MARCO POLO 45 



Australia. On what might conceivably be Dampier Land 

 he wrote " Lucach Regnum " ; and on what might con- 

 ceivably be Arnhem Land he wrote " Beach provincia 

 aurifera quam pauci ex alienis regionibus adeunt, propter 

 gentum inhumanitatem." Now Beach is a curious printer's 

 error for Locach ; and Mercator is simply copying out 

 Marco Polo's phrases, and interpreting them to describe 

 parts of the great continent of the South. And in the 

 midst of what might possibly be the Gulf of Carpentaria, 

 in a position roughly corresponding to Groote Eylandt, are 

 the islands of Pentan and Java Minor, the latter with a 

 legend summing up the information given by Marco Polo. 

 Still later, when in 1619 the Dutch sailor Houtman hit the 

 coast of Western Australia, he described the fact by saying 

 that he " suddenly came across the Southland of Beach." 

 He believed that the land which the Dutch called 

 Eendrachtsland, and which we call Western Australia, was 

 the same continent which Marco Polo was thought to have 

 described under the name of Locach or Beach, existing 

 about 1200 or 750 miles Southward of Java, a continent 

 where gold abounded to a degree scarcely credible, where 

 elephants were found, and inhuman inhabitants. 



And yet modern critics have made clear that the But Marco 

 belief that Marco Polo had described a continent and Pol , as 



misunder- 



islands lying far to the South of Java was founded on stood, 

 nothing more solid than a misunderstanding of Marco 

 Polo's meaning. In describing the countries between 

 China and India to the Pisan gentleman in the prison 

 at Genoa, Marco had reached Chamba or Cochin China. 

 At this point it had occurred to him to make a few remarks 

 about Java, which, as we have seen, he described inaccurately, 

 and probably from the loose talk of Malay, Chinese, 

 or Arab merchants and navigators. He then resumed 

 his narrative of travel, and spoke of places you come 

 to after leaving Chamba ; and his distances are therefore 

 measured not from Java but from Chamba. But, either 

 the Pisan gentleman misunderstood him, or the copyist 

 of the Pisan gentleman's manuscript made a mistake. 

 It was thought that, having described Java, Marco must 



