been found in archeological sites in the Caribbean and Central America, and many of these American examples have patterns very similar to those from the Canaries. The earliest examples from the Canaries have been dated to the second millennium BC; there is some evidence that they were still in use there at the time of the Spanish con?quest. Their presence means the Canaries were inhabited from a remote period - before the time of the Mauretanian king Juba II, who colonized the islands in about 25 BC ?and they may even, because of their similarity to American seals indicate very ancient trans-Atlantic contacts.

The Roman scholar Pliny the Elder reported that the Canary Islands were named for the species of large dog found there in classical times - canis being the Latin word for dog - but this smacks of folk etymology. Unfortunately, so do all the other origins that have been proposed for the name, most recently that the name derives from qannariya, the Andalusian Arabic word for the vegetable called cardoon, which is said to have grown therein profusion. It is more likely that the name is related to that of the people who may then have inhab?ited the opposite coast and now inhabit northeastern Nigeria, and who were known to al-Idrisi as the qamanuriya; they are now called the Kanuri. Those names are close to "Canaria" in sound, and it is more likely that an island should be named after a people than after dogs or vegetables. In addition, the qamanuriya spoke Berber, al-Idrisi says; so did the Guanche. Perhaps the Kanuri were the original discoverers and colonizers of the Eternal Isles, the first stepping stone tow the New World.