102 



THE DISCOVERY OF AUSTRALIA 



Finaeus's 

 conception 

 of Terra 

 A ustralis. 



The travels 

 of Patala, 



as Mexico, about a thousand miles to the North-West. 

 In short, what recent voyages have done is to supply 

 Ptolemy's Asia with a badly needed Eastern coast. Thus, 

 e.g., Newfoundland (Baccalar) is obviously a promontory 

 of Siberia. 



So far, Finaeus, no doubt, felt that he was treading 

 on firm ground. In constructing the map of Eastern 

 Asia he was simply adding to the map of Ptolemy the un- 

 doubted discoveries of Spaniards and Portuguese. But 

 what was one to say about the Southern side of the Indian 

 Ocean, the great sweep of " Unknown Land " which, in 

 Ptolemy's map, linked Asia to Africa. Why not, in general, 

 leave it as Ptolemy had left it, a great sweep of unknown 

 land ? Diaz and Gama had knocked a hole in it in the 

 South-West corner, and now Magellan had knocked another 

 hole in it in the South-East corner ; but, for the rest, no 

 one had proved that Ptolemy was wrong. On the contrary, 

 Magellan had seen land to the South that was, no doubt, 

 a promontory of the unknown continent. That continent 

 accordingly Finseus will draw upon his map, and in order 

 to be strictly honest he will write upon it " Austral Land 

 recently discovered but not yet fully known." But as, 

 in fact, no one knew anything whatever about it, he was 

 gloriously free to make it look pretty. So he put in gulfs 

 and creeks and headlands and rivers with a profuse detail 

 that would seem to suggest that he had returned from 

 a voyage of scientific survey with a portfolio full of charts. 

 In reality the fulness of detail is proof, if proof were needed, 

 of completeness of ignorance. The whole is purely the 

 work of the artistic imagination. 



There are, however, certain features of the continent 

 that deserve our attention. Its coast line, on the Indian 

 Ocean, is broken into two huge bulges, separated by a 

 great gulf in a direction slightly East of the South of 

 Java, in a position that seems to correspond to the break 

 in the ring of Schoner's " Lower Brazil." We shall find 

 this gulf of interest when we return to the study of 

 Mercator's map of 1569. On the Eastern of the two 

 bulges, which is separated from South America by the 



