rious that Mela puts a race
of pygmies at the headwaters of the Nile (see map above, p.
304). Is this only an echo from _Iliad_, iii. 6, or can any
ancient traveller have penetrated far enough inland toward the
equator to have heard reports of the dwarfish race lately
visited by Stanley (_In Darkest Africa_, vol. ii. pp. 100-104,
164)? Strabo had no real knowledge of savagery in Africa (cf.
Bunbury, _Hist. Ancient Geog._, ii. 331). Sataspes may have
seen barbarians of low type, possibly on one of the Canary
isles (see description of Canarians in Major's _Prince Henry_,
p. 212). Ptolemy had heard of an island of cannibals in the
Indian ocean, perhaps one of the Andaman group, visited A. D.
1293 by Marco Polo. The people of these islands rank among the
lowest savages on the earth, and Marco was disgusted and
horrified; their beastly faces, with huge prognathous jaws and
projecting canine teeth, he tried to describe by calling them a
dog-headed people. Sir Henry Yule suggests that the mention of
Cynocephali, or Dog-heads, in ancient writers may have had an
analogous origin (_Marco Polo_, vol. ii. p. 252). This visit of
the Venetian traveller to Andaman was one of very few real
glimpses of savagery vouchsafed to Europeans before the
fifteenth century; and a general review of the subject brings
out in a strong light the truthfulness and authenticity of the
description of American Indians in Eric the Red's Saga, as
shown above, pp. 185-192.]

[Sidenote: Effect of these discoveries upon the theories of Ptolemy and
Mela.]

These voyages into the southern hemisphere dealt a damaging blow to the
theory of an impassable fiery zone; but as to the circumnavigability of
the African continent, the long stretch of coast beyond the equator
seemed more in harmony with Ptolemy's views than with those of Mela. The
eastward trend of the Guinea coast was at first in favour of the latter
geographer, but when Santarem and Escobar found it turning southward to
the equator the facts began to refute him. According to Mela they
should have found it possible at once to sail eastward to the gulf of
Aden. What if it should turn out after all that there was no connection
between the Atlantic and Indian oceans? Every added league of voyagi