Among the boulders that face the broad Atlantic Ocean on the Aran Island of Inis Óirr at the mouth of Galway Bay stands a limestone chair inscribed with the exhortation: Suigh síos agus lig do scíth/and behold the beauty of Inis Óirr/and perhaps see Hy-Brazil.
The mythical island of Hy-Brazil is said to appear in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean at least once every seven years. It featured frequently on maps dating back to the 14th century and its presumed existence may have prompted St Brendan the Navigator and the first European explorers to sail westward on the Atlantic.
“Men thought it a region of sunshine and rest/and they called it O’Brazil, the Isle of the Blest”, says a Gerald Griffin poem from 1845. A century later Jack B Yeats and Patrick Collins painted their imagined versions of the fabled island.
Generations of Galway parents have told their children that HyBrazil (often called Hy-Brasil) is a paradise or Tír na nÓg on the western horizon where people go after they die. Some claim that Brazil takes its name from a Galwegian sailor who shouted “Hy-Brasil” instead of “Terra” when he first saw landfall from the crow’s nest of the ship from which Pedro Álvares Cabral “discovered” and claimed the vast South American territory for Portugal in the year 1500.
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The patriot Roger Casement was captivated by the legend of Hy-Brazil when he visited the Aran Islands in 1904 during a break from his job as a diplomat in the Portuguese capital, Lisbon. Four years later, while serving as British consul in Belém do Para at the mouth of the Amazon in Brazil, he drafted an essay asserting that the name Brazil derived from the mythical west of Ireland Hy-Brazil.
“Brazil owes her name not to her abundance of a certain dyewood, but to Ireland,” Casement claimed in his handwritten, 11-page essay, which is preserved among his papers in the National Library of Ireland in Dublin. “The distinction of naming the great South American country, I believe, belongs as surely to Ireland and to the ancient Irish belief as old as the Celtic mind itself,” he added.
Casement wrote that the name Brazil “is probably the sweetest-sounding name that any large race of the earth possesses”. He continued: “Nothing is more certain than that Ireland was the home of the legend which for centuries has turned men’s minds westward in search of that fabled land, and that the very name by which the earliest records call the region [that] St Brendan set out to find was the very name by which, when the discovery came, the discovering people themselves decided by popular will and all pervading prior use to confer upon this new found possession”.
The draft essay appears to be incomplete, but the National Library also holds a pamphlet produced with the patronage of the Roger Casement Foundation that implies without citation that Casement also wrote: “The name Brazil could only have come to the Portuguese from the Celtic legendry name applied to the ‘islands of the blessed’, the Tír na nÓg of the land of the setting sun, which the Galway and Mayo peasant still sees in the sunset, just as the Galician and Lusitanian wayfarers in Cabral’s day dreamt of it, before their eyes had actually fallen on the peaks of Porto Seguno rising from the western waves”.
The limestone chair on Inis Óirr with its inlaid inscription was constructed and installed by islander Peadar Póil at the request of his long-time friend, journalist Charlie Bird, who composed the Hy-Brazil exhortation. The inscription adds: “Buíochas le Peadar Póil as a chairdeas le 50 blian. Charlie Bird, Iriseoir 2021”.
Bird, long-time RTÉ chief reporter, always stayed with his friends Peadar and Bríd Póil during his frequent visits to the island after first going there in the late 1960s.
He used to say RTÉ was his second home and Inis Óirr was his home from home. He commissioned Wicklow sculptor Séighean Ó Draoi to inscribe the stone and he ferried it in his car to Galway Harbour for shipping to Inis Óirr in late 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic ban on inter-county travel was lifted briefly.
Peadar installed the stone on a boulder at Charlie’s favourite spot on the island, Béal an Chaladh. They unveiled it in summer 2021 when Charlie was noticing the first symptoms of the motor neurone disease that killed him three years later. His ashes are buried on Inis Óirr, the closest landfall to Hy-Brazil.
