HISTORY OF DISCOVERY. 9 



maintained by learned men was found by sailors to be 

 entirely false. Nevertheless, the ancient opinion held 

 its ground, and would have lived on much longer but 

 for the general spread of knowledge in the west, based 

 on the accounts brought back from voyages of enter- 

 prise and by numerous missionaries. The Italians first, 

 and after them the Portuguese, navigated the west coast 

 of Africa, and were enabled by the help of the compass 

 to make more accurate outlines of the coast. As early as 

 the end of the thirteenth century, two Genoese vessels set 

 off with the object of discovering the passage to the 

 Indies round Africa, though they never returned home. 

 Thus the belief in the great Ptolemaic southern boundary 

 had been entirely given up by navigators, indeed, an 

 imaginary outline of Africa which came very near the 

 truth was actually drawn. But geographers and carto- 

 graphers found it impossible to entirely give up the old 

 delineations ; the German navigator, Martin Behaim, 

 even after the discovery of the southern extremity of 

 Africa in 1487 by Bartholomew Diaz, distorted the out- 

 lines on his celebrated globe in the year 1492. He gave 

 the coast a markedly eastern direction, and by means of 

 a huge repetition of the island of Zanzibar in addition 

 to Madagascar brought the meridian out to that of the 

 mouth of the Ganges. 



One might suppose that the complete circumnaviga- 

 tion of Africa by Vasco da Gama would have proved the 

 non-existence of the fabulous great southern land, and 

 driven the idea from the minds and charts of contem- 

 poraries. On the contrary, however, the great Austral 

 country reappeared after a few decades, more fantastic 

 and extensive than ever. Of course, it did not correspond 

 to the reports of seamen, but depended on the arbitrary 

 exposition of isolated facts and observations by means 

 of geography and cartography. Land, perhaps even 

 only ice, was linked and set down together to form 



