Note 51 — Chapter IV · THE PORTUGUESE IN AFRICA

It had however been known to Italian and Norman navigators a century earlier. Indeed it is increasingly probable that the Portuguese as discoverers of West Africa had been preceded a hundred years earlier by the Genoese, the Catalans and Majorcans, and the Norman French of Dieppe. A remarkable map of the continent of Africa was painted in Italy, about 1351, and is now in the Medicean Library at Florence. It is known as the Laurentian Portolano and gives the most correct general outline of the whole continent which had as yet been depicted. For the first time the great Bight of the Gulf of Guinea is shown, together with the tongue-like projection southwards of Central and Southern Africa. There is even the indication of a river where the Congo emerges into the South Atlantic.