When I Gave Myself To The Study Of Geography, After I Had Perused
And Diligently Scanned The Descriptions Of Europe,
Asia, and Africa,
and conferred them with the maps and globes both antique and modern,
I came in fine to
The fourth part of the world, commonly called
America, which by all descriptions I found to be an island environed
round about with the sea, having on the south side of it the Strait
of Magellan, on the west side the Mare de Sur, which sea runneth
towards the north, separating it from the east parts of Asia, where
the dominions of the Cathaians are. On the east part our west
ocean, and on the north side the sea that severeth it from
Greenland, through which northern seas the passage lieth, which I
take now in hand to discover.
Plato in his Timaeus and in the dialogue called Critias, discourses
of an incomparable great island then called Atlantis, being greater
than all Africa and Asia, which lay westward from the Straits of
Gibraltar, navigable round about: affirming, also, that the princes
of Atlantis did as well enjoy the governance of all Africa and the
most part of Europe as of Atlantis itself.
Also to prove Plato's opinion of this island, and the inhabiting of
it in ancient time by them of Europe, to be of the more credit:
Marinaeus Siculus, in his Chronicle of Spain, reporteth that there
hath been found by the Spaniards in the gold mines of America
certain pieces of money, engraved with the image of Augustus Caesar;
which pieces were sent to the Pope for a testimony of the matter by
John Rufus, Archbishop of Constantinum.
Moreover, this was not only thought of Plato, but by Marsilius
Ficinus, an excellent Florentine philosopher, Crantor the Grecian,
Proclus, also Philo the famous Jew (as appeareth in his book De
Mundo, and in the Commentaries upon Plato), to be overflown, and
swallowed up with water, by reason of a mighty earthquake and
streaming down of the heavenly flood gates. The like thereof
happened unto some part of Italy, when by the forcibleness of the
sea, called Superum, it cut off Sicily from the continent of
Calabria, as appeareth in Justin in the beginning of his fourth
book. Also there chanced the like in Zeeland, a part of Flanders.
And also the cities of Pyrrha and Antissa, about Palus Meotis; and
also the city Burys, in the Corinthian Gulf, commonly called Sinus
Corinthiacus, have been swallowed up with the sea, and are not at
this day to be discerned: by which accident America grew to be
unknown, of long time, unto us of the later ages, and was lately
discovered again by Americus Vespucius, in the year of our Lord
1497, which some say to have been first discovered by Christopher
Columbus, a Genoese, Anno 1492.
The same calamity happened unto this isle of Atlantis six hundred
and odd years before Plato's time, which some of the people of the
south-east parts of the world accounted as nine thousand years; for
the manner then was to reckon the moon's period of the Zodiac for a
year, which is our usual month, depending a Luminari minore.
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