THE DISCOVERY OF AUSTRALIA 



reconcile 

 travellers' 

 stories with 

 Mela and 

 Ptolemy. 



new age, did his best to make out the meaning of what 

 Nicolas de Conti had said to Poggio Bracciolini ; and the 

 result was that he confused the Indus with the Ganges, 

 They have to and the Ganges with the Kiang. 1 Then, when the unhappy 

 map-maker thought that he had sifted truth from the 

 travellers' tales, he had to reconcile this truth with the 

 teaching of Ptolemy. For by that time the Renaissance 

 had brought Ptolemy to birth once more, 2 and scholars were 

 eager to interpret the new discoveries in the form of scien- 

 tific maps. They endeavoured to solve the problem by 

 bringing out new editions of Ptolemy. The sixteenth- 

 century map was the map of Ptolemy somewhat timidly 

 brought up to date by the cautious insertion of guesses at 

 truth founded on the talk of the travellers. 



We find a curious example of honest effort made to 

 achieve the impossible in a map of the year 1489. 3 In 1487 

 the Portuguese captain Bartholomew Diaz had rounded 

 the Cape, and it had become certain that Ptolemy had 

 made a mistake in describing the Indian Ocean as a land- 

 locked ocean. The map-maker has therefore smashed a 

 way through the too solid block of Terra Incognita, which, 

 according to Ptolemy, unites Asia and Africa in the South, 

 and has thus made ocean way from the Cape to India. 

 But the Eastern side of Ptolemy's Indian Ocean remains 

 substantially unchanged. We still have India and Tapro- 

 bane in very much the mis-shapen condition in which 

 Ptolemy had left them ; though the map-maker, having 

 read Marco Polo, is able to add Socotra, and the islands 

 of Men and Women. We still have the huge southerly 

 prolongation of Eastern Asia. We still have Ptolemy's 

 town of Cattigara marked on its coast. But further on 

 to the South and to the West are the Indian lands which 

 de Conti had described as " situated in the second gulf 

 beyond the Indus." Here we find St. Thomas, which should 

 have been near Madras on the East Coast of India ! And, 



1 See map, p. 59. 



2 First translation of Ptolemy, 1409 or 1410. See Gallois' Les 

 geographes allemands de la Renaissance. 



8 See map, p. 57. 



