Jave La Grande - Jave La Grande As A Composite of Regio Patalis and Brasielie Regio

Jave La Grande As A Composite of Regio Patalis and Brasielie Regio

Robert J. King has suggested that Alfonse’s description of La Grande Jave could also fit the Regio Patalis promontory on Oronce Fine’s world map, and indicates that the Dieppe Maps appear to have conflated Marco Polo’s Greater Java with Fine’s Regio Patalis and Brasielie Regio. On the Dieppe Maps, the great promontory of (Greater Java) extends, like the Regio Patalis, northward from the Austral continent. The evolution of Fine’s into may have been influenced by the phrase used by Ludovico di Varthema, an Italian from Bologna who made a voyage in 1505 from Borneo to Java, who said that Java, “prope in inmensum patet (extends almost beyond measure)”. Although the word patet (“extends”) has no connection with the city of Patala (now Thatta) at the mouth of the Indus River, which gave its name to the Regio Patalis (“Region of Patala”), the Dieppe mapmakers may have misunderstood the name to mean “the Extensive Region”. Ludovico di Varthema also said that he had been told by the captain of the ship in which he had made the voyage from Borneo that on the southern side of Java Major, to the southward, “there are peoples who sail with their backs to our stars of the north until they find a day of but 4 hours, where the day does not last more than four hours”, and that there it was colder than in any other part of the world. The region where the shortest day would only last four hours would be in latitude 63° South. This could explain Jean Alfonse’s description of La Grande Jave as an extension of the giant Antarctic continent: “This Java touches the Straight of Magellan in the west, and in the east Terra Australis… I estimate that the coast of the Ocean Sea called the Austral coast extends eastwards to Java, to the western coast of the said Java”. Guillaume Le Testu’s Grande Jave of 1556 is part of the Terre Australle, and bears a Baie Braecillie on its northwest coast, an appellation, as noted by Armand Rainaud in 1893, “which without doubt comes from the globes of Schoener and the maps of Oronce Fine”. This appellation appears on other Dieppe maps as baie bresille on the Rotz map, Baye bresille on the Harleian, and Baye bresill on the Desceliers, indicating the reliance of their makers on the Schoener/Fine cosmography. Johannes Schoener defined Brasilia australis as “an immense region toward Antarcticum newly discovered but not yet fully surveyed, which extends as far as Melacha and somewhat beyond; close to this region lies the great island of Zanzibar”. On Fine’s 1531 mappemonde, is shown as part of the Terra Australis lying to the east of Africa and to the south of Java, just where Schoener located on his 1523 globe, and where the Dieppe maps locate their Baye Bresille. King concludes that the Dieppe cartographers appear to have transposed Marco Polo’s Java Minor and Java Major and combined the relocated Java Major with Fine’s Brasielie Regio and and Regio Patalis, which were both part of the Terra Australis.