Before the Portuguese came here in the 15the century, precious little is known about the Azores past, and as with the Canaries and Madeira, this mysterious prehistory has proved a fertile ground for legend and myth. Plato’s description of the Lost Continent of Atlantis, a paradise on Earth once situated somewhere west of the Pillars of Hercules (the Straits of Gibraltar) which sank below the ocean surface, has been identified by some as the submarine plateau beneath the Azores. Only recently a visiting politician described the islands as ‘the vestiges of Atlantis’, and the Azoreans tell themselves stories of their Atlantean ancestors, clearly apocryphal since the islands were uninhabited when the Portuguese arrived.
There is, however, a possibility that the islands had been visited by Carthaginians, merchants and traders who were perhaps blown off course when rounding the African coast in search of new trading routes. As Thor Heyerdahl has demonstrated, there is at least a theoretical chance that ancient mariners successfully crossed the Atlantic long before Columbus, maybe finding shelter and fresh water in the Azores, and there have been reports of Carthaginian coins discovered by divers off the island coasts. Alas, one oft-repeated story which supported the Carthaginian theory is untrue.
It used to be said that the Portuguese colonists found a statue of a horseman on Corvo, one arm pointing west as though showing the way to the yet-to-be-discovered New World, but the ‘statue’ was apparently nothing more than a curious rock formation.
