WAS AUSTRALIA KNOWN ? 105 



with better knowledge of the nature of the thoughts Mercator's 

 which it is likely to express. His mind is possessed by s P eculatlons - 

 certain fixed ideas, (i) Tierra del Fuego is part of. an 

 Austral continent. (2) This continent must be a very 

 big and heavy one, for it has to add much needed weight 

 to the scale which holds the comparatively meagre con- 

 tinents of the South in order that they may hold their 

 own against their bulky sisters of the North. (3) It 

 includes the lands South of Java of which Marco Polo 

 and Varthema had told. 



He starts, then, with the known land of Tierra del Fuego, He spun a 

 which he draws with inlets and rivers, which are intended, c 

 one may guess, to explain the reverberating roar of the out of 



sea which Magellan's seamen had heard, and which had ' 



seemed to them to suggest the erroneous conclusion that 

 Tierra del Fuego was an island. Then he continues the 

 coastline of Tierra del Fuego on a North-Westerly curve that 

 touches, or all but touches, New Guinea. More honest or 

 less artistic than Finseus, he leaves the unknown coastline 

 undecorated. But he boldly writes across the whole 

 continent the monstrous statement that Magellan was 

 its discoverer ! The truth was that the continent was 

 not Magellanican but Mercatorian, and that of its many 

 thousand miles Magellan had seen about three hundred 

 and twenty. 



The continent, then, which Magellan had discovered He knew 

 stretches away from Tierra del Fuego to New Guinea. * 2' st "j 1 

 The Northern coast of New Guinea is marked by geo- New^Guinea, 

 graphic features x and by names ; and it seems clear that ^ a t itmfght 

 Mercator got his information from Spanish or Portuguese be an island. 

 narratives of voyages. 1 But the other coasts are given 

 in unbroken and nameless outline, that seems to express 

 ignorance, and he confesses that he does not even know 

 whether New Guinea is an island. It may be a hitherto 

 unknown part, he says, of the Austral continent. Now 

 it seems curious that Mercator, who had without question 



1 He makes the interesting though incorrect suggestion that New 

 Guinea may be the Labadii Insula which Ptolemy marked in the S.E. 

 corner of his Indian Ocean, and which probably was Sumatra. 



