Despite slightly differing nuances, and what looks like a tenfold exaggeration for distances, all the translations converge on two very clear and really quite startling messages:
Ceylon was believed by Marco Polo to have been one-third larger in the past than it had become by his day – with extensive lands to the north of the present island said to have been ‘submerged under the sea’. In the process its circumference was reduced in size from 3600 units of measurement to 2400 units of measurement, i.e. by one-third.
Maps were in use amongst mariners in the Indian Ocean when Marco Polo was there – either mappamundi or mariners’ charts depending on the translation – which continued to show the one-third larger, antediluvian Ceylon.
A reduction by one-third
On the first of the two points above – the one-third reduction in the size of Sri Lanka by flooding – we cannot deny, having studied the inundation history of south India and Sri Lanka in earlier chapters,13 that the tradition which Marco Polo here preserves and passes down to us is essentially correct when set within the time-frame of the end of the last Ice Age.
Since approximately 7700–6900 years ago, when the last remnants of its land-bridge to south India were inundated, Glenn Milne’s maps suggest that there have been no significant changes in Ceylon’s size. Prior to 7700 years ago the picture is very different, and as we go back through 8900 years ago, 10,600 years ago, 12,400 years ago, and 13,500 years ago, we note a progressive enlargement of Sri Lanka, exclusively in the north around the land-bridge to south India, resulting from the lowered sea-level of those epochs.14 At its greatest extent the enlargement is of the order of one-third.
Polo’s quaint theory about how these former lands were lost through the action of the north wind is wrong. But he is completely right when he tells us that Sri Lanka was much larger ‘in old times’, right when he tells us that its land-loss took place in the north, right again when he tells us that the lost land was submerged beneath the sea, and right yet again in his information that approximately one-third of antediluvian Sri Lanka was lost in this way.
The question of how a Venetian traveller of the thirteenth century could have equipped himself with such esoteric facts of palaeogeography brings us to point two.
Where did Polo get his information from?
Polo himself tells us only that he had learned of the former extent of Ceylon from an ancient ‘Mappa-Mundi’ or ‘mariners’ chart’ that he had seen, and he seems to accept without demur the obvious implication that this chart must have originated before the epoch of inundation. As historian of cartography Thomas Suarez confirms, ‘Polo’s explanation of the size accorded Ceylon on the chart was that the chart’s geography originated at an earlier time before much of the island had been submerged.’15 This is quite an extraordinary and interesting explanation, in my view. However, Suarez does not pursue it. He also ignores Polo’s clear suggestion that the chart showing a formerly much larger Sri Lanka was actually in use by ‘mariners of those seas’, rejects Polo’s explanation for the out-of-date geography of the chart (namely that it had come down from antediluvian times), and rather dogmatically asserts his own theory that the ‘Mappa-Mundi’ or ‘mariners’ chart’ Polo is referring to must be a Ptolemaic world map.16
Suarez admits that Ptolemaic world maps were only in extremely limited circulation in Europe in Polo’s time and are most unlikely to have been known to him from any European source. But he is right also to point to the possibility that such maps could have been preserved amongst the Arabs trading in the Indian Ocean, and that Polo could thus have seen a Ptolemaic map – without knowing it to be ‘Ptolemaic’ or recognizing it as such – during his stay in Ceylon.17 Moreover, it is true that all Ptolemaic world maps show the very large island of Taprobane in approximately the place where Sri Lanka/Ceylon might be expected to be found. Thus, Suarez concludes that the chart referred to by Polo ‘followed the Ptolemaic model with its characteristic reversal of the relative proportions of Ceylon and India’.18
Return of the Tyrian sea-fish
Suarez’s logic is easy enough to follow: (1) Polo has been shown a Ptolemaic world map, probably preserved by Arab seafarers in the Indian Ocean,19 featuring the giant island of Taprobana, which he takes to be Ceylon; (2) confronted by the much smaller Ceylon of his own day he concludes that the map he has seen preserves an image of Ceylon made before large parts of it were submerged; (3) he is incorrect in this conclusion and his notion of a formerly enlarged Sri Lanka results only from his misunderstanding of a well-known error on all Ptolemaic maps.
Yet this is surely only one possible explanation for Polo’s ‘knowledge’ of obscure palaeogeographic facts – and one moreover that requires us to accept the supposedly firm identification that Suarez makes between Sri Lanka/Ceylon and Taprobana (an identification that is generally but by no means universally favoured by modern scholars and ancient cartographers).20
Another explanation for Polo’s apparent anachronistic knowledge might be that there is nothing to it at all and that he made the whole idea up, scoring a few correlations with post-glacial reality purely by coincidence.
Still another and by no means impossible explanation might be that Polo’s account was in some way informed by the flood traditions of Sri Lanka and south India, reported in previous chapters, that speak of the lost Tamil homeland of Kumari Kandam.
But as Polo does tell us quite explicitly that the source of his ancient geographical knowledge about Ceylon was ‘mariners’ charts’ (‘charts of the mariners of those seas’ or ‘Mappa-Mundi’) we should surely also consider another possibility. This is the suggestion first raised by A. E. Nordenskiold and discussed in chapter 21 that a genre of maps older than the Ptolemaic maps and attributed to Marinus of Tyre was in circulation amongst the Arabs at least as early as AD 955 (the date of a direct reference by the geographer Masudi, who, as the reader will recall, had ‘seen the maps of Marinus’ which ‘by far surpassed those of Ptolemy’).21 Nordenskiold argues that these ‘Tyrian sea-fish’ maps formed the prototype for the mysteriously accurate portolans of the Mediterranean region that seem to appear suddenly in the cartographic record in the late thirteenth century. But, as we’ve seen, the portolan genre was never confined to the Mediterranean region alone. The greatest number of surviving examples of portolans do depict the Mediterranean, it is true. But from very early on portolan world maps also appear. Though sometimes contaminated by Ptolemaic ‘inserts’ or ‘patches’ in sections of the globe for which, presumably, the cartographer had no portolan original at hand to copy from, these in their own way are as startlingly precocious as the Mediterranean portolans. To give just one example here, Piedro Vesconte’s world map of c.1321 shows Africa to be circumnavigable – in complete contradiction of the Ptolemaic tradition – more than one and a half centuries before the Portuguese finally circumnavigated it.
Isn’t it possible, therefore, that the chart Polo saw in the Indian Ocean which convinced him that Ceylon had formerly been one-third larger than it was in his day, that its lost lands had lain to the north, and that they had been submerged by the sea, could have been one of these ‘Tyrian sea-fish’ maps?
Still the best after all those years …
Polo was not the only European traveller in the Indian Ocean to have seen very interesting maps in the hands of ‘mariners of those seas’. The reader will recall that Vasco da Gama was also shown what seems to have been a highly sophisticated map by the navigator Guzarate, who guided him so rapidly from Malindi in East Africa to Calicut on the west coast of India in 1498.22
It is important to stress, contrary to Suarez, that such maps, which were clearly used by local navigators – and to all accounts used effectively – could not possibly have been Ptolemaic maps (whatever else they might have been). This is so because of the extreme and indeed almost grotesque inaccuracy of all Ptolemaic maps of India/Sri Lanka – arising not only from the peculiar presence of Taprobana (which may require a more complex interpretat
ion than it has hitherto received) but also from the fact that India’s west coast is made to run parallel to the equator instead of roughly north-south as it does in reality.23 Mariners like Guzarate, or those who took Marco Polo to Ceylon, were men whose lives depended on knowing the waters they sailed. Even if they had possessed a Ptolemaic map as a curiosity, we can be quite sure that they would never have taken the risk of actually using it for navigation.
This forces Suarez into the paradox – as he wraps up his argument for the Ptolemaic provenance of the map Polo claimed to have seen – of having to take Polo’s direct reference to nautical charts (‘the charts of the mariners of those seas’) as evidence that such charts did not actually exist:
The fact that the map seen by Polo retained such an incorrect dimension for Ceylon supports the view that native pilots guided their vessels by navigational texts, and did not refer to the charts themselves.24
It seems to me that something quite other than this is likely to be the case, since Polo makes no mention at all of navigational texts as the source for his notion of a formerly larger Ceylon, but does make very explicit mention of charts. We are now also clear that the charts he was referring to could not have been of Ptolemaic origin – simply by virtue of the fact that that they were routinely and successfully used by experienced local mariners in the Indian Ocean. Last but not least we have seen that the issue of the very exaggerated dimensions given to Ceylon (by a chronicler admittedly prone to the exaggeration of dimensions) may be less important than the entirely correct notion Polo preserves that ‘in old times’ one-third of Ceylon had been swallowed up by the sea.
Isn’t it possible that what confronts us here is another trace, like the brief report of Masudi, of a parallel tradition of cartography (parallel, that is, to the Ptolemaic tradition) that survived from antiquity into the Middle Ages and that was associated by some with the works of Marinus of Tyre?25 From the little that we already know and may reasonably speculate about these ‘Tyrian sea-fish’ charts, they seem to have been acknowledged and recognized for their overall accuracy and excellence despite having been overtaken in certain locations such as the north of Ceylon – as Polo testifies – by geological changes linked to flooding.
It is the circulation of precisely such sophisticated yet curiously out-of-date charts amongst Indian Ocean navigators like Guzarate, as we saw in chapter 21, that could provide the best explanation for the strange anachronistic perfection of the Cantino and Reinel maps drawn by Portuguese cartographers in the early sixteenth century. The reader will remember that these maps not only represent areas of the Indian coast that the Portuguese had not yet visited but also show a number of detailed and inexplicable correlations, particularly around Gujerat and Cape Comorin, with India’s Ice Age coastline.
Knowledge of Ice Age topography in Ptolemy too?
When Sharif Sakr first drew Marco Polo’s comments on Sri Lanka to my attention he pointed out that ‘Polo’s primary assertion is that Sri Lanka had changed in size since ancient times, and that the old topography is preserved in nautical charts.’26 In the same report Sharif also notes:
Other historical characters apparently believed that Ptolemy’s maps depict an ancient topography, for example with respect to a former land-bridge between Malaya and Sumatra, across the present Strait of Malacca.
The Dutch adventurer Linschoten (1596) stated that some believed that Sumatra was the Chersoneso Aurea [Golden Chersonese] of old, and that ‘in times past it was firme land unto Malacca [Malaya]’.
Camoes in his famous epic poem The Lusiads (1572), dealing with the birth of Portugal as a nation, writes: ‘There is a saying that in ancient times the noble isle of Sumatra was joined to the main, until mountainous seas eroded its base and cut it off.’27
Abraham Ortelius explained in a legend on his 1567 map of Asia: ‘It is true that Samotra is not now a peninsula, but it is very likely that it was torn from the continent by the force of the Ocean after Ptolemy’s time. Moreover, if you imagine Samotra being joined to Malacca with an isthmus, it will agree very well with the shape of the Golden Chersonese as described by Ptolemy.’
I think it is absolutely fascinating that this basic belief, that old maps could depict ancient and hence different topography, is so apparent in the writings of adventurers who visited the Indian Ocean and must surely have been in contact with ‘the mariners of those seas’. That Ortelius takes the contemporary separation of Sumatra from Malaya as evidence that the land changed since the time of Ptolemy merely indicates his eagerness to try to understand whatever source information he had, and also his ignorance of the real geological processes that led to the separation of Sumatra from Malaya – at least 6000 years before Ptolemy.28
Readers who have come this far will already know enough inundation science to realize that there was indeed a time, at the end of the Ice Age, when the Strait of Malacca did not exist (as all the traditions quoted above correctly assert), when there was ‘firme land’ between Sumatra and the Malaysian peninsula, when ‘the noble isle of Sumatra’ was ‘joined to the main’ – and so on and so forth. For this area was all part of a continuous, near-continent-sized peninsula that geologists call Sundaland, a once fertile exposed shelf of well-watered low-lying plains – extending as far south as Surabaya, as far west as the Philippines and as far north as Taiwan – that was inundated in a series of catastrophic floods between 15,000 and 7000 years ago.29
How likely, therefore, is it to be an accident that the Ptolemaic world maps – said by Ptolemy himself to have been based on those of Marinus – do appear to present a fair image of Ice Age Sundaland in the form of the great peninsula that is labelled on those maps sometimes as the Golden Chersonese and sometimes as the peninsula of Mangi? Isn’t it at least equally probable, as Ortelius was already more than half way to suggesting 500 years ago, that this ‘mythical’ peninsula is a genuine echo of Ice Age topography?
Likewise, it may be significant that the Cantino world map of 1502, which we have suggested could have come down to us directly through the Marinus-to-portolan ‘line’ (rather than indirectly via Ptolemy’s abridged and ‘corrected’ version of Marinus), also shows a vast peninsula reminiscent of the exposed Sunda Shelf.
Given the highly anomalous traditions cited by Linschoten and Camoes concerning the flooding of the Strait of Malacca – traditions that are anomalous purely and simply because of their remarkable convergence with palaeogeographic facts – it seems almost perverse not to consider the possibility that certain maps, too, might have preserved reflections of the Ice Age world.
Waldseemüller’s ‘Golden Chersonese’, AD 1507.
The Golden Chersonese as shown in the Cantino planisphere, c. AD 1502.
Exposed Sunda Shelf at the LGM.
But traditions, with all their folksy redolences, are relatively safe matters for scholars to speculate about. Maps and nautical charts on the other hand -especially accurate, sophisticated maps of the kind used by Guzarate to chart Vasco da Gama’s course from Malindi to Calicut in 1498 – are quite another matter. If maps have indeed come down to us containing recognizable representations of Ice Age topography – as arguably may be the case with the depictions of India and of the long-submerged Sundaland peninsula by Cantino and Reinal and with the depiction of the ‘Golden Chersonese’ by Ptolemy – then prehistory cannot be as it has hitherto been presented to us.
If they are what they seem, such maps mean a lost civilization. Nothing more. Nothing less.
‘A piece of a map …’
In 1937 the eminent Portuguese map historian Armando Cortesao, an indefatigable searcher after lost cartographical treasures, discovered – in Paris – ‘the long-sought codex containing the Suma Oriental of Tome Pires and the Book of Francisco Rodrigues’.30
During the years 1512–15 when he wrote his Suma (now recognized as ‘the most important and complete account of the East produced in the first half of the sixteenth century’)31 Tome Pires had been the first official Portugu
ese ambassador to China.32 For some inexplicable reason, however, his great work lay ‘forgotten and practically unnoticed’, until Cortesao brought it to light again in the twentieth century.33 This was all the more puzzling because the Suma proved to be bound together in the same codex with another volume which, far from being forgotten, had been sensationally republished (in an abridged, illustrated edition) in the 1849 Atlas of the Viscount de Santarem.34 This second volume was the Book of Francisco Rodrigues, containing detailed written sailing directions and ‘precious maps’ (with compass roses and rhumb lines) drawn in the early sixteenth century by Rodrigues himself – a true portolan in other words.35 Unlike the famous Tome Pires – with whom it was nevertheless his fate to end up bound between two covers – and despite the publicity given to his maps in Santarem’s Atlas, Francisco Rodrigues is virtually unknown. Indeed, says Cortesao, so little is known about him that:
It is impossible even to attempt a biographical sketch. Besides the information we can gather from Rodrigues’ Book itself, he is mentioned in two letters of Alfonso de Albuquerque to King Manuel of Portugal written from Cochin, 1 April and 20 August 1512.36
The suspicion that European travellers in the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century may from time to time have stumbled across charts and maps containing the remnants of a lost geography (perhaps even the maps of Marinus of Tyre, said to have been superior to those of Ptolemy) is intriguingly enhanced by the first of Alfonso de Albuquerque’s two letters. It introduces a ‘piece of a map’ that Albuquerque has acquired in his travels in the Indian Ocean and that he is sending to King Manuel. This fragment, he explains, is not the original but was ‘traced’ by Francisco Rodrigues from: