50 THE DISCOVERY OF AUSTRALIA 



seen and heard. It is admitted, however, that " the 

 legendary jumble " of the chapter on the Nicobars, after 

 a personal visit to those islands, is " disturbing." 1 I 

 confess that I am a good deal disturbed and not only by 

 the dog-faced men of the Nicobars. Friar Odoric seems 

 to follow somewhat too closely in the footsteps of Marco 

 Polo, not only as a traveller but also as a writer. 

 His account of Java looks very like a combination of 

 Marco Polo's Java and Marco Polo's Cipango. 2 However, 

 the point of interest to us is that the Friar's statements, 

 whether true or untrue, were believed by the men of 

 his time, and of the next time. They were enormously 

 advertised by being incorporated, without acknowledge- 

 ment, in the most successful wonder-book of the Middle 

 Ages, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. And, finally, 

 Confusion, the curious and inexplicable disarrangement of the 

 Friar's material, 3 his description of the Andamans and 

 Ceylon in an order which implies that they are not far 

 away to the South of Cochin China, still more confounded 

 the growing confusion of the geography of these seas. 

 The journeys About a hundred years later, another Venetian traveller 

 de Cont? returned home to add to this confusion. In the year 1444, 

 narrated says Poggio Bracciolini, a very famous scholar of the 

 Italian Renaissance, a Venetian traveller named Nicolo de 

 Conti, who had penetrated to the interior of India, came 

 to Pope Eugenius IV., craving absolution, inasmuch as in 

 his travels he had been compelled to renounce his Faith. 

 " I, being very desirous of his conversation," says Poggio, 

 " questioned him diligently." He convinced himself that 

 de Conti had " gone further than any former traveller ever 

 penetrated, for he crossed the Ganges, and travelled far 

 beyond Taprobane (a name which in this narrative means 

 not Ceylon but Sumatra !) to a point which there is 

 no evidence to show that any European had yet reached, 

 except the commander of the fleet of Alexander and the 



1 Beazley, vol. ii. p. 268. 



2 Yule, however, thinks Odoric is describing the old Javan palaces 

 an 1 temples covered with gold leaf (vol. ii. p. 152). 



3 This is discussed in the last edition of Yule's Cathay. 



