100 THE DISCOVERY OF AUSTRALIA 



journalist who interviewed them on their return, " there was 

 no continent, but only islands, as they occasionally heard 

 on that side the reverberation and roar of the sea at a 

 more distant part of the coast " ; surely a remarkably 

 bad argument ! If the geographers had believed the 

 travellers they would have had to abandon Schoner's 

 theory that a great Southern Continent extended from 

 the South side of the straits " somewhat as Africa extended 

 from the South side of the straits of Gibraltar." And, 

 as we have already seen, many map makers were sceptic 

 or agnostic", made their Southern world not continental 

 but oceanic, pointed out that no lands had been discovered, 

 and declined to fill their maps with vain imaginations. 



But other cosmographers remained unconvinced by 

 the argument of the travellers. Is the " reverberation 

 and roar of the sea " never heard save on islands ? What 

 the seamen had heard could easily be accounted for by 

 the existence of some deep inlet. Tierra del Fuego, they 

 were convinced, was no island, but the tip of the continent 

 of the South ; the nature of which could be fully explained 

 by those who had studied the map of Ptolemy, had read 

 Marco Polo and Varthema, and were acquainted with the 

 laws of physical science. And when they made their maps 

 of the South they gave bold expression to this conviction. 

 Finaeus Let us consider a map of this sort made by a Frenchman, 



(u 53I \_.L ^ Orontius Finseus in 1531. l Like a good orthodox 



thought that . . TU. i J 



Peru was geographer he is working on his Ptolemy, and is seeking 



Cattigara- to k rmg him up to date. Magellan has bored a hole into 

 land. 



the extreme South-East corner of Ptolemy's land-locked 



Indian Sea. Where then are we now ? The country 

 to the North, recently discovered and conquered by Pizarro 

 and his friends, is evidently Ptolemy's Southward exten- 

 sion of Eastern Asia. So Finseus confidently marks 

 Ptolemy's Cattigara as a seaport of Peru. Following 

 Ptolemy's map Northward, one comes to Sinae (China) 

 or Cathay, and this is evidently the country, part of which 

 Cortez has recently conquered under the name of Mexico ; 

 so Finaeus puts down Pekin (Cambaluc) in the same land 

 1 See map, p. 101. Cf. Fiske's Discovery of America, vol. ii. p. 123. 



