Kabanata Kabanata 37 · But Now That People Had Broken Through The Bonds Of Their

NARROW MEDIÆVAL LIMITATIONS, THEY HAD TO HAVE MORE ROOM FOR THEIR

WANDERINGS. THE EUROPEAN WORLD HAD GROWN TOO SMALL FOR THEIR

AMBITIONS. IT WAS THE TIME OF THE GREAT VOYAGES OF DISCOVERY

The Crusades had been a lesson in the liberal art of travelling. But

very few people had ever ventured beyond the well-known beaten track

which led from Venice to Jaffe. In the thirteenth century the Polo

brothers, merchants of Venice, had wandered across the great Mongolian

desert and after climbing mountains as high as the moon, they had found

their way to the court of the great Khan of Cathay, the mighty emperor

of China. The son of one of the Polos, by the name of Marco, had

written a book about their adventures, which covered a period of more

than twenty years. The astonished world had gaped at his descriptions

of the golden towers of the strange island of Zipangu, which was his

Italian way of spelling Japan. Many people had wanted to go east, that

they might find this gold-land and grow rich. But the trip was too far

and too dangerous and so they stayed at home.

[Illustration: MARCO POLO]

Of course, there was always the possibility of making the voyage

by sea. But the sea was very unpopular in the Middle Ages and for

many very good reasons. In the first place, ships were very small.

The vessels on which Magellan made his famous trip around the world,

which lasted many years, were not as large as a modern ferryboat.

They carried from twenty to fifty men, who lived in dingy quarters

(too low to allow any of them to stand up straight) and the sailors

were obliged to eat poorly cooked food as the kitchen arrangements

were very bad and no fire could be made whenever the weather was the

least bit rough. The mediæval world knew how to pickle herring and

how to dry fish. But there were no canned goods and fresh vegetables

were never seen on the bill of fare as soon as the coast had been left

behind. Water was carried in small barrels. It soon became stale and

then tasted of rotten wood and iron rust and was full of slimy growing

things. As the people of the Middle Ages knew nothing about microbes

(Roger Bacon, the learned monk of the thirteenth century seems to

have suspected their existence, but he wisely kept his discovery to

himself) they often drank unclean water and sometimes the whole crew

died of typhoid fever. Indeed the mortality on board the ships of the

earliest navigators was terrible. Of the two hundred sailors who in

the year 1519 left Seville to accompany Magellan on his famous voyage

around the world, only eighteen returned. As late as the seventeenth

century when there was a brisk trade between western Europe and the

Indies, a mortality of 40 percent was nothing unusual for a trip from

Amsterdam to Batavia and back. The greater part of these victims died

of scurvy, a disease which is caused by lack of fresh vegetables and

which affects the gums and poisons the blood until the patient dies of

sheer exhaustion.

Under those circumstances you will understand that the sea did not

attract the best elements of the population. Famous discoverers like

Magellan and Columbus and Vasco da Gama travelled at the head of crews

that were almost entirely composed of ex-jailbirds, future murderers

and pickpockets out of a job.

These navigators certainly deserve our admiration for the courage and

the pluck with which they accomplished their hopeless tasks in the face

of difficulties of which the people of our own comfortable world can

have no conception. Their ships were leaky. The rigging was clumsy.

Since the middle of the thirteenth century they had possessed some sort

of a compass (which had come to Europe from China by way of Arabia and

the Crusades) but they had very bad and incorrect maps. They set their

course by God and by guess. If luck was with them they returned after

one or two or three years. In the other case, their bleached bones

remained behind on some lonely beach. But they were true pioneers. They

gambled with luck. Life to them was a glorious adventure. And all the

suffering, the thirst and the hunger and the pain were forgotten when

their eyes beheld the dim outlines of a new coast or the placid waters

of an ocean that had lain forgotten since the beginning of time.

[Illustration: HOW THE WORLD GREW LARGER]

Again I wish that I could make this book a thousand pages long. The

subject of the early discoveries is so fascinating. But history, to

give you a true idea of past times, should be like those etchings

which Rembrandt used to make. It should cast a vivid light on certain

important causes, on those which are best and greatest. All the rest

should be left in the shadow or should be indicated by a few lines. And

in this chapter I can only give you a short list of the most important

discoveries.

Keep in mind that all during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the

navigators were trying to accomplish just _one thing_—they wanted to

find a comfortable and safe road to the empire of Cathay (China), to

the island of Zipangu (Japan) and to those mysterious islands, where

grew the spices which the mediæval world had come to like since the

days of the Crusades, and which people needed in those days before the

introduction of cold storage, when meat and fish spoiled very quickly

and could only be eaten after a liberal sprinkling of pepper or nutmeg.

The Venetians and the Genoese had been the great navigators of the

Mediterranean, but the honour for exploring the coast of the Atlantic

goes to the Portuguese. Spain and Portugal were full of that patriotic

energy which their age-old struggle against the Moorish invaders had

developed. Such energy, once it exists, can easily be forced into new

channels. In the thirteenth century, King Alphonso III had conquered

the kingdom of Algarve in the southwestern corner of the Spanish

peninsula and had added it to his dominions. In the next century, the

Portuguese had turned the tables on the Mohammedans, had crossed the

straits of Gibraltar and had taken possession of Ceuta, opposite the

Arabic city of Ta’Rifa (a word which in Arabic means “inventory” and

which by way of the Spanish language has come down to us as “tariff,”)

and Tangiers, which became the capital of an African addition to

Algarve.

They were ready to begin their career as explorers.

In the year 1415, Prince Henry, known as Henry the Navigator, the

son of John I of Portugal and Philippa, the daughter of John of

Gaunt (about whom you can read in Richard II, a play by William

Shakespeare) began to make preparations for the systematic exploration

of northwestern Africa. Before this, that hot and sandy coast had been

visited by the Phœnicians and by the Norsemen, who remembered it as the

home of the hairy “wild man” whom we have come to know as the gorilla.

One after another, Prince Henry and his captains discovered the Canary

Islands—re-discovered the island of Madeira which a century before

had been visited by a Genoese ship, carefully charted the Azores which

had been vaguely known to both the Portuguese and the Spaniards, and

caught a glimpse of the mouth of the Senegal River on the west coast

of Africa, which they supposed to be the western mouth of the Nile. At

last, by the middle of the Fifteenth Century, they saw Cape Verde, or

the Green Cape, and the Cape Verde Islands, which lie almost halfway

between the coast of Africa and Brazil.

But Henry did not restrict himself in his investigations to the waters

of the Ocean. He was Grand Master of the Order of Christ. This was

a Portuguese continuation of the crusading order of the Templars

which had been abolished by Pope Clement V in the year 1312 at the

request of King Philip the Fair of France, who had improved the

occasion by burning his own Templars at the stake and stealing all

their possessions. Prince Henry used the revenues of the domains of

his religious order to equip several expeditions which explored the

hinterland of the Sahara and of the coast of Guinea.

But he was still very much a son of the Middle Ages and spent a great

deal of time and wasted a lot of money upon a search for the mysterious

“Prester John,” the mythical Christian Priest who was said to be the

Emperor of a vast empire “situated somewhere in the east.” The story of

this strange potentate had first been told in Europe in the middle of

the twelfth century. For three hundred years people had tried to find

“Prester John” and his descendants. Henry took part in the search.

Thirty years after his death, the riddle was solved.

[Illustration: THE WORLD OF COLUMBUS]

In the year 1486 Bartholomew Diaz, trying to find the land of Prester

John by sea, had reached the southernmost point of Africa. At first

he called it the Storm Cape, on account of the strong winds which had

prevented him from continuing his voyage toward the east, but the

Lisbon pilots who understood the importance of this discovery in their

quest for the India water route, changed the name into that of the Cape

of Good Hope.

One year later, Pedro de Covilham, provided with letters of credit on

the house of Medici, started upon a similar mission by land. He crossed

the Mediterranean and after leaving Egypt, he travelled southward. He

reached Aden, and from there, travelling through the waters of the

Persian Gulf which few white men had seen since the days of Alexander

the Great, eighteen centuries before, he visited Goa and Calicut on

the coast of India where he got a great deal of news about the island

of the Moon (Madagascar) which was supposed to lie halfway between

Africa and India. Then he returned, paid a secret visit to Mecca

and to Medina, crossed the Red Sea once more and in the year 1490

he discovered the realm of Prester John, who was no one less than

the Black Negus (or King) of Abyssinia, whose ancestors had adopted

Christianity in the fourth century, seven hundred years before the

Christian missionaries had found their way to Scandinavia.

These many voyages had convinced the Portuguese geographers and

cartographers that while the voyage to the Indies by an eastern

sea-route was possible, it was by no means easy. Then there arose a

great debate. Some people wanted to continue the explorations east of

the Cape of Good Hope. Others said, “No, we must sail west across the

Atlantic and then we shall reach Cathay.”

Let us state right here that most intelligent people of that day were

firmly convinced that the earth was not as flat as a pancake but

was round. The Ptolemean system of the universe, invented and duly

described by Claudius Ptolemy, the great Egyptian geographer, who had

lived in the second century of our era, which had served the simple

needs of the men of the Middle Ages, had long been discarded by the

scientists of the Renaissance. They had accepted the doctrine of the

Polish mathematician, Nicolaus Copernicus, whose studies had convinced

him that the earth was one of a number of round planets which turned

around the sun, a discovery which he did not venture to publish for

thirty-six years (it was printed in 1543, the year of his death) from

fear of the Holy Inquisition, a Papal court which had been established

in the thirteenth century when the heresies of the Albigenses and

the Waldenses in France and in Italy (very mild heresies of devoutly

pious people who did not believe in private property and preferred to

live in Christ-like poverty) had for a moment threatened the absolute

power of the bishops of Rome. But the belief in the roundness of the

earth was common among the nautical experts and, as I said, they were

now debating the respective advantages of the eastern and the western

routes.

Among the advocates of the western route was a Genoese mariner by the

name of Cristoforo Colombo. He was the son of a wool merchant. He seems

to have been a student at the University of Pavia where he specialised

in mathematics and geometry. Then he took up his father’s trade but

soon we find him in Chios in the eastern Mediterranean travelling on

business. Thereafter we hear of voyages to England but whether he went

north in search of wool or as the captain of a ship we do not know.

In February of the year 1477, Colombo (if we are to believe his own

words) visited Iceland, but very likely he only got as far as the Faröe

Islands which are cold enough in February to be mistaken for Iceland

by any one. Here Colombo met the descendants of those brave Norsemen

who in the tenth century had settled in Greenland and who had visited

America in the eleventh century, when Leif’s vessel had been blown to

the coast of Vineland, or Labrador.

[Illustration: THE GREAT DISCOVERIES, WESTERN HEMISPHERE]

What had become of those far western colonies no one knew. The American

colony of Thorfinn Karlsefne, the husband of the widow of Leif’s

brother Thorstein, founded in the year 1003, had been discontinued

three years later on account of the hostility of the Esquimaux. As for

Greenland, not a word had been heard from the settlers since the year

1440. Very likely the Greenlanders had all died of the Black Death,

which had just killed half the people of Norway. However that might

be, the tradition of a “vast land in the distant west” still survived

among the people of the Faröe and Iceland, and Colombo must have heard

of it. He gathered further information among the fishermen of the

northern Scottish islands and then went to Portugal where he married

the daughter of one of the captains who had served under Prince Henry

the Navigator.

[Illustration: THE GREAT DISCOVERIES, EASTERN HEMISPHERE]

From that moment on (the year 1478) he devoted himself to the quest of

the western route to the Indies. He sent his plans for such a voyage

to the courts of Portugal and Spain. The Portuguese, who felt certain

that they possessed a monopoly of the eastern route, would not listen

to his plans. In Spain, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile,

whose marriage in 1469 had made Spain into a single kingdom, were

busy driving the Moors from their last stronghold, Granada. They had

no money for risky expeditions. They needed every peseta for their

soldiers.

Few people were ever forced to fight as desperately for their ideas as

this brave Italian. But the story of Colombo (or Colon or Columbus,

as we call him,) is too well known to bear repeating. The Moors

surrendered Granada on the second of January of the year 1492. In

the month of April of the same year, Columbus signed a contract with

the King and Queen of Spain. On Friday, the 3rd of August, he left

Palos with three little ships and a crew of 88 men, many of whom were

criminals who had been offered indemnity of punishment if they joined

the expedition. At two o’clock in the morning of Friday, the 12th of

October, Columbus discovered land. On the fourth of January of the year

1493, Columbus waved farewell to the 44 men of the little fortress

of La Navidad (none of whom was ever again seen alive) and returned

homeward. By the middle of February he reached the Azores where the

Portuguese threatened to throw him into gaol. On the fifteenth of

March, 1493, the admiral reached Palos and together with his Indians

(for he was convinced that he had discovered some outlying islands of

the Indies and called the natives red Indians) he hastened to Barcelona

to tell his faithful patrons that he had been successful and that

the road to the gold and the silver of Cathay and Zipangu was at the

disposal of their most Catholic Majesties.

Alas, Columbus never knew the truth. Towards the end of his life, on

his fourth voyage, when he had touched the mainland of South America,

he may have suspected that all was not well with his discovery. But

he died in the firm belief that there was no solid continent between

Europe and Asia and that he had found the direct route to China.

Meanwhile, the Portuguese, sticking to their eastern route, had been

more fortunate. In the year 1498, Vasco da Gama had been able to

reach the coast of Malabar and return safely to Lisbon with a cargo

of spice. In the year 1502 he had repeated the visit. But along the

western route, the work of exploration had been most disappointing. In

1497 and 1498 John and Sebastian Cabot had tried to find a passage to

Japan but they had seen nothing but the snowbound coasts and the rocks

of Newfoundland, which had first been sighted by the Northmen, five

centuries before. Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine who became the Pilot

Major of Spain, and who gave his name to our continent, had explored

the coast of Brazil, but had found not a trace of the Indies.

In the year 1513, seven years after the death of Columbus, the truth

at last began to dawn upon the geographers of Europe. Vasco Nuñez de

Balboa had crossed the Isthmus of Panama, had climbed the famous peak

in Darien, and had looked down upon a vast expanse of water which

seemed to suggest the existence of another ocean.

Finally in the year 1519 a fleet of five small Spanish ships under

command of the Portuguese navigator, Ferdinand de Magellan, sailed

westward (and not eastward since that route, was absolutely in the

hands of the Portuguese who allowed no competition) in search of

the Spice Islands. Magellan crossed the Atlantic between Africa and

Brazil and sailed southward. He reached a narrow channel between the

southernmost point of Patagonia, the “land of the people with the big

feet,” and the Fire Island (so named on account of a fire, the only

sign of the existence of natives, which the sailors watched one night).

For almost five weeks the ships of Magellan were at the mercy of the

terrible storms and blizzards which swept through the straits. A mutiny

broke out among the sailors. Magellan suppressed it with terrible

severity and sent two of his men on shore where they were left to

repent of their sins at leisure. At last the storms quieted down, the

channel broadened, and Magellan entered a new ocean. Its waves were

quiet and placid. He called it the Peaceful Sea, the Mare Pacifico.

Then he continued in a western direction. He sailed for ninety-eight

days without seeing land. His people almost perished from hunger and

thirst and ate the rats that infested the ships, and when these were

all gone they chewed pieces of sail to still their gnawing hunger.

[Illustration: MAGELLAN]

In March of the year 1521 they saw land. Magellan called it the land of

the Ladrones (which means robbers) because the natives stole everything

they could lay hands on. Then further westward to the Spice Islands!

Again land was sighted. A group of lonely islands. Magellan called

them the Philippines, after Philip, the son of his master Charles V,

the Philip II of unpleasant historical memory. At first Magellan was

well received, but when he used the guns of his ships to make Christian

converts he was killed by the aborigines, together with a number

of his captains and sailors. The survivors burned one of the three

remaining ships and continued their voyage. They found the Moluccas,

the famous Spice Islands; they sighted Borneo and reached Tidor. There,

one of the two ships, too leaky to be of further use, remained behind

with her crew. The “Vittoria,” under Sebastian del Cano, crossed the

Indian Ocean, missed seeing the northern coast of Australia (which

was not discovered until the first half of the seventeenth century

when ships of the Dutch East India Company explored this flat and

inhospitable land), and after great hardships reached Spain.

This was the most notable of all voyages. It had taken three years.

It had been accomplished at a great cost both of men and money. But

it had established the fact that the earth was round and that the

new lands discovered by Columbus were not a part of the Indies but a

separate continent. From that time on, Spain and Portugal devoted all

their energies to the development of their Indian and American trade.

To prevent an armed conflict between the rivals, Pope Alexander VI

(the only avowed heathen who was ever elected to this most holy

office) had obligingly divided the world into two equal parts by

a line of demarcation which followed the 50th degree of longitude

west of Greenwich, the so-called division of Tordesillas of 1494.

The Portuguese were to establish their colonies to the east of this

line, the Spaniards were to have theirs to the west. This accounts

for the fact that the entire American continent with the exception of

Brazil became Spanish and that all of the Indies and most of Africa

became Portuguese until the English and the Dutch colonists (who had

no respect for Papal decisions) took these possessions away in the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

[Illustration: A NEW WORLD]

When news of the discovery of Columbus reached the Rialto of Venice,

the Wall street of the Middle Ages, there was a terrible panic. Stocks

and bonds went down 40 and 50 percent. After a short while, when it

appeared that Columbus had failed to find the road to Cathay, the

Venetian merchants recovered from their fright. But the voyages of

da Gama and Magellan proved the practical possibilities of an eastern

water-route to the Indies. Then the rulers of Genoa and Venice, the two

great commercial centres of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, began

to be sorry that they had refused to listen to Columbus. But it was

too late. Their Mediterranean became an inland sea. The overland trade

to the Indies and China dwindled to insignificant proportions. The old

days of Italian glory were gone. The Atlantic became the new centre of

commerce and therefore the centre of civilisation. It has remained so

ever since.

See how strangely civilisation has progressed since those early days,

fifty centuries before, when the inhabitants of the Valley of the Nile

began to keep a written record of history. From the river Nile, it

went to Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers. Then came the turn

of Crete and Greece and Rome. An inland sea became the centre of trade

and the cities along the Mediterranean were the home of art and science

and philosophy and learning. In the sixteenth century it moved westward

once more and made the countries that border upon the Atlantic become

the masters of the earth.

There are those who say that the world war and the suicide of the great

European nations has greatly diminished the importance of the Atlantic

Ocean. They expect to see civilisation cross the American continent and

find a new home in the Pacific. But I doubt this.

The westward trip was accompanied by a steady increase in the size

of ships and a broadening of the knowledge of the navigators. The

flat-bottomed vessels of the Nile and the Euphrates were replaced by

the sailing vessels of the Phœnicians, the Ægeans, the Greeks, the

Carthaginians and the Romans. These in turn were discarded for the

square rigged vessels of the Portuguese and the Spaniards. And the

latter were driven from the ocean by the full-rigged craft of the

English and the Dutch.

At present, however, civilisation no longer depends upon ships.

Aircraft has taken and will continue to take the place of the sailing

vessel and the steamer. The next centre of civilisation will depend

upon the development of aircraft and water power. And the sea once

more shall be the undisturbed home of the little fishes, who once upon

a time shared their deep residence with the earliest ancestors of the

human race.