Tall tales thought to hold feathery truths

THEY say the best place to hide a book is in a library.

This is certainly true of Thesaurus Geographicus by Abraham Ortelius of Antwerp, published in 1576 and the map of the known world he published six years earlier.

Ortelius was not a traveller. Instead he collected charts and stories from sailors who passed through Antwerp. And most science historians will tell you that his problem was that he was an undiscriminating collector with a bad habit of publishing tall tales that were completely false.

Because his work was rubbished so often, it lay neglected in libraries until comparatively recently. But an American scholar, James Romm, took a closer look at it and in 1994 made the discovery that Ortelius had noticed Africa and America fitted together rather neatly and postulated that the continents might have drifted apart.

Up until then the theory of continental drift was attributed to Alfred Wegener and dated to 1912. It took the theory most of the 20th century to be argued over and finally accepted into mainstream science. But it seems as though Ortelius had written about it nearly 350 years earlier and his work had been hidden in a library.

When I heard about this I became interested in Ortelius and took a look at his work myself. I discovered that one of the reasons everybody had made fun of him was that he had written about an unknown land to the south of the Cape of Good Hope which, “according to the Portuguese”, was ruled by giant parrots.

This I found interesting because it’s remarkably accurate. New Zealand was a then unknown land to the south and, at least up until about 1300, it was ruled by moas.

Moas were huge flightless birds. Some species were twice the height of a human being, far bigger than an ostrich, so they could truly be described as “giant”. They were herbivores that lived in forests and they had massive hooked beaks to help them deal with their diet of leaves, branches, fruits and nuts. Rather like a parrot’s beak, really.

They could be said to have ruled the land, though they did have one predator, an enormous bird of prey called Haast’s eagle, probably the largest raptor that killed its own prey that the world has ever seen. The pelvic bones of moas have been found with punctures from the talons of the great eagle.

But what happened around 1300 was that the first humans arrived in New Zealand — Maori people from Polynesia. They developed a so-called “Moa Culture”, hunting the giant birds, taking their eggs, and making elaborate ceremonial robes out of their feathers. Eventually they exterminated them. This also led to the extinction of Haast’s eagle.

There are arguments among scholars about when the last moas disappeared. Theories vary from one extreme that says the Maoris exterminated them in less than a century to another that believes (very improbably) that there are still moas left in remote parts of the country.

But the point is that moas were either alive or only very recently extinct when Ortelius was writing about giant parrots in the 1570s.

IT’S difficult to imagine how a Portuguese explorer could have heard about New Zealand and its moas nearly a century before Abel Tasman, the Dutch sailor who is thought to be the first European to have sighted its shores.

It’s difficult but it’s not impossible. Sailors have always been addicted to “scuttlebutt”, gossiping and spinning yarns to pass long watches at sea. Maybe somebody told somebody else that he’d met a Polynesian who had great tales of giant parrots. And maybe Ortelius deserves a lot more credit than he gets.