BY JAMES E. M'cLYMONT, M.A. 45- 



shall find that the cartographers wei'e right or wrong in their 

 location of the Begio Psittacorum, according as they took the 

 one or the other of these texts for their guide. 



The critical method of Kant has taught us moderns 

 to place no faith in second-hand testimony, or in reason- 

 ings based upon plausible conjecture to which antiquity 

 and authority have added a specious prestige. But in the 

 days of the Novus Orhis, and even down to the confines of our 

 own age, a conjectural theorising held the place which 

 criticism now holds. The theory which taught the existence of 

 an antipodal continent as necessary, in order to maintain the 

 globe in a condition of counterpoise, is to be met with in a 

 multitude of geographical treatises, in maps, and even, at a 

 later period, in actual expeditions undertaken with the object 

 of discovering the antipodal world — a striking instance of 

 the influence of the philosophic upon the practical mind. 

 When any fresh discovery was made, this favourite theory 

 and the innate love of systematisation combined to induce 

 geographers of the Ptolemaic school to identify the new land 

 of fact with the old land of phantasy, and so a southern 

 continent was pieced together out of the figments of men's 

 brains and" the inadequately recorded details of actual 

 voyage. The compiler of the Novus Orhis, Jans Huttich, 

 was, like his contemporaries, predisposed to adjust any 

 fresh discoveries to the current misconceptions regarding the 

 configuration of the globe and the distribution of land and 

 water. 



The Paesi, one of the first, if not actually the first 

 collection of voyages compiled in modern times, was the 

 work of Montalboddo Fracan, and was first published in 

 Yicenza in 1507, and in Latin and German versions in 1508. 

 The passage referring to the discovery of the Begio Psittacorum 

 is thus worded in the Italian version : — " Di sopra dal capo 

 d Boasperaza uerso garbi hano scopto tma terra noua la 

 chiamao d li Papaga." The words " uerso garbi " are those 

 over which the translator has stumbled. They mean 

 "towards the south-west." The G-erman version has " gege 

 nidergage auff d' seite " — " towards the side of the west." The 

 passage will run thus : — " Above the Cape of Good Hope 

 they discovered a new land towards the south-west, which 

 they called the Land of Parrots." With this indication of 

 Cabral's landfall the above cited inscriptions of Schoner and 

 Apianus agree, as well as the independent accounts given in 

 Eamusio (i., 121), and in the letter of Emanuel to the Spanish 

 sovereigns. (E"avarrete, Viages y descuhrimientos iii., 94-) 

 Listead of lying to the east of the route to India the Begio 

 Psittacorum actually lay to the west of it, — was in fact the 

 Vera Cruz of Cabral, which appears on a map by Johan 

 Euysch in a Ptolemy published in Eome in 1508 — " TJniver- 



