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very great and innumerable islands, rich in gold and pearls and in other wealth, and now, quite lately, have they discovered the vast Mediterranean city, Tenostica^[1] situated in a lake, like Venice. About this city Peter Martyr, an author more careful about his facts than the elegance of his style, has written many wonderful, and yet true, things. But the Portuguese, passing southwards by the shores of the Hesperides, and of the ichthyophagous Æthiopians, and crossing the equinoctial line and the Tropic of Capricorn, sailed eastward, and discovered many great and unknown islands, and afterwards the sources of the Nile and the land of the Troglodytæ. Thence they sailed past the Arabian and Persian Gulfs to the shores of India, within the Ganges, where there is now the mighty emporium and kingdom of Calicut. Thence they sailed to Taprobanes, which they now call Zamatara. For there is now no island which either can be, or can be supposed to be, Taprobanes, in the position in which Ptolemy, Pliny, and the other cosmographers placed it. Going thence, they arrived at the Golden Chersonesus, where now is situated that most famous city of Malacca, the greatest emporium of the East. After this they entered the Great Gulf,^[2] which reaches as far as the country of the Sinæ, which they now call Schinæ, where they found a white and tolerably civilised people, like our Germans. They believe that the Seres and the Asiatic Scythians extend as far as there. And though there was a certain rumour afloat that the Portuguese had progressed so far to the east as to cross their own limits and enter the territory of the Spaniards, and that Malacca and the Great Bay were within our limits, still all these things were said rather than believed, until four years ago Ferdinand Magellan, a distinguished Portuguese, who, for many years had explored the coasts of the whole of the East as Admiral, took a great hatred to his king, whom he complained of as being most

1. "Tenistitan," Ramusio.
2. Gulf of Siam.