108 THE DISCOVERY OF AUSTRALIA 







Sumatra, and had therefore no place Southward from Java ; 

 so he removed the island from the map, and at the same 

 time greatly curtailed the gulf which had been made to 

 contain it ; it dwindles not because any discovery has been 

 made, but because Marco Polo has been better understood. 1 

 md Siam in Passing to the bulging promontory which forms the 

 ivest laCG C [ Western side of the gulf, and which, if it were anything 

 \ustralia. real, would be the coast of West Australia, we still find 

 ourselves in a country which owes its names, if not its 

 existence, to the misunderstood talk of Marco Polo. On 

 it we read : " Beach, an auriferous province, which few 

 foreigners approach on account of the inhumanity of its 

 people." We are, of course, tempted to see a reference 

 to the gold mines of West Australia, and the ferocious 

 manners of the blackfellows on the North-Western coast. 

 But Beach was an earlier printer's error for Locac : 2 

 and Locac was a region which Marco Polo described 

 as being South of Cochin China, but which his editor 

 believed that he had described as being South of Java. 

 The gold mines and the inhumane people were not in West 

 Australia but in Siam or Cambodia. 



Below Beach in Mercator's map we find the inscrip- 

 tion, " Maletur, a kingdom in which is very great plenty 

 of spices." Maletur is Marco Polo's kingdom of Malaiur, 

 or Kingdom of Malays, which existed at the South-East 

 end of the Malay Peninsula. Then we have the " Kingdom 

 of Lucach," another rendering of Locac. It is evidently 

 a matter of 'great satisfaction to Mercator that his theory 

 of the physical necessity for a great and weighty Southern 



1 Plancius's map is printed in Hakluyt, vol. ix. See map, p. 107. 



2 " In the Basle edition of Marco Polo in 1532, the printer unluckily 

 altered the L into a B, and the first C into an E, so that Locach became 

 Boeach. This was afterwards shortened into Beach. . . . As, however, 

 some editions of Marco Polo retained the word Locach and others 

 Beach, both names came to be copied on to maps, and, the point of 

 departure being Java, the map-makers following the course indicated 

 in Marco Polo, laid these countries down as forming part of the Great 

 Southern Land, which was supposed to occupy the entire South part 

 of the globe " (Major's Prince Henry the Navigator, Appendix, p. 307 ; 

 quoted by Collingridge, p. 199). On Behaim's globe Locach became 

 Coachs. 



