The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s5.173

c10.s5.173

Chang-k’ien’s recognition of these legendary Ta-hia can be paralleled in his own time and country by the emperor Wu-ti’s recognition of the ‘heavenly horse’, which will be noticed later and which seems to make the explanation certain; and indeed there are a couple of well-known parallels in the modern atlas. When the Happy Isles of the Greeks, floating in the unknown West, had been finally pinned down to the Canaries, their place in men’s imagination was taken by a new island Antilia, which appeared on the fringe of the western ocean in many pre-Columban maps; to-day it is the Antilles. Such maps also showed in the far West another unknown island called Brazil,¹ that mysterious island of the red dye-wood which had replaced the Purple Islands of Pliny (vi, 202); and when the red dye-wood was discovered in Cabral’s new Land of the Holy Cross, that land forthwith received, and still retains, the name of the mythical Brazil. It is very natural that what happened when Spain and Portugal discovered one new world in the far West should already have happened when China discovered another.