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Updated: May 24, 2025
It is indeed proven that on the west side India begins beyond the Ganges, and ends on the east side. It is not without cause that cosmographers have left the boundaries of Ganges India undetermined. There are not wanting those among them who think that the coasts of Spain do not lie very distant from the shores of India. The natives called this country Cuba.
According to ancient and modern cosmographers, that part of the world called Asia has adjacent to it a multitude of greater and lesser islands, inhabited by various nations and peoples, and as rich in precious stones, gold, silver, and other minerals, as they abound in fruit and grain, flocks, and animals.
She will find riches on the surface, in shallow diggings; she will find them in the sun-dried banks of rivers; it will suffice to merely sift the earth. Pearls will be gathered with little effort. Cosmographers unanimously recognise that venerable antiquity received no such benefit from nature, because never before did man, starting from the known world, penetrate to those unknown regions.
I have wished, most illustrious Prince, to give you these details about the parrots; and although the opinion of Columbus seems to be contradictory to the theories of the ancients concerning the size of the globe and its circumnavigation, the birds and many other objects brought thence seem to indicate that these islands do belong, be it by proximity or by their products, to India; particularly when one recalls what Aristotle, at the end of his treatise De Cælo et Mundo, and Seneca, and other learned cosmographers have always affirmed, that India was only separated from the west coast of Spain by a very small expanse of sea.
His house, whereever he happened for the time to be, was the hospitable meeting-place where statesmen, noblemen, foreign envoys, great ecclesiastics, and papal legates came together with navigators and conquerors, cosmographers, colonial officials, and returning explorers from antipodal regions Spain's empire builders.
To assist his judgment, he again went over the cosmographers which he had formerly studied, and considered maturely the astronomical reasons which corroborated this new opinion. He carefully weighed likewise the information and opinions on this subject of all with whom he conversed, particularly sailors.
The second argument concludeth nothing. Ptolemy knew not what was above 16 degrees south beyond the equinoctial line, he was ignorant of all passages northward from the elevation of 63 degrees, he knew no ocean sea beyond Asia, yet have the Portuguese trended the Cape of Good Hope at the south point of Africa, and travelled to Japan, an island in the east ocean, between Asia and America; our merchants in the time of King Edward the Sixth discovered the Moscovian passage farther north than Thule, and showed Greenland not to be continent with Lapland and Norway: the like our north-western travellers have done, declaring by their navigation that way the ignorance of all cosmographers that either do join Greenland with America, or continue the West Indies with that frosty region under the North Pole.
Men's minds were drawn into this special channel; and it remained for Christopher Columbus first to form a sound theory out of the conflicting views of the cosmographers, and finally to carry out that theory with the boldness and resolution which have made his name one of those beacon-fires which carry on from period to period the tidings of the world's great history through successive ages.
It was believed by the Dutch cosmographers that some ten thousand miles of voyaging might be saved, could the passage to what was then called the kingdoms of Cathay be effected by way of the north. It must be remembered that there were no maps of the unknown regions lying beyond the northern headlands of Sweden.
Ferdinand and Isabella seem not to have taken the extremely unfavourable view of the matter entertained by the junta of cosmographers, or at least to have been willing to dismiss Columbus gently, for they merely said that, with the wars at present on their hands, and especially that of Granada, they could not undertake any new expenses, but when that war was ended, they would examine his plan more carefully.
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