Assisted by Persians of the Persian Gulf, the Arabs of southern and western Arabia revealed East Africa and Madagaskar about the beginning of the Christian Era, and before this period had found their way to western India, Ceylon, and even the Malay Peninsula. After the convulsion and awakening caused by the promulgation of the Muhammadan religion, Arab voyages to the Far East (largely instigated by the merchants of Persia) increased to a remarkable extent; and wherever the Arabs went they endeavoured to spread the faith of Islam. Thus, as early as the thirteenth century, the Arab religion, dress, and customs had been introduced into the Island of Borneo, into the north of Sumatra, and the south of the Malay Peninsula. By 1470 the whole of Java had been converted to the Muhammadan religion, and the great mass of the Malay people became ardent advocates of that faith. The Arabs, of course, belong to the Caucasian sub-species: they are emphatically White Men in body and mind, though their skin colour may have been darkened by ages of exposure to a hot sun and by occasional intermixture with the Negro. But they have gradually grown to be distinct in cast of mind and sympathies from the peoples of Europe; and the institution of the Muhammadan religion separated them still more widely from the world of Greece, Rome, Paris, Lisbon, and London. Until the fourteenth century of the Christian Era they and their Persian allies monopolized the whole of the trade which had grown up between Asia, Malaysia, and Africa on the one hand, and Europe on the other. Then the movements of the Mongols and Tatars in central and western Asia, and their temporary respect for and curiosity concerning Christian Europe, enabled Italian commercial travellers to penetrate to the farthest parts of Asia. Thus there reached Europe not only more or less accurate descriptions of Java and Sumatra, but vague hints as to a "great Java" which lay to the south and was a whole continent in itself. These hints became more precise at the beginning of the sixteenth century, when not only had the Malay Archipelago been traversed almost to the limits of New Guinea by adventurous Italians, but French and Portuguese navigators may even have been driven out of their course by storms, and obtained some glimpse of the Australian coastline.[18] [18] In my volume on the Pioneers in India and Southern Asia I have referred to the story told to Ludovico di Varthema by a Malay captain of the vessel in which he travelled, according to which Malays had penetrated southwards into seas where the ice obstructed their passage, and the day in wintertime became shortened to a period of four hours. This would look as though the Malays had anticipated us in Antarctic discovery.