ABSTRACT
In this single statement, startling in its departure from the author’s well-deserved reputation for sobriety, Pacheco reveals both the vitality of mediaeval mythology and the credulity of the Renaissance mind. That men should, in the same breath, be able to speak with almost the exactitude of a modern Pilot book about the navigability of the Senegal River and the existence of mile-long serpents is not very remarkable, however, when we recall the popularity of the “ Mirabilia”—wonder books-and the “ Bestiaries” throughout the Middle Ages. The reading of these enchanted not only the common people, but men of education, and inspired the pictorial illustration of many of our most famous “ mappae mundi,” e.g. the Hereford and Ebstorf maps. Pliny’s Natural History, Solinus’s Collectanea and the Treatise on Marvels, attributed to Aristotle, were among the most read works of the time. Aristotle’s authority was so great with the Portuguese of the fifteenth century that even the Proctors of the People were quoting his work in the Cortes {vide Santarem, quoted in Zurara, op. cit. Hakluyt Society Edition, p. 338). The seamen of our period, therefore, were steeped in the teratological traditions of antiquity, and it is difficult to over-emphasise the domination exercised in mediaeval and early Renaissance thought, in geography, natural history and ethnology, as well as in other departments, by the pseudo-science of the “ Mirabilia.” Zurara comes under it, even though he is somewhat more cautious than Pacheco. In chap. 52 he tells us, for instance, that the hornbills of the Ilha das GarĢas (i.e. Heron
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