policy, and held the foreigner at arm's
length. Night descended upon the farther East, covering Cathay with
those cities of which the old travellers had told such marvels,
Cambaluc and Cansay, Zayton and Chinkalan. And when the veil rose
before the Portuguese and Spanish explorers of the 16th century, those
names are heard no more. In their stead we have China, Peking,
Hangchow, Chinchew, Canton. Not only were the old names forgotten, but
the fact that those places had ever been known before was forgotten
also. Gradually new missionaries went forth from Rome--Jesuits and
Dominicans now; new converts were made, and new vicariates
constituted; but the old Franciscan churches, and the Nestorianism
with which they had battled, had alike been swallowed up in the ocean
of pagan indifference. In time a wreck or two floated to the
surface--a MS. Latin Bible or a piece of Catholic sculpture; and when
the intelligent missionaries called Marco Polo to mind, and studied
his story, one and another became convinced that Cathay and China were
one.

But for a long time all but a sagacious few continued to regard Cathay
as a region distinct from any of the new-found Indies; whilst
map-makers, well on into the 17th century, continued to represent it
as a great country lying entirely to the north of China, and
stretching to the Arctic Sea.

It was Cathay, with its outlying island of Zipangu (Japan), that
Columbus sought to reach by sailing westward, penetrated as he was by
his intense conviction of the smallness of the earth, and of the vast
extension of Asia eastward; and to the day of his death he was full of
the imagination of the proximity of the domain of the great khan to
the islands and coasts which he had discovered. And such imaginations
are curiously embodied in some of the maps of the early 16th century,
which intermingle on the same coast-line the new discoveries from
Labrador to Brazil with the provinces and rivers of Marco Polo's
Cathay.

Cathay had been the aim of the first voyage of the Cabots in 1496, and
it continued to be the object of many adventurous voyages by English
and Hollanders to the N.W. and N.E. till far on in the 16th century.
At least one memorable land-journey also was made by Englishmen, of
which the exploration of a trade-route to Cathay was a chief
object--that in which Anthony Jenkinson and the two Johnsons reached
Bokhara