Saba
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Saba. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
An Encyclopaedia of Occultism (1920)
In Ossianic legend, wife of Finn and mother of Oisin. In the form of a fawn, she was captured by Finn in the chase, but noticing that his man-hounds would do her no hurt, he gave her shelter in his Dun of Allen. The next morning he found her transformed into a beautiful woman. She told him that an enchanter had compelled her to assume the shape of a fawn, but that her original form would be restored if she reached Dun Allen. Finn made her his wife, and ceased for a while from battle and the chase. Hearing one day, however, that the Northmen's warships were in the Bay of Dublin, he mustered his men and went to fight them. He returned victorious, but to find Saba gone. The enchanter, taking advantage of his absence, had appeared to her in the likeness of Finn with his hounds and so lured her from the dun, when she became a fawn again.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a small island in the Leeward group of the West Indies, a little N. of St. Kitt's and near the island of St. Eustatia. Though a Dutch colony the Island of Saba is an independent republic. Pop. (1918) 2,229. The island rises abruptly from the sea, and is about 12 miles in circumference. On the S. side there is a break in the perpendicular rock-walls where a "ladder" of 1,000 steps and a gallery leads to the habitable part of the island. The natives raise cotton, fruit, and vegetables for export, and build boats of considerable size. A cabbage is the coat-of-arms of the republic. The Sabans are pure-blooded white people, descendants of Dutch, Swedish, and Danish pirates of the 17th and 18th centuries.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's called Saba "an independent republic" with a cabbage for a coat of arms in 1921; in fact it was a Dutch possession then and is now a special municipality of the Netherlands, a status it took on 10 October 2010 when the Netherlands Antilles was dissolved. The 1,000-step "ladder" up the cliff is no longer the only way in: a road was hacked out by hand from the 1930s under the self-taught Saban Josephus Lambert Hassell, and Juancho E. Yrausquin Airport, opened in 1963, has one of the shortest commercial runways in the world at roughly 400 metres. The population has barely grown — still under 2,000 — but the claim that Sabans are "pure-blooded white people" descended from pirates was always a partial picture, and today the island's people are of mixed European and African descent. The Ossianic Saba of the 1920 occultism entry, by contrast, needs no updating; she is now more often spelled Sadhbh, and the tale of Finn's fawn-wife and the birth of Oisin is told much as it was then.
Written for this edition, 2026.