Great pains have been taken by me with the maps illustrating this volume; and, if the outcome of my endeavour does not differ in its broad features from the maps furnished by M. d’Anville, in 1732, to Labat’s _Relation Historique de l’Éthiopie Occidentale_, this should redound to the credit of the great French geographer, but should not be accounted a proof of lack of industry on my own part. Still, my maps exhibit an advance in matters of detail, for our knowledge of the country has increased considerably since the days of d’Anville. They would have proved still more satisfactory had the Portuguese thought it worth while to produce a trustworthy map of a colony of which they had claimed possession during four centuries. It seems almost incredible that even now many of the routes followed by the Conquistadores and missionaries of old cannot be laid down upon a modern map for lack of information. Sonyo, for instance, through which led the high road followed by soldiers, traders, and missionaries going up to San Salvador (the present route leaves the Kongo River at Matadi), is almost a _terra incognita_. I am almost ashamed to confess that I have even failed to locate the once-famous factory of Mpinda; all I can say is, that it cannot have occupied the site assigned to it on some Portuguese maps. I need hardly say that modern research lends no support to the extravagant claims of certain geographers as to the knowledge of Inner Africa possessed by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. Pigafetta’s fantastic map, with its elaborate system of lakes and rivers, merely proves the utter incapacity of its author to deal with questions of critical geography. This has long since been recognised. The map which accompanies Isaac Vossius’s _De Nili et aliorum Fluminum Origine_ (Hagae Com., 1659) only shows one lake in Inner Africa, which borders on “Nimeamaie vel Monemugi,” and may without hesitation be identified with our Nyasa: for the Monemugi (Muene Muji) is the chief of the Maravi or Zimbas. The “Iages, gens barbara et inculta,” are placed right in the centre of Africa. The “Fungeni,” which are shown as neighbours of the “Macoco,” ought to have been placed to the west of Abyssinia, as they are the Funj, or Fung, of the Egyptian Sudan. If Ludolfus had carried out his intention of compiling a map of the whole of Africa (in 1681), these extravagancies of early map-makers would have been exposed more fully long since.[7]