Footnote 51: It had however been known to Italian and Norman navigators a century earlier. Indeed it is increasingly probable that the Portuguese as discoverers of West Africa had been preceded a hundred years earlier by the Genoese, the Catalans and Majorcans, and the Norman French of Dieppe. A remarkable map of the continent of Africa was painted in Italy, about 1351, and is now in the Medicean Library at Florence. It is known as the Laurentian Portolano and gives the most correct general outline of the whole continent which had as yet been depicted. For the first time the great Bight of the Gulf of Guinea is shown, together with the tongue-like projection southwards of Central and Southern Africa. There is even the indication of a river where the Congo emerges into the South Atlantic. Footnote 52: Only a long inlet in the Desert coast. At the head of this inlet was the little island of Kerné (still called Herné by the Moors) which was once a trading station of the Carthaginians. Footnote 53: Nowadays known as Elmina. Footnote 54: As will be seen in another chapter, there are traditions of Norman merchants from Dieppe having established forts or trading stations along the West African coast in the later years of the 14th century, especially at “La Mine d’Or”—Elmina—where the Normans possibly preceded the Portuguese. Footnote 55: Mr E. G. Ravenstein deduces 1485 as the date from the details shown in the coat of arms in the inscription. This inscription was only discovered on the high rock, near the Mpozo confluence, by a Swedish missionary in 1906. The inscription begins “Aqi chegaram os navios do esclarecido Rey Dom Joam ho seg° de Portugall,” and is followed by the names of Diogo Cam (Cão) and others. See the _Geographical Journal_ for June, 1908. Footnote 56: They described the Arab settlements on the South-East African coasts and alleged that certain Arab ships had been driven by stress of weather past the Cape of Good Hope, and had brought back word of the northward trend of the west coast. Footnote 57: