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Updated: May 21, 2025


According to my map, Ki-ngan-foo should be about fifty miles south of Kan-tchou-foo, so that I ought to have reached there by noon to-day. All due allowance, however, must be made for the map-makers in mapping out a country where their opportunities for accuracy must have been of the meagerest kind.

The maritime ones are adorned with ships in full sail, and bold sea-monsters with curly tails; the inland ones are speckled with trees and spires and hillocks. In spite of these old-fashioned oddities, the maps are remarkably accurate. They are signed by John Norden and William Kip, the master map-makers of that reign.

For the first time the map told her where she was, and possibly how she had arrived there. Straight down to that dot from the blue space of the ocean far to the north the map-makers had trailed the course of the Coppermine River. Celie gave an excited little cry and caught Philip's arm, stopping him short in his explanation of the human wailings in the storm.

And some of the map-makers in France, when they had to name the new lands in the West that they drew on their maps the lands that were not the Indies, nor China, nor Japan called them after the man who had told them so much about them Americus Vespucius. And so it is that to-day you live in America and not in Columbia, as so many people have thought this western world of ours should be named.

It must be confessed that the historians and the map-makers did not always attach the importance that Smith did to the battles in which he was conspicuous, and we do not find the Land of Zarkam or the city of Regall in the contemporary chronicles or atlases. But the region is sufficiently identified.

Now that some of those narratives have been found, it is easy to identify the present day Solomon Islands with the group discovered by the Spaniards; most of the latitudes in the old chart that I give here, agree with those given by Herrera, the Spanish historian, which shows that if they have been thrown out of position, as they are on some old charts, it is through the fault of the map-makers.

In this short chapter, before leaving the subject of the old manuscript maps of Australia, and devoting the remaining pages of my book to actual voyages of discovery, I shall refer once more to the importance of the Lusitano-Spanish planispheres of the Dieppese school of cartography* because most of those documents, becoming the property of French map-makers, were used in various endeavours which were made to induce European sovereigns to colonize the Great South Land.

This river, they told us, parted Europe from Asia, though our map-makers, as I am told, do not agree to it; however, it is certainly the eastern boundary of the ancient Siberia, which now makes a province only of the vast Muscovite empire, but is itself equal in bigness to the whole empire of Germany.

The first map-makers who used it secured their information indirectly, we may suppose, from the Cabot voyages and the fishermen who frequented the coast. They marked it as an island lying in the 'Bay of the Bretons, which had come to be the name for the open mouth of the Gulf of St Lawrence. Gomez, however, used the name for Cape Breton island.

Map-makers, having no certain data concerning this vast uncharted area, commonly sprawled across the extremity of the southern hemisphere a purely fanciful outline of imaginary land. Terra Australis was the playground of the cartographers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They seemed to abhor blank spaces.

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