Until the eighteenth century most European stories about utopian societies were situated on an island. Undoubtedly that convention was partly motivated by the discovery, since the days of Columbus and Vespucci, of faraway territories. Often, the land where seafarers anchored after voyages of many months was an island, with a mild or tropical climate, lush vegetation, and rich wildlife. The natural setting appeared idyllic, and if the inhabitants were not openly hostile their different way of life could arouse the utopian imagination and would stimulate the projection of an ideal state without religious conflict, political corruption, economic hardship, or oppressive sexual morality. Thomas More set an example in this respect too, as his Utopia was situated on an island near the Brazilian coast. The insular geography provided an ideal setting for the construction of a perfect society. The inhabitants could easily ward off unwelcome intruders and contact with the depraved outer world was not encouraged.

The changing European tradition

The seafaring explorers of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were not the first to consider the island a topos of potential bliss. A thousand years earlier the legendary Irish monk Saint Brendan had located a mythical island resembling paradise that some commentators have identified as one of the Canary Islands. Still earlier, in Greek mythology, the Garden of the Hesperides with its much desired sacred apples was situated on an island west of the Strait of Gibraltar, and Plato recorded the oral tradition of the beautiful island of Atlantis to which Bacon referred in his New Atlantis.

Critias, one of the characters in the dialogues Timaeus and Critias, is the major source of information about Atlantis. Plato goes to some lengths to emphasize the historical reliability of Critias’s story by explaining its narrative genealogy. As a young boy Critias had learned from his grandfather about the visit of the statesman and poet Solon (c. 640-c. 560 BCE) to Egypt. An elderly Egyptian priest had told Solon that, different from the Greeks, they had recorded the ancient history of Athens and Atlantis in the sacred writings that were preserved in their temples.