On the continent a German, who knew the tract only as translated into
German through a Dutch version of the English text, and therefore
imperfectly, gave it serious consideration, and had little difficulty in
finding inconsistencies and contradictions. Some of his questions went
to the root of the matter. It was a Dutch ship which first found the
Isle of Pines and its colony; why was not the discovery first announced
by the Dutch? Piece by piece the critic takes down the somewhat clumsily
fashioned structure of Neville's fiction, and in the end little remains
untouched by suspicion. No such examination, dull and labored in form,
and offering no trace of imagination which wisely permits itself to be
deceived in details in order to be free to accept a whole, could pass
beyond the narrow circle of a university.
[42]As an antidote to the attractions of Neville's tract it was
powerless, and to-day it remains as much of a curiosity as it was in
1668, when it was written. Indeed, a question might be raised as to
which tract was less intentionally a joke--Neville's "Isle of Pines," or
our German's ponderous essay upon it? At least the scientific
ignorance of the Englishman, perfectly evident from the start, is more
entertaining than the pseudo-science of the German critic, who boldly
asserts as impossible what has come to be a commonplace.{1}
1 Das verdachtige Pineser-Eylandd, No. 29 in the
Bibliography. It it dedicated to Anthonio Goldbeck,
Burgomaster of Altona, and the letter of dedication b dated
at Hamburg, October 26, 1668.
Hippe calls attention to the geography of the relation as not the least
interesting of its features, for the neighborhood of the Island of
Madagascar was used in other sea stories as a place of storm and
catastrophe. "The ship on which Simplicissimus wished to return
to Portugal, suffered shipwreck likewise near Madagascar, and the
paradisiac island on which Grimmelshausen permits his hero finally to
land in company with a carpenter, is also to be sought in this region.
In precisely the same way the shipwreck of Sadeur,{1} the hero of a
French Robinson Crusoe story, [43]happens on the coast of Madagascar,
and from this was he driven in a southerly direction to the coast of the
southern land."
1 La Terre Australe commue, a romance written by Gabriel de
Foigny (pseud. J. Sadeur), describing the stay of Sadeur on
the southern continent for more than thirty-five years, The
original edition, made in Geneva in 1676, is said to contain
"many impious and licentious passages which were omitted in
the later editions." Sabin (xviii. 220) gives a list of
editions, the first English translation appearing in 1693.
It is possible that the author owed the idea of his work to
Neville's pamphlet.
In most of the older surveys of the known world America counts as the
fourth part, naturally coming after Europe, Asia, and Africa. Even that
arrangement was not generally accepted. Joannes Leo (Hasan Ibn Muhammad,
al-Wazzan), writing in 1556, properly called Africa "la tierce Partie du
Monde;" but the Seigneur de la Popellinière, in his "Les Trois Mondes,"
published in 1582, divided the globe into three parts--1. Europe, Asia,
and Africa; 2. America, and 3. Australia. A half century later,
Pierre d'Avitz, of Toumon (Ardèche), entitled one of his compositions
"Description Générale de l'Amérique troisiesme partie du Monde," first
published in 1637.{2} The expedition under Alvaro de Mendana de Nevra,
setting sail from Callao, November 19, 1567, and steering westward,
sought to clear doubt concerning a continent which report had pictured
as being somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. The Solomon Islands rewarded
the enterprise, and with New Guinea and the Philippines completed
a connection between Peru and the continent of Asia. There had long
existed, however, a settled belief in the existence of a great continent
in the southern hemisphere, which should serve as a counterpoise to the
known lands in the northern.