[120] The island of Madeira (Wood) lies off the west coast of Africa, between 32° 37´ and 32° 52´ north latitude and 16° 38´ and 17° 16´ west longitude. It is thirty-four miles long. The island of Porto Santo is twenty-five miles northeast of it.
[121] Various fictions were current in the middle ages respecting the situation of the island of the Seven Cities, and a number of expeditions went in search of it with unsuccessful results. Mercator, Ortelius, and Locke place the island in 28° north latitude.
[122] Thucydides, a Greek historian, born B.C. 471.
[123] Historie del S. D. Fernando Colombo, cap. ix, x.
[124] “Paolo Toscanelli was so greatly distinguished as an astronomer that Behaim’s teacher, Regiomontanus, dedicated to him, in 1463, his work, De Quadratura Circuli, directed against the Cardinal Nicolaus de Cusa. He constructed the great gnomon in the church of Santa Maria Novella at Florence, and died in 1482, at the age of eighty-five, without having lived long enough to enjoy the pleasure of learning the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope by Diaz, and of the tropical part of the new continent by Columbus.”—Humboldt: Cosmos. Otté’s trans. vol. ii. p. 644. Note.
[125] Zacton, in China, is now called Tsiuenchau. “At this city” says Marco Polo, “is the haven of Zayton, frequented by all of the ships from India, ... and by all the merchants of Manzi, for hither is imported the most astonishing quantity of goods and of precious stones and pearls.... For it is one of the two greatest havens in the world for commerce.”—Ser Marco Polo. Yule. Second ed. vol. ii. p. 186. On Ruysch’s map of 1508, Zaiton is placed on the east coast of China, west of the island of Cuba. Vide map.
[126] The city is now called Hangchau, and is in the province of Chehkiang. As described by Marco Polo, the city was “the finest and the noblest in the world.”—Ser Marco Polo. Yule. Second ed. vol. ii. p. 145. Quinsai on Ruysch’s map of 1508, is northwest of Zaiton.
[127] Antonio Pigafetta, in his Treatise on navigation, written about the year 1523, says: “The circumference of the earth is supposed to be divided into three hundred and sixty degrees, and to each degree are assigned seventeen leagues and a half; the circumference of the earth is consequently six thousand three hundred leagues. The land league is three miles, the sea league is four.”—MS. in Ambrosian library, Milan.
[128] Cipango (Japan), now called by the natives Dai Nippon or Dai Nihon, is a group of islands lying between the twenty-third and fiftieth parallels of north latitude and the one hundred and twenty-second and one hundred and fifty-third meridians of east longitude.
[129] From Lisbon, Spain, in 38° 42´ north latitude and 9° 8´ west longitude (first meridian at Greenwich), to Tokio, Japan, in 35° 40´ north latitude and 139° 40´ east longitude, the westward distance is about eleven thousand six hundred statute miles; and from Lisbon to Peking, China, in 39° 56´ north latitude and 116° 27´ east longitude, about twelve thousand one hundred miles. From Liverpool, England, to New York, on the sailing route, the distance is about three thousand and twenty-three miles, and from New York to Canton, China, via the Isthmus of Panama and the Sandwich Islands, the distance is about ten thousand six hundred miles.