Regio Patalis

Regio Patalis appeared on late 15th and early 16th century maps and globes in a variety of increasingly erroneous locations, further and further east and south of India.

[7] The 2nd century AD author Dionysios Periegetes said in his Orbis Descriptio: “This river [the Indus] has two mouths, and dashes against the island enclosed between them, called in the tongue of the natives, Patalênê”.

[8] Or, as Priscian put it in his popular rendition of Periegetes: “the River Indus... Patalene is girt by its divided waters.”[9] Some scholars identify Patala with Thatta, a one-time capital of Sindh.

Ahmad Hasan Dani, director of the Taxila Institute of Asian Civilisations, Islamabad, concluded: “There has been a vain attempt to identify the city of Patala.

[10] The eighteenth century French geographer, Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville, also identified Thatta with Patala:“Tatta is not only a town, but also a province of India, according to modern travellers; this town has taken the place of the ancient Patala or Pattala, which formerly gave name to the country included between the mouths of the Indus.”[11] This opinion was shared by Alexander Burnes, who voyaged up the Indus on a diplomatic mission in 1831–32, and wrote:"The antiquity of Tatta is unquestioned.

[20] Martin Behaim's source of knowledge of India Patalis was the Ymago Mundi of Pierre D'Ailly, a revised edition of earlier standard cosmographical works which d’Ailly wrote between 1410 and 1419.

[21] In discussing the habitability of lands under the Torrid Zone and Tropic of Capricorn, D'Ailly drew on the Opus Majus, written around the year 1267 English monk and scholar Roger Bacon.

With regard to the Regio Patalis, Bacon said: “the southern frontier of India reaches the Tropic of Capricorn near the Region of Patale and the neighbouring lands which are washed by a great arm of the sea flowing from the Ocean”.

[25] Following Magellan’s circumnavigation voyage of 1519-1522, Johann Schoener identified South America with the extended India Superior (Indochina) peninsula, and so depicted it on his 1523 globe.

[29] This development may have been influenced by the phrase used by the Italian traveler Ludovico di Varthema in describing Java which, he said, “prope in inmensum patet (extends almost beyond measure)”.

[33] Schoener's idea of the Regio Patalis developed, as explained above, from the earlier globe of Martin Behaim which itself was based on the works of Pierre d’Ailly, Roger Bacon and Pliny the Elder, and not on the accounts of any voyages to the unknown Austral continent, the Terra Australis Incognita.

[35] The Flemish cosmographer and map maker Gerard Mercator produced a map of the world in 1538 which, though modelled on that of Fine of 1531, departed from it by showing Fine's southern continent much smaller, unnamed and bearing the inscription, Terra hic esse certum est sed quãtus quibusque limitibus finitas incertum (“It is certain that there is a land here, but its size and the limits of its boundaries are uncertain”).