Increasingly, royal cartographers and navigators are beginning to question the belief that the westward discoveries are the Indies. Letters written recently by sailors in the employ of Castile and Portugal indicate that these unfamiliar shores, lush with greenery, vast, and inhabited by unfamiliar peoples, could not be in Asia but in an entirely new continent.

"There is nothing to equal Ptolemy's maps" grumbled Master João de Barros, a royal cartographer. "No temples of the Great Khan, no silk, no spices, nothing but jungle, tobacco, and feathered men who chatter like birds."

The early landings brought back reports of gold and kindness but also of cannibalism, opposition, and practices wholly alien to eastern habits. One of the captains noted that there the sun sets differently, that the stars follow unknown patterns. The vegetation is bizarre, the animals monstrous.

There are whispers circulating that what had long been considered a shortcut to India is in fact a gateway to some new and uncharted region of the world, neither East nor West but something entirely different.

Scholars whisper the heresy: perhaps the world is larger again. The court at Lisbon waits for further proof but if these "New Lands" are not Asia then Christendom must ready itself for conquest, for disorientation, and for cartographic upheaval.