The Portuguese Quest for Taprobane
Ananda Abeydeera

As armas e os barões aninaldos Que, da ocidentalpraia lusitana Por marco nunca de antes navegados Passaram ainda além da Taprobane
- CAMÕES

Finding myself in a Lisbon street recently, I inquired from a middle-aged passerby how to get to the Gulbenkian Foundation. Instead of helping with my orientation he wished to know where I came from. “Oh! from Ceilão!” exclaimed the gentleman very politely in Portuguese and recited the above verse uninhibited. No wonder he took pride in recalling these lines from Camões, for Portugal is the only country in the world whose national poet (like Shakespeare to England) evokes Taprobane, an island of hallowed legend from the remote East, linking it with his country's legacy of discoveries.

A rough rendering in English of that verse is “Arms and the distinguished heroes, who from the western Lusitanian shore, over seas never navigated before, sailed even beyond Taprobane.” Although the modern name of Ceilam appears with some frequency on the maps and in the chronicles of the period in which Camões lived, and despite the fact that this was the case even a century before he published the Lusiads, his preference for the ancient name of the island in the very first stanza of the opening canto of the poem was not merely a coincidence. The Latin form of the name Tapi appearing at the end of the verse to rhyme with the adjective Lusitana, the Roman name in antiquity, in the second line was also not a mere lyrical device.

Camões bestows the laurel crown upon his compatriot navigators for having sailed past Taprobane. This island, which formed a boundary of the world from classical times up until the time the Portuguese made a landfall at Ceylon in 1507, conjured up in the Renaissance mind all the mythical attributes and the fabulous wealth of a legendary island. Camões was conscious of the power of this imagery of an island reaching to a remote past and located on the eastern edges of the earth; his compatriot Pirrus de Noha had a similar idea of Taprobane in the previous century. Noha expressed his wish to go there by a long route, without having the least intuition that one hundred years later his wish would be accomplished via a maritime route that the Portuguese discovered by way of rounding the Cape of Good Hope.

Although the Ptolemaic map attributed to Noha found in the manuscript of Pomponius Mela's work was not typical for the period, it has preserved for us an image of the world as it must have existed in the mind of a Portuguese geographer. With the arrival of Vasco da Gama in India in 1498, there opened another stage in the search for Taprobane described by Eratosthenes, Pliny, and Ptolemy. Travelers and sailors began venturing further from known locations in the hope of finding Taprobane in the vicinity of India. The feelings of uncertainty and also of conviction related to the location of Taprobane as revealed in their accounts show the nature of their quest in the exploration of the Indian Ocean in those early days of navigation.

Two unique world maps from the eve of the Portuguese discovery of Ceylon have reached us through surviving Italian copies. They epitomize the geographical approaches that culminated in the depiction of Taprobane and the state of understanding that preceded its imminent exploration. The way the cartographers of these two charts conceived the island-region visually summarizes the historical context in which they interpreted information already circulating about Taprobane against the fresh information just arriving from the voyages of discoveries. The cartographers therefore were confronted with the problem of reconciling and updating the discordant accounts, so that they could geographically visualize and translate them onto the charts now known as “Cantino” (1502) and “Caverio” (1505).

Ceylon appears on these charts, for the first time in the history of cartography in the West, reduced to tolerable proportions in relation to peninsular India and conceived in such a manner that it will soon be evolving into its real contours. This is the earliest image of the island to have appeared on Portuguese maps. However, opposite Ceylon, facing the “Malagha” [Malayan] peninsula, is “Ataprobana,” a name given to a large island, rectangular in form, featuring several place-names such as “Amotora,” a name which evokes an obvious affinity with Sumatra. This distinction between “Ceylon” and “Ataprobana” is very much in line with the distinction that Fra Mauro had made by transferring the classical name of Ceylon to Sumatra, calling it Taprobana. Thus, the authors of “Cantino” and “Caverio” charts share with medieval mapmakers and travelers the error of assigning the name Taprobane to Sumatra.

Meanwhile, the king of Portugal, Dom Manuel, seems to have at that time allied himself with those who thought that Taprobane was Ceylon. The Lisbon-based Moravian editor Valentin Fernandes did not have the least doubt as to a straightforward identification in the preface to his 1502 Portuguese translation of Marco Polo: “In front of the above mentioned cape lies the most famous city and the island of Taprobane, which is now called Seylam.” Making “the most famous city” out of the island of Taprobane is a minor error of Fernandes' not to be held against him. Despite the King’s official affirmation of support for the geographical research and discoveries recorded in his diverse letters, orders, and instructions, the authors of so-called “Cantino” and “Caverio” charts do not appear to have been capable of dissociating themselves from the old way of thinking that held Taprobane to be Ceylon. They persisted in maintaining the medieval cartographic tradition in which the legendary island had a definite place.

Ten years after the “Caverio” chart (1505) there appeared in the town of Abrantes (where the king of Portugal resided at the time) a pamphlet recounting the first contact of the Portuguese with the kings of Ceylon titled: “The Acquisition of the Island of Taprobane in Eastern Ethiopia.” One wonders whether this linking of two disparately situated countries might have been a conscious decision of the Portuguese with the goal of misleading their rivals. Whatever ignorance or premeditation brought about the error, Dom Manuel had a great deal of “evidence” to show to the Castillian kings in his effort to claim a large share of the geographical discoveries to be apportioned to the Lusitanians during the scramble for land that followed the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494/1506). Ought we not to see in the term “acquisition” the sense of a metaphor for the inclusion of Taprobane within the orbit of Portuguese discoveries, since, at that date, the Portuguese only had a sense of their way through these areas? A number of editions of the same pamphlet, bearing a variety of titles, registers the extent of the publicity given to the Portuguese “acquisition” of Taprobane.

Nevertheless, the world map by Johannes Ruysch (pictured at right) which appeared in 1507, separates Ceylon from Taprobane and registers very clearly on the map itself the announcement of the arrival of the Portuguese in Taprobane. A cosmographer from Krakow, Johannes Glogoviensis, maintained that the island of Taprobane was found under the equator. Speaking about its fame in wealth, he went on to state that “this had been attested, in the years 1501 and 1501 [sic], by those who were sent there by the king of Portugal in search of the islands in the world.” As Ceylon is located a little less than ten degrees above the equator, Glogoviensis' Taprobane might have referred to Sumatra, which is athwart the equator.

Barros, in an attempt to explain away the modest size of Taprobane in his day and thus avoid the necessity to disclaim the information of Ptolemy, who bestowed a major importance on Taprobane in exaggerating its size fifteen degrees lengthwise, that Barros decided to write: “According to what geographers have written about it, it seems that in the very ancient times, it [Ceylan] was a big as the inhabitants say where they affirm that it had a circumference of more than 700 leagues though little by little the sea had eaten into it; this is the reason why without doubt he (if we wish to salvage Ptolemy) assigned to it an extension of two and one-half degrees in the length beyond the equator towards the south.”

This demonstration by Barros reveals how the historian of Portuguese discoveries has recourse to the consequences of a geomorphological process, in other words, the erosion of the island by the sea, to explain the changed dimensions of Ceylon. His explanation does not depend so much on his obvious willingness to emphasize the geomorphological factor by way of an evasion but on his implicit, tenacious wish to save Ptolemy, the great authority of classical geography and thus establish the fact that the map of Taprobane given in his Geography and the Ceylon contemporary to Barros are one and the same.

In point of fact, Taprobane was considered synonymous with Sumatra not only by the geographers and historians living in metropolitan Lisbon but also by the Portuguese themselves living in the East. Several literary sources bear witness to this, including Garcia da Orta’s Colloquios, published in 1563 in Goa, the capital of the Portuguese empire in Asia. Camões, the minstrel par excellence of the Portuguese discoveries, makes Taprobane but one with Ceylon in stanza 51 of canto 10: “In his turn the noble isle of Taprobane also famous then for its ancient name that rendered it powerful and proud[ ... ].” On the other hand, Camões, while living in Goa some ten years before as a simple soldier, had assimilated Taprobane into Sumatra in the ode addressed to the then viceroy of India: “Trapobonico Achem[?], que ho mar molesta,” which translated literally means “Trapobanian Achem, that the sea bothers.” Thus Camões had translated Atjeh (pronounced Achem by the Portuguese) to Taprobane assuming it then as forming part of it. The adjective “Taprobanic” or “Taprobanian” encompasses the entire territory “of Sumatra” where Atjeh is situated.

Faria e Sousa commented on the introductory stanza of this article to the effect that: “Because if Ceylon is the island of Taprobane, the poet saying that they went beyond it and met other people, then we have to understand that they reached the island of Samatra; and if Samatra is Taprobane, then they would have gone even beyond and reached the Malucas. When all is said and done, the fact that they had reached Taprobane (even though by another route) was a great feat for that was the eastern end of the world for this eastern part of the world according to the Ancients [... ].”

An echo of this debate is found in the writings of the Portuguese mathematician and “Cosmographer of the State,” Eredia, a near contemporary of Orta and Camões. Eredia, who embarked on a voyage of discovery in search of the Island of Gold, found himself in the waters of Sumatra, a land that he called Taprobane. In an essay he wrote in 1615 he seems to have realized the mistake he had made in his geography and had attempted to rectify the error with the statement: “Ceylon which is otherwise called Taprobane by Pliny and Ptolemy.” What is more, Eredia juxtaposed a map of the ancient Taprobane with another he drew of Ceylam, driving home the point that both these names meant one and the same island. Gleaned from a variety of disparate sources, these scanty glimpses into the issues surrounding Taprobane shed light on the process of discoveries involving Portuguese cosmographical theorizing. These sparse notes help us expand our understanding of a little-known area of explorations that concerned a remote outpost of the Portuguese empire, called “Taprobane cum Ceildo” which lives in the minds of the Portuguese people as immortalized by Camões in the opening lines of the Lusiads.