[Sidenote: Toscanelli's visions of the East.]
The extravagances of the letter of Toscanelli, in his opulent descriptions of a marvelous Asiatic region, were safely made in that age without incurring the charge of credulity. Travelers could tell tales then that were as secure from detection as the revealed arcana of the Zuñi have been in our own days. Two hundred towns, whose marble bridges spanned a single river, and whose commerce could incite the cupidity of the world, was a tale easily to stir numerous circles of listeners in the maritime towns of the Mediterranean, wherever wandering mongers of marvels came and went. There were such travelers whose recitals Toscanelli had read, and others whose tales he had heard from their own lips, and these last were pretty sure to augment the wonders of the elder talebearers.
Columbus had felt this influence with the rest, and the tales lost nothing of their vividness in coming to him freshened, as it were, by the curious mind of the Florentine physician. The map which accompanied Toscanelli's letter, and which depicted his notions of the Asiatic coast lying over against that of Spain, is lost to us, but various attempts have been made to restore it, as is done in the sketch annexed. It will be a precious memorial, if ever recovered, worthy of study as a reflex, in more concise representation than is found in the text of the letter, of the ideas which one of the most learned cosmographers of his day had imbibed from mingled demonstrations of science and imagination.
[Illustration: TOSCANELLI'S MAP AS RESTORED IN _DAS AUSLAND_.]
It is said that in our own day, in the first stages of a belief in the practicability of an Atlantic telegraphic cable, it was seriously claimed that the vast stretch of its extension could be broken by a halfway station on Jacquet Island, one of those relics of the Middle Ages, which has disappeared from our ocean charts only in recent years.
Just in the same way all the beliefs which men had had in the island of Antillia, and in the existence of many another visionary bit of land, came to the assistance of these theoretical discoverers in planning the chances of a desperate voyage far out into a sea of gorgons and chimeras dire. Toscanelli's map sought to direct the course of any one who dared to make the passage, in a way that, in case of disaster to his ships, a secure harbor could be found in Antillia, and in such other havens as no lack of islands would supply.