Page:Legendaryislands00babcuoft.djvu/174

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I 5 6 ANTILLIA AND THE ANTILLES omissions were thought to do the least harm. Because of the island's position on the very edge of the skin, its outline, although unmistakable, is faint and in a few decades of exposure of the orig- inal might have vanished altogether. This raises the question whether certain outlines, now missing but plainly called for, on other maps of the same period, have not met with the same fate. Probably this has happened. Antilia spelled thus is plain in name and outline; so is the island next above it, spelled Saluaega. The "I" is omitted from I in Mar, as was often done in like cases, and the words "in Mar" are uncertain, but seem as above. The island figure is correctly given by Beccario's standard, and in gen- eral the representation of the island series is almost exactly the same. Perhaps the most discernible difference is a very slight northwestern trend given to Antillia, instead of the equally slight northeastern inclination in Beccario's case. THE BIANCO MAP OF 1436 The Bianco map of I436 22 (Fig. 25) was the first of the Antillia maps to attract attention in quite modern times but has suffered far worse than Roselli's in the matter of limitation. The border of the material cuts off all but Antillia and the lower end of Salvagio, to which Bianco has given the strange name of La Man (or Mao) Satanaxio, generally translated "The Hand of Satan" but believed by Nordenskiold to be rather a corruption of a saint's name, perhaps that of St. Anastasio. It remains a mystery, though one hypothesis connects it with a grisly Far Eastern tale of a demon hand. The initial "S" is all that Satanaxio has in common with the names for this island on the other maps that show it; and, as nearly all of these present very slight changes from Salvagio, easily to be accounted for by carelessness or errors in copying, the latter name is fairly to be regarded as the legitimate one, while Satanaxio remains unique and grimly fanciful, perhaps to be explained another day. The most that can be said for its generally accepted meaning is that it corrobo- 22 A. E. Nordenskiold, Periplus, PL 20. Cf. also Kretschmer, atlas, PI. 4, map 2.