94 THE DISCOVERY OF AUSTRALIA 



" the Land of Parrots," and after rounding the Cape of 

 Good Hope, traverses the South Atlantic and joins the 

 Eastern coast of Tierra del Fuego. 



But these At first sight one would be tempted to say that the man 



sent S not PrC w ^ ^ rew tms ma P mu t have had some knowledge of the 



knowledge outline of the Northern coast of Australia. But closer 



speculation, inspection of the map, and especially of certain inscriptions, 



which I will discuss later, would stir suspicion. And when 



one studies the map in connection with other maps of the 



same series, and when one considers the explanations 



offered by the map-makers, suspicion grows into certainty ; 



certainty that Mercator's Austral continent was the creation 



of Mercator's ingenious imagination, and that he had no 



knowledge whatever of Australia. 



When geographers of the school of which Mercator was 

 the most distinguished representative sat down to make 

 their maps, they had certain fixed ideas in mind which deter- 

 mined their drawing of those parts of the world of which 

 they had no authentic knowledge. 



They are In the first place, they had in mind the conceptions of 



based on ^ Q anc j en t geographers, and especially of Pomponius Mela 



dence in the and of Claudius Ptolemy. It is hardly possible, we are told, 



g ^| r ^P hy d to exaggerate the influence of " the despotic sway " of 



Ptolemy, Ptolemy. The map of the cosmographer of the school of 



Mercator was a map of Ptolemy cautiously brought up to 



date. Now, according to Ptolemy, as we remember, the 



Indian Ocean was a land-locked Ocean. And the southern 



coast of this Ocean was the great " Unknown Land " of the 



Southern temperate zone, which, so ancient geographers 



agreed, certainly existed in one form or another. The 



rnap-maker of this school, then, was disposed to take 



Ptolemy's Unknown Land of the South as basis of an 



Austral continent. He perceived, it is true, that Ptolemy 



had not known the whole truth. The Portuguese had 



knocked a big hole in the Western corner of his Unknown 



Land. And Magellan had bored a small hole in the eastern 



corner. But otherwise Ptolemy's authority stood firm. 



There seemed no reason to disbelieve in the rest of his 



continent of the South. He had been in error in thinking 



