Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. | Page 8

century A.D.,
was a geography, based not on knowledge, but on ideas of symmetry. It
was a scheme fit for the Arabian Nights.
And how did Ptolemy lend himself to this?

His chief mistakes were only two;--but they were mistakes from which
at any rate Strabo and most of the Greek geographers are free. He made
the Indian Ocean an inland sea, and he filled up the Southern
Hemisphere with Africa, or the unknown Antarctic land in which he
extended Africa.[8] The Dark Continent, in his map, ran out on the one
side to the south-east of China, and on the other to the indefinite west,
though there was here no hint of America or an Atlantic continent. It
was a triumph of learned imagination over humdrum research. Science
under Hadrian was ambitious to have its world settled and known; it
was not yet settled or fully known; and so a great student constructed a
mélange of fact and fancy mainly based on a guess-work of imaginary
astronomical reckonings. On the far east, Ptolemy joined China and
Africa; and on this imaginary western coast, fronting Malacca and
Further India, he placed various gratuitous towns and rivers. Coming to
smaller matters, he cut away the whole of the Indian peninsula proper,
though preserving the Further or "Golden" Chersonesus of the Malays,
and he enlarged Taprobane, or Ceylon, to double the size of Asia Minor.
Thus the southern coast of Asia from Arabia to the Ganges ran almost
due east, with a strait of sea coming through the modern Carnatic,
between the continent and the Great Spice Island, which included most
of the Deccan. The Persian Gulf, much greater on this map than the
Black Sea, was made equal in length and breadth; the shape of the
Caspian was, so to say, turned inside out and its length given as from
east to west, instead of from north to south; while the coast line, even
of the familiar Euxine, Ægean, and Southern Mediterranean, was
anything but true. Scandinavia was an island smaller than Ireland;
Scotland represented a great eastern bend of Britain, with the Shetlands
and Färoes (Thule) lying a short distance to the north, but on the
left-hand side of the great island. The Sea of Azov, hardly inferior to
the Euxine, stretched north half way across Russia. All Central Africa
and the great Southern or Antarctic continent was described as pathless
desert--"a land uninhabitable from the heat"; and the sources of the Nile
were accounted for by the marshes and Mountains of the Moon.
[Footnote 8: Rejecting the old idea of an encircling ocean as the girdle
or limit of the known world, and replacing it with a new fancy of
unbounded continent (on all sides except the north-west)--a fancy

which the vast extension of Roman Dominion under the Empire may
have fostered.]
Thus all the problems of ancient geography were explained: where
Ptolemy's knowledge failed him altogether, no Western of that time had
ever been, or was likely to go. The whole realised and unrealised world
was described with such clearness and consistency, men thought, that
what was lacking in Aristotle was now supplied.
Yet it is worth while observing how, centuries before Ptolemy, in the
ages nearer to Aristotle himself, the geography of Eratosthenes and
Strabo, by a more balanced use of knowledge and by a greater restraint
of fancy, had composed a far more reliable chart.[9]
[Footnote 9: In using the expressions "Chart," or "Map" of Strabo's
description (c. A.D. 20), it is not meant to imply that Strabo himself left
more than a written description from which a plan was afterwards
prepared: "The world according to Strabo." The same applies to
Eratosthenes (c. B.C. 200) and all pre-Ptolemaic Greek geographers.
Ptolemy's Atlas, probably, and the Peutinger Table, more certainly, are
maps really drawn by ancient designers; but these are the only ones that
have survived from a much larger number.]
This earlier and discredited map avoided all the more serious
perversions of Ptolemy. Africa was cut off at the limit of actual
knowledge, about Cape Non on the west and Cape Guardafui on the
east; and the "Cinnamon-bearing Coast," between these points, was
fringed by the Mountains of Æthiopia, where the Nile rose. This was
the theory which revived on the decline of the Ptolemaic, and which
encouraged the Portuguese sailors with hopes of a quick approach to
India round Africa, as the great eastern bend of the Guinea coast
seemed to suggest. Further, on this pre-Ptolemaic map the Southern
Ocean was left untouched by a supposed Southern Continent, and
except for an undue shrinkage of the Old World in general as an island
in the midst of the vast surrounding ocean, a reliable description of
Western Asia and Central Europe and North Africa was in the hands