72 THE DISCOVERY OF AUSTRALIA 



comparatively easy. Columbus was confident that he had 

 discovered the lands made familiar by Marco Polo and his 

 successors Cipango, Cathay, India, Malacca, and the 

 seven thousand seven hundred and forty islands ! But 

 what was this great land to the South ? Was it Ptolemy's 

 Cattigara-land, the hitherto unknown East coast of the 

 huge southerly extension of Eastern Asia ? Or was it 

 Marco Polo's Locac, the great continent far South of Java, 

 rich in gold, in spices, in elephants ? Or was it the mys- 

 terious continent of the South, imagined by ancient cosmo- 

 graphers, and by medieval scholars, the continent which 

 Dante had described, existing under the Southern Cross, 

 and culminating in the heights of the Terrestrial Paradise ? 

 Most likely all these guesses were right. No wonder there 

 was excitement in the hearts of voyagers. They were to 

 know all that Ptolemy had known, and more ! And any 

 journey might end in the Garden of Eden. 

 Amerigo Gradually the successors of Columbus groped their way 



^| ai " 1 1 ed , , southward down the unknown coast, and in 1502 Amerigo 

 that he had J 



proved this. Vespucci, Florentine " Pilot " on a Portuguese ship, traced 

 it through the tropics to Lat. 35 S. "He had proved the 

 existence of a huge continent of the South, hitherto un- 

 visited either by the ancients or by recent travellers " a 

 land which thy charts do not indicate, O Ptolemy ! " boasted 

 a poetical admirer of Amerigo. " It is proper," wrote 

 Amerigo himself to a friend, " to call these lands a new 

 world. Since among our ancestors there was no knowledge 

 of them, and to all who hear of the affair it is most novel. 

 For it transcends the ideas of the ancients, since most of 

 them (i.e. the medieval scholars) say that beyond the 

 equator to the South there is no continent, but only the sea 

 which they call Atlantic, and if any of them asserted the 

 existence of a continent there they found reason for refusing 

 to consider it a habitable country. But this last voyage 

 of mine has proved that this opinion of theirs was erroneous, 

 and in every way contrary to the facts, since in those 

 southern regions I have found a continent more thickly 

 inhabited by peoples and animals than our Europe 

 or Asia or Africa, and moreover a climate more 



