Like the giant gold-digging ants Herodotus described in the fifth century BC or this 16th-century depiction of shipwrecked Portuguese sailors battling giant crabs in the Indian Ocean, the fantastic, the strange and the astonishing have always been ascribed to whatever lands were little-known and distant. For Europeans, this was the East. CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY (BRY, INDIA ORIENTALIS, IV, 1601)