The sailors whom the Infant employed in these navigations and discoveries were well instructed in nautical science. They set out from Portugal furnished with "naval charts" in which the cosmographers of that time had designed not merely the hydrographical configuration of the coasts of the various countries then known, but also which is more curious, the interior of the Continents, in which they represented, by a multitude of figures, the various sovereigns, animals, birds, woodland, and other details, both real, fantastic, and hypothetical: as the curious reader may see in the Planisphere of Andrea Bianco of 1436, published in the work of Formaleone, entitled _Saggio sulla nautica antica de Veneziani_, and in the other planisphere of the famous Fra Mauro, published by Cardinal Zurla in his work, _Sulle antiche Mappe lavorate in Venezia_ (1818). The idea, then, which Alvaro de Freitas had of his distance from the terrestrial Paradise, according to his own words, shows that he considered it to be at the extremity of the earth: that idea, we repeat, proves the influence which the geography of the Middle Ages exercised upon our sailors. As a matter of fact, that idea of the position of the terrestrial Paradise dates from the time of the _Topographia Christiana_ of Cosmas Indicopleustes (see Montfaucon, _Nova Collectio Patrum_, vol. ii), an idea which the journeys accomplished by land during the Middle Ages fortified and reduced to a systematic opinion. On the map of Andrea Bianco, the terrestrial Paradise is to be found marked in the most easterly part of Asia. Alvaro de Freitas in these words of his, alluded either to the locality in which Paradise was to be found on the ancient charts--and this, we think, is the more probable supposition--or he referred to the _Cosmology_ of Dante, according to which Paradise was situate in the middle of the seas of the southern hemisphere (Dante, _Purgatorio_, cant. xxvi, ll. 100, 127.)]--S. Santarem's commentary here needs a word of supplement, which we take from the _Dawn of Modern Geography_, pp. 332-3. "The position of the Garden of Eden, the habitat of the people of Gog Magog and other monstrous races, and the existence of a literal centre for the earth-circle, were problems which exercised the patristic mind only less than the great controversy upon the 'Spherical,' 'Tabernacular,' or other shape of the world itself.