Sources
For the play's exotica, Brome relied first of all on the classic book The Travels of Sir John Mandeville; Mandeville himself is mentioned more than once in the play. Brome may have pulled hints and suggestions from other travel accounts, since the play refers to the famous English explorers of the day, Sir Francis Drake, Martin Frobisher, Sir Richard Hawkins, and Sir Thomas Cavendish. Many earlier writers stressed the sheer strangeness of far lands; Brome's self-styled "master," Ben Jonson, did so in a notable instance in his 1620 masque News from the New World Discovered in the Moon, with children who are part bird and coaches that are blown by the wind — and some of Jonson's wonders date back as far as the Vera Historia of Lucian. Strikingly, though, the idea of the Antipodes as a "topsy-turvy" place, where familiar relationships are directly reversed, seems to have been original with Brome; no clear precedents for it have been identified.
Read more about this topic: The Antipodes
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