9 6 



THE DISCOVERY OF AUSTRALIA 



(3) the 

 misunder- 

 stood state- 

 ments of 

 Marco Folo 

 and 

 Varthema. 



How the 

 Magellamcan 

 continent 

 was thought 



In the third place, the sixteenth-century map-maker had 

 in mind certain passages from the travel books of Marco 

 Polo and his successors. He remembered that Marco Polo 

 had been understood 1 to say that some 1200 miles 

 (750 miles according to another text) South of Java "you 

 reach an extensive and rich province which forms a part of 

 the main land, and is named Locac," a word that was some- 

 times mis-printed Beach : a province in which were found 

 elephants, and brazil wood, and gold in incredible quantity, 

 but which was " little visited on account of the inhumanity 

 of its inhabitants." He remembered that Marco Polo had 

 also been understood to say that, still further Southward, "so 

 far to the Southward as to render the North Star invisible," 

 " you reach the island of Java the Lesser not less than 

 2,000 miles in circuit," an island rich in spices which 

 the traveller had visited and explored, having been detained 

 there for five months by contrary winds, while on his 

 way from China to India. And he remembered that 

 these statements had been confirmed by the story told 

 by the skipper to Ludovico Varthema about races of men 

 who lived to the South of Java, and who navigated their 

 ships not by the North Star but by the Southern Cross. 



Now let us observe in a little detail how the sixteenth- 

 century geographer, who had these three fixed ideas in 

 j^g min^ interpreted the new discoveries. 



When Amerigo Vespucci in 1502 brought home the 

 exciting news, which lost nothing in the telling, that 



inherently denser portions of the earth's outer shell or crust under 

 gravitational attraction. 



Mercator's hypothesis contains the implicit assumption that the 

 earth is either quite homogeneous in structure, or is built up of a series 

 of concentric shells each of which is homogeneous ; and it is now known 

 that this is not the case. 



Although Mercator's hypothesis has not stood the test of time, its 

 fruitful results afford a most excellent illustration of the value of 

 imagination in stimulating research. It has so often been the case 

 that in the search for one truth the light of genius has revealed many 

 others." 



1 It was, as we have seen, a misunderstanding. Marco Polo had 

 spoken of lands to the South not of Java but of Cochin-China. Locac 

 was not Australia but Siam. Java Minor was not Groote Eyland but 

 Sumatra. See Yule's Marco Polo and Beazley's Dawn of Modern 

 Geography. 



