Page:Further India; (IA furtherindia00clif).pdf/76

their way round the Cape of Good Hope, seeking a new highroad to India, the minds of even the learned of Europe presented something like a tabula rasa upon which was inscribed none of the facts concerning southeastern Asia that had been collected by the geographers and mariners of antiquity, which had been added to by many Arabian writers, and which had received detailed confirmation from the European wanderers of the Middle Ages. It is in the coming of the Portuguese, therefore, that the exploration of Malaya and of Indo-China by the peoples of the west may properly be said to have had its beginning.