It is not necessary to dwell on the additional confusion furnished by this "explanation"--Thebes given to the Israelites (as part of Goshen?), Cadmus building the Egyptian Thebes, Achaia for Bœotia, and so forth; but the point really noticeable is that in Azurara's text the "dwellers on the Nile who possess Thebes" came in here as "wearing the Prince's livery:" _i.e._, the negroes of the Senegal are supposed to live on the western branch of the Nile, which mediæval conceptions obstinately brought from Egypt or Nubia to the Atlantic, and which Prince Henry's seamen thought they had discovered when they reached the Senegal; just as later in the Gambia, the Niger, and the Congo, other equivalents were imagined for the Negro Nile of Edrisi, and the West African river-courses of Pliny and Ptolemy. Cf. chs. xxx, xxxi, lx-lxii, of this Chronicle.]
[Endnote 13: (p. 8). _Wisdom of the Italians ... labyrinth._--Here we have another original MS. note. [Labyrinth is so much as to say anything into which a man having entered cannot go out again (_so Prince Henry, in Azurara, vol. i, p. 8 (ch. ii), has "entered a labyrinth of Glory"_). And therefore, saith Ovid, in his _Metamorphoses_, that Pasiphaë, wife of Minos, king of Crete, conceived the Minotaur, who was half man and half bull. The which was imprisoned by Daedalus in the Labyrinth into which whatsoever entered knew not how to come out, and whosoever was without knew not how to enter. And of this Labyrinth speaketh Seneca in the _Tragedy_, where he treated of the matter of Hippolytus and Phedra].
Azurara's reference to the distinctive virtues of the four great peoples here noticed is interesting, especially from the fact that Prince Henry's mother was an Englishwoman; that the Emperor (now a purely German sovereign, though still in name "holy and Roman"), invited him to enter his service (see ch. vi); that the Pope (like Henry VI (?) King of England) made him similar offers; that his scientific and practical connections with Italy were very important; and that his sister Isabel was married to the Duke of Burgundy. "The wisdom of the Italians" was nowhere more conspicuous at that time than in geography. Italians initiated the great mediæval and renaissance movement of discovery both by land and sea (cf. John de Plano Carpini, Marco, Nicolo, and Matteo Polo, Malocello, Tedisio Dorio, the Vivaldi, the Genoese captains and pilots of 1341, precursors of Varthema, the Cabots, Verrazano, and Columbus). Italians also constructed the first scientific maps or Portolani (existing specimens from 1300 show out of 498 examples 413 of Italian origin, including all the more famous and perfect). Lastly, Italians probably brought the use of the magnet to higher efficiency; though they did not "invent" the same, it is likely that they were the first to fit the magnet into a box and connect it with a compass-card. "Prima dedit nautis _usum_ magnetis Amalphis."