SUMMARY OF RESULTS. 
33 
Notwithstanding their frequent voyages in Indian seas, many of the Arabs continued Ueogkaphk 
to hold the erroneous idea enunciated by Ptolemy regarding the morphology of that a,^^ N 8 °* 
ocean. That celebrated geographer, as we have seen, regarded the eastern coast of Africa 
as advancing towards the east beyond the peninsula of Malacca to the south of China, 
instead of taking a southern trend from the promontory of Rhaptum, near Zanzibar. 
Many Arabs, then, looked on the Indian Ocean as a Mediterranean — an enclosed sea ; 
some of them even regarded the Indus and the Nile as branches of the same river. 
Cape Guardafui did not exist with them ; from that point the African land turned to the 
east, the coast of Zanzibar was placed opposite the Indus, that of Sofala faced Ceylon, 
and Madagascar approached so closely to the islands of the Straits of Sunda as to 
coalesce with J ava or Sumatra. Such are the features presented by the Indian Ocean 
on the planisphere of Edrisi, the best known of oriental geographers, constructed for 
Roger of Sicily in 1154. This false idea was perpetuated for a very long time among 
the Christian nations of the Middle Ages. 
While Greek theory continued to hamper the Arabs, some writers in the early part 
of the ninth century, for instance Ibn-al-Faklh, held just views. 1 The Indian Ocean 
was sometimes regarded as communicating with the all-encircling ocean by a strait in 
the extreme east, and sometimes widely continuous with the encircling ocean. Nearly 
all writers agree that there is a great sea to the east of Asia, Arab merchants having 
traded as far as Japan and the Corea. Yacut states that the *Sea of Zanzibar and the 
Indian Ocean are identical, and communicate with the encircling ocean. Travellers had 
told him that they had gone so far to the south that the pole star and great bear were 
lost to sight, and the south pole and canopus were high in the heavens. All the seas, 
according to Yacut, except the Caspian, communicate with the encircling ocean which 
nature, will probably be no more ; and it will be then that mankind shall rea]> the benefit of the labours of such 
learned men as Friar Bacon, and do justice to that industry and intelligence for which he and they now meet with no 
other return than obloquy and reproach” (see Major, Prince Henry the Navigator , pp. 58, 59). Vivien de St. Martin 
(op. cit., pj. 247) says it is quite indisputable that the Arabs received from the Chinese the knowledge of the compass. 
He adds : — “ It was through the Arabs that it arrived among the sailors of the Mediterranean at the time of the 
second crusade, although there is a want of precise information on the subject.” Peschel (op. cit., p. 205) is r ot so 
affirmative with respect to this matter ; he says : — “ That the magnet arrived in Europe from China directly or by the 
hands of the Arabs has never been thoroughly established.” To demonstrate that the Arabs had been the intermedi- 
aries, it has been usual to found upon the fact that Albertus Magnus (De Mineralibus, lib. ii. tract iii. cap. 6 : Lugd. 
1651, tom. ii. fol. 243), employs the words Aphron and Zoron to designate the south and the north, and that these 
words are of Arabic origin. Peschel, relying on the authority of Reinaud (Aboulfeda, p. ccii.) and of Santarein (Hist, de 
la Co3mographie, tom. i. p. 295), holds that these expressions are borrowed from the Hebrew (see S. Ruge, Gescliichte 
des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, Berlin, 1881, p. 39). The magnet may possibly have been a Norman discovery. The 
Italian bussola and French boussole come, it has been said, from the Flemish boxal, hence the expression to box the 
compass. Flavio Giogo, of Amalfi, in 1307, probably first swung the compass on a pivot. The compass is mentioned 
as early as 1100 a.d. (see Hallam, Middle Ages, vol. iii. p. 394). Alexander Neckham, an English writer of the 
twelfth century, describes the compass carried by ships (see Nature, vol. xiv. pp. 147-148, 1876; Lindsay, Ii: r-. 
of Merchant Shipping and Ancient Commerce, vol. i. pp, xlii., xliii.). 
1 According to Ibn-al-Faklh (ca. a.d. 900), there are four seas, — (1) the Great Sea, which extends from Maghri : to Kol- 
zom (Suez) and to the Wak-wak Islands of China (Japan) ; (2) the Mediterranean, — the Western or Roman Sea ; (3) 
the Caspian ; (4) the unnavigated sea of Thule, between Riunia and Khawarezm (Ibn-al-Faklh, Leyden, 1885, p. 7 
(summary of results chall. exp. — 1894.) 
;al 
T UK 
