[Illustration: Cover art]
THE GREATEST STORY IN THE WORLD
PERIOD III
The Development of the Modern World
[Frontispiece: A COMPOSITE PHOTOGRAPH SHOWING THE FIRST LOCOMOTIVE
EVER MADE FOR A PUBLIC RAILWAY STANDING UPON THE SAME TRACK ALONG
WHICH IT HAULED THE FIRST TRAIN ON SEPTEMBER 27TH, 1825, AND THE
"FLYING SCOTSMAN" CROSSING THE OLD LINE AT DARLINGTON.]
THE GREATEST STORY
IN THE WORLD
PERIOD III
The Development of the Modern World
BY HORACE G. HUTCHINSON
LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
FIRST EDITION ... 1926
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES
{v}
PREFACE TO PERIOD III
In this third and final volume of the Greatest Story in the World I
have tried to give an outline sketch of the happenings of the last
five centuries. It is the period which must appeal more forcibly
than any earlier time to all of Anglo-Saxon race, because it is the
Anglo-Saxon race that plays by far the largest role in it, and a role
which becomes of constantly increasing interest right down to the
present day. We first see Great Britain, in the gallant figures of
Elizabeth's sea-captains, as chief actor in thwarting the aims at
world empire of Spain. A little while, and we see her again taking
the lead in abating the arrogance of the Grand Monarque, Louis XIV.
of France. But of far greater importance than even this checking of
the powers of the would-be masters of the world is that part which
fortune or Providence assigned to her to play so conspicuously
throughout the second half of the period which this volume
covers--the part of mother of nations. It is thus that the
historian, J. R. Green, writes of her as she appeared to the world
after the United States had fought their way to independence--not a
nation broken by her loss, as all had perhaps expected to find her,
possibly a sadder and certainly a wiser nation, but, most surprising
of all, stronger and more adventurous.
These are Mr. Green's words: "From the moment of the Declaration of
Independence it mattered little whether England counted for less or
more with the {vi} nations around her. She was no longer a mere
European power, no longer a mere rival of Germany or Russia or
France. She was from that hour a mother of nations.... And to these
nations she was to give not only her blood and her speech, but the
freedom which she had won. It is the thought of this which flings
its grandeur round the pettiest details of our story in the past.
The history of France has little result beyond France itself. German
or Italian history has no direct issue outside the boundaries of
Germany or Italy. But England is only a small part of the outcome of
English history. Its greater issues lie not within the narrow limits
of the mother island, but in the destinies of nations yet to be. The
struggles of her patriots, the wisdom of her statesmen, the steady
love of liberty and law in her people at large, were shaping in the
past of our little island the future of mankind."
The greatest part, in fact, of this Greatest Story for the last
hundred and fifty years has been made in England. That is, indeed,
much to say, but it is not too much.
In this volume I have thought best not to take up space with
description of the way in which men have so lately lived, have built
their houses, and so on. I have assumed that all this would be more
or less familiar to my readers from other books and pictures and
talk. And not even in vaguest outline have I attempted a sketch of
the Great War and its effects. The moving picture which I have tried
to make intelligible stops before the curtain is rung up on that grim
tragedy whose import we do not even now fully understand.
And yet again my best thanks are due to Mr. R. B. Lattimer for
valuable criticisms and suggestions.
{vii}
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. How Man sailed East and West
II. The Stories of the Old East and of the New West
III. Three Kings and a Monk
IV. The Waning Power of Spain
V. The Wars of Religion
VI. The Growing Power of France
VII. The Humbling of France
VIII. From the Peace of Utrecht to the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle
IX. The Seven Years' War
X. How The United States won Independence
XI. How the Stage was set for the French Revolution
XII. The Revolution and the Terror
XIII. The Napoleonic Wars
XIV. The Expansion of the Anglo-Saxon and the Slav
XV. Steam and Evolution
XVI. The Resettlement of Europe
XVII. The Settlement of America
XVIII. "The White Man's Burden"
SECTION I.--Africa
SECTION II.--India and the Far East
SECTION III.--The Far South
Index
{viii}
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Railway Centenary, 1925: Ancient and Modern Locomotives ...
_Frontispiece_
Ships of the Time of Henry VIII.
Mexican Picture Writing
Statue of Buddha
Sir Francis Drake
General Wolfe's Statue, Quebec
The Potala at Lhasa
The Taj Mahal, Agra
Warren Hastings
The Modern Palace of Versailles
Napoleon I.
H.M.S. "Victory" after Trafalgar
The Duke of Wellington
An Old Mail Coach
Old Hand Loom and Modern Power Loom
Garibaldi
Old Japan: Entrance to the Tombs, Tokio
A Street Scene in Modern Japan
A Scene in New Zealand: Mt. Pembroke
{1}
THE GREATEST STORY IN THE WORLD
CHAPTER I
HOW MAN SAILED EAST AND WEST
Suddenly, at the end of the fifteenth century, the persons of our
story found the picture of the world which they carried in their
minds wonderfully expanded, rather as if it were a closed fist widely
opening. Columbus in 1492 "discovered America": Vasco da Gama, in
1487, "rounded the Cape of Good Hope."
That is the way in which most of the history books state it for us;
but it is a statement which gives credit to Columbus for a little
more than he actually did, and does not put enough to the credit of
da Gama. For it was not what we call America at all which Columbus
discovered in 1492, but only one of what we now know as the West
Indies, or West Indian Islands: and the mere "rounding" of the Cape
of Good Hope had been done by another before da Gama, but da Gama,
after "rounding" and sailing up the eastern coast of Africa, struck
across to the western coast of India. As a feat of navigation his
voyage was far greater than that of Columbus.
{2}
[Sidenote: Vasco da Gama]
Thus Vasco da Gama, going eastward, reached the western coast of
India, and Columbus, going westward, reached the "West Indies." The
name is worth noting.
These islands, as further exploration showed them to be, were called
"West Indies," because men had expected to reach India by sailing
west. The geographers had no conception of the great continent of
America and the vast ocean of the Pacific that lay between the land
touched by Columbus and the land which he thought that he had touched.
No matter. He came back with a very marvellous story--a story which
grew ever more marvellous as further exploration revealed the
astonishing truth.
What made this discovery of America so intensely exciting was that it
was discovery of a land wholly new and unexpected. Although the
voyage of Vasco da Gama to India was a new and remarkable achievement
in navigation, the people in the West, the only people with whom this
"greatest story" has been concerned until this time, were tolerably
informed about the East. But its story had never before come into
their own and mingled itself with their own so that each should have
an effect and make a change in the other, as did begin to happen now.
The "New World," as it was called, of America, unlike the East,
scarcely had a story at all. A few, a very few, historical records
were discovered by the Spaniards in Mexico and Peru. The inhabitants
whom the Spaniards found there had been workers in gold and silver,
and the riches which Spain obtained by robbery of this treasure and,
later, by working the gold mines and silver mines from which the
precious metals were taken, made a large difference, as we shall see,
in the history of men in Europe. But for the rest the "New World"
had no history, no activities, which worked into and altered the
history of the old. {3} The old world was vastly affected by the
discovery nevertheless. Just because it was so new, and occupied by
savages who were able to make very little resistance to invasion, it
enlarged the actual size of the world both for men's imaginations and
also as a place for them to live in. But except for the treasure
which the Spaniards took, it had little to send back to the old
world. All else was a going out of the old world to the new.
Da Gama did not discover a new world. He merely--but it made a vast
difference to the story--proved possible a new and far more
convenient route to a country already known. Thus he brought that
known land into contact with Europe so that the story of the far East
interpenetrated the European story as it never had done before. The
whole, in fact, became one world-wide story.
The East had been sending her produce to the West ever since the
West--by which term we here mean Europe--had been civilised enough to
need and to value it. There was a very ancient overland route from
the north-west of India through Persia and Mesopotamia to Tyre and
the Mediterranean coast. Another way was oversea from some Indian
port as far as the head, that is to say the northern end, of the
Persian Gulf, and thence, as before, overland to a port on the coast
of Syria. And thirdly, there was a route by longer sea, again
starting from India, calling perhaps at one or two ports in Arabia
and up through the Red Sea. At a port in the Red Sea the goods would
be landed and taken, probably on camel-back, to the Nile, and would
be brought down the river and transhipped at its mouth into vessels
which would carry them to Venice or Genoa.
The chief Indian port from which the trading vessels sailed, whether
to the Persian Gulf or to the Red Sea, was Calicut, which we still
see marked on {4} the maps of India. It is a town on what is called
the Malabar Coast, on the western side of India, low down towards the
west.
And not only did ships bearing the produce of India start from
Calicut, but Calicut was also the port to which came ships, some of
them of great size, from the farther East, bearing the silks of
China, the spices of the islands of the Malay Archipelago, and so on.
All the carrying trade west of Calicut seems to have been in the
hands of Mahommedans, by far the most part of them being Arabs, at
the date of da Gama's adventurous voyage to India. It was, of
course, by far the more adventurous and full of danger for that very
reason, because here was he, a Christian, and therefore to be
regarded as almost their natural enemy by all good Mahommedans,
coming to interfere with a trade which they had made their own.
It does not seem possible that they did not realise what his coming
was likely to mean for the future of that trade. The Arab traders
themselves knew the eastern coast of Africa at least as far south as
Mozambique, for it was at this point that da Gama first came into
touch with them. And it is probable that they knew the African coast
further south also. They must have realised that ships going round
the Cape of Good Hope could carry goods from India to Europe very
much more cheaply than they could be transported by means which
involved several transhipments, the payment of duties at several
ports, and a longer or shorter carriage overland.
The wonder is that da Gama, going with only three vessels and of no
great size--they were of the kind that were known as caravels--was
ever allowed by the Moslems to come home again. But he artfully
pretended to them that these three were only part of a larger fleet
from which they had become separated, {5} and it may be that this
pretence imposed upon the Arabs and deterred them from doing him any
injury. As it was, he was imprisoned for awhile by one of the
Sultans, or rulers of a territory on the Indian coast, but by some
means he conciliated his captor and was allowed to trade and go home
again with his ships laden with silks, pearls, rubies, and a variety
of treasure. The question that naturally occurs now is why it should
have been the Portuguese, of all the European nations, that were led
to undertake this sailing round Africa. The answer is interesting,
because it involves an explanation of a curious idea of the
geographers of the day.
We saw, in the second volume of this Greatest Story, Arabs and Moors
established along the fertile fringe of Northern Africa. Northward
of this fringe lay the Mediterranean; behind it, that is to say to
the south, the desert. But the African tribes had penetrated and
traversed this desert. They had learnt that there was, on the far
side of it, a fertile land again, a land which was later known as
Guinea. And this land was watered by a great river, now known as the
Senegal river, flowing from the east and coming out into the sea in
the Gulf of Guinea. It appeared to come from much the same direction
as that in which they rightly supposed lay the sources of the Nile,
the river of Egypt; and they seem to have imagined it a western
branch of that ancient river. If they could mount up this branch
then far enough in their boats they deemed that they might come out
on the Nile, and so, if they pleased, arrive again on the
Mediterranean.
[Sidenote: The land of slaves]
Apart from this idea, the land in itself was rich and produced much
that they valued--gold dust and ivory in the elephants' tusks which
the natives brought or barter with them--but above the ivory and gold
and the rest of the rich products they valued the {6} natives
themselves, whom they captured and brought to markets in the
Mediterranean towns and sold for slaves. Slaves had a value then
which is not easy for us to realise to-day when our great difficulty
is to find work for men to do. At that time the difficulty was to
find men to do the work; and perhaps this was more true of Portugal
and Spain than of other European countries, because so much of their
territory lay uncultivated and waste by reason of the continual wars
which had been waged between the Christians and the Moors. They
needed men badly to till those waste lands. This fertile country
then, south of the extensive tract of desert, had much that might
attract the Spaniard or the Portugee.
We do not know very precisely why it was that little Portugal, rather
than great Spain, sent out the mariners which worked southward along
the western coast of Africa. We do not know, but perhaps we may make
a guess. Spain had a large stretch of coast, with many ports, along
the Mediterranean, and it is likely that Portuguese vessels would not
have been very welcome if they tried to trade in that direction.
Moreover, the Mediterranean swarmed with pirates, both of Mahommedan
and Christian nations. It was no peaceful sea for the trader.
Again, Spain had a long coast line northward and north-eastward right
away to where the Pyrenees come up to the Bay of Biscay. There was
no warm welcome there for ships encroaching on Spanish trade.
Therefore, if the Portuguese sailors were to be adventurous at all
there was no other very apparent direction for their enterprise to
take than that of the western coast of Africa and of the islands that
lay off it, such as Madeira, the Canaries, and the Cape Verde islands.
[Sidenote: Portuguese adventurers]
And there can be no doubt about the adventurous spirit of the
Portuguese sailors of that day. They were inspired by the spirit of
adventure, but also--for {7} human motives are generally mixed--the
adventure attracted them by the profits to be gained in it, the gold
and the slaves. Further, we have to credit them with a more noble
and spiritual motive, for they were inspired with a fervent
conviction that it was a work most pleasing to God to induce the
natives of new-found lands to become Christians. The means employed
to this end were often cruel, but we ought to realise that it was a
very real motive, both with the Spaniard and the Portugee. It is a
motive which gives dignity to their conquests. They were not
undertaken solely for material gain. Even if the means were cruel by
which they converted a savage, whether of Africa or of America, they
believed that it was in the truest sense a kindness to be thus cruel,
if by so dealing with his body his soul might be saved.
Such motives as the above had their influence not only with the
adventurers themselves, but also with the Governments of their
countries. A member of the Royal family of Portugal, known in story
as Prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460), especially favoured and
helped to equip these expeditions. He was grandson of our own John
of Gaunt. Perhaps his title of "Navigator" was cheaply earned, for
there is no evidence that he ventured far oversea himself, but the
distant voyages owed very much of their success to his assistance.
Thus the Portuguese crept farther and farther down the African coast
until at length they rounded it, and in the last years of the
fifteenth century da Gama achieved the great adventure. He must have
deemed himself uncommonly fortunate to come home, with those three
"caravels," to his native land, and that he was considered to have
been favoured by fortune we may gather from Portugal's later conduct.
Her rulers were far from trusting that it would be always so--that
her trading ships might always go {8} safely voyaging in those seas
which the Moslems had hitherto deemed to be their own. One fleet,
more powerful and more numerous than da Gama's poor three ships, was
sent out, and again another, greater still, until the Portuguese had
taken all the chief ports--Mozambique, on the eastern shore of Africa
itself, the ports commanding the entries of the Red Sea and of the
Persian Gulf--had penetrated farther east and captured the great
trading port of Malacca, had even landed in China, and had
established their headquarters at Goa, in the Indian peninsula.
It is not the least wonderful part of the whole surprising story that
they should have made this conquest so completely and so easily. We
must attribute it to the superiority of their ships in comparison
with those of the Arabs and other Moslems in that sea, to their
better armament and to their greater skill in using these ships for
naval battle. Had the Mahommedans of that ocean possessed anything
like the ships and the experience of marine warfare that sailors of
the same religion in the Mediterranean had acquired by perpetual
sea-fighting, it is not possible that Portugal could have dominated
them so decisively and at such slight cost to herself. Besides that
the Portuguese could manœuvre far more skilfully with their ships,
and knew how to combine them for attack, the guns which their ships
carried seem to have been far more powerful than any that the Moslems
had, whether ashore or afloat; for not only do we find them gaining
the victory in all the naval battles, but they employed their ships'
guns in bombarding the ports and combining the bombardment from the
sea with attacks by their landing forces.
The result of it all was that within a dozen or so years of da Gama's
reaching India the Portuguese were the masters of those seas, and had
the whole of that trade in their hands. And while Portugal thus {9}
worked her way to the dominance of the eastern sea, Spain was
confirming the conquests for which Columbus had pointed her the way
in the West.
[Sidenote: Atlantis]
For some years there had been vague rumours in Europe of an island
far out in the western sea, and a still more confident idea that if
men could sail westward far enough they would come to the eastern
side of Asia. That was the goal at which they aimed, in the westward
sailing. Columbus' special genius and courage inspired him to go
bravely on this western cruise, not troubling himself, as others had
done before him, with the search for that fabulous island, of
Atlantis, supposed to be somewhere in the mid-ocean, but holding his
way continuously towards the sunset until he did at length touch a
land which he thought to be that eastern Asia which he had set out to
look for.
We know how that it was something very different. During the next
few years Spain kept sending out expedition after expedition, to find
out what sort of new world it was that this bold sailor had thus
reached. To Spain fell the enterprise and the conquest first, but
not by any natural sequence of events, for it was truly due to the
genius of Columbus, who was a man of Genoa, and no son of Spain at
all, that the first enterprise of discovery was undertaken. He could
not attempt it at his own cost. His native state would not furnish
him with the means. For four years he was trying to get his voyage
"financed," as we should say now--that is, get its expenses paid--by
the Governments either of Spain or of England. He had a brother
working to this end at the English Court, while he was pleading his
own cause at the Court of Spain. Our Henry VII. was just beginning
to listen favourably to the prayer of the brother, when Isabella,
joint ruler, with Ferdinand, of Spain, was won by the eloquence of
Christopher Columbus. {10} Spain equipped the ships, and England,
whether for her good or her ill it is interesting to speculate, but
impossible surely to know, lost her chance of achieving the
astonishingly rich conquest which thus came to Spain.
For what the repeated Spanish expeditions established ever more
conclusively was the amazing richness of the new world, or, at least,
of that part of it which she was first to conquer. And yet, at the
beginning, there was some disappointment. We have seen how one of
the great needs of these countries of the old world was men to
cultivate their war-wasted lands. This man-power they were
constantly hoping to increase by acquiring slaves. Portugal did
acquire slaves, who proved excellent workers, from Africa. The
slaves which the first conquerors of the West brought to Spain were
nearly useless. The Red Indian, as it became the fashion to call him
later, has never been of any value, as the African negro and the East
Indian "coolie" have been valuable, in the service of the white man.
Thence, just at first, arose disappointment in Spain. But later, as
the treasures in gold and silver and gems of the new land were
brought over and became known and appreciated, there was ever growing
joy and triumph over the El Dorado--the Golden Land--which had thus
surprisingly been added to the Spanish Crown. There were new riches,
without limit, to be brought home, new souls, beyond number, to be
saved. Priests went out with the conquerors. It was a spiritual, as
well as a material conquest. Immense treasure was taken when in 1521
Cortez made himself master of Mexico, and twelve years later the yet
greater wealth of Peru was added by the conquest of Pizarro.
And it was a conquest and a source of riches with which at first no
other country interfered. We have {11} seen, however, that Columbus
in the first instance, sailing west, had supposed himself to arrive
on the eastern shore of Asia and of India--the eastern shore, that is
to say, of the very land at which the Portuguese arrived by sailing
east. It was apparent then that if these voyagings were prolonged
far enough the ships must meet, or at least must cross each other's
path. Therefore the two nations came to an agreement between
themselves for the amicable partition of the world. It was arranged
that Spain should have all lands, that she should conquer from any
non-Christian peoples, to the west of a line drawn from north to
south half-way between the Azores and the West Indies, and that
Portugal should have the lands that she might similarly conquer to
the east of that line. Each country would establish the Christian
Church in its conquered territories; and the division was sanctioned
by the Pope in a "Bull," as the Papal pronouncement is called, dated
as early as 1493.
The northern nations of Europe paid only a partial respect to the
Bull. Before the close of the fifteenth century Henry VII. of
England had given a charter to a Venetian seaman--he had learnt his
seamanship in Venice, though he, like Columbus, was a Genoese by
birth--Cabot and his three sons to claim as England's possession any
non-Christian lands that they might discover in the West. This
charter, however, was expressly stated to apply to the northern,
western, and eastern seas, but not the southern, a restriction which
obviously shows that the rights of Spain and Portugal in the south
were observed.
[Sidenote: America]
Long years before this, Northmen, as is told in the Saga of Eric the
Red, sailing from Iceland and going west, had come to a land which
they had called Vineland the Good. It is supposed to have been
either Newfoundland or the mainland of North America. Very likely
they touched both. There is {12} a small grape that grows there
which might justify the name. They tried to form a settlement there,
but the settlers were all murdered by the natives, and the attempt
was not repeated. From the port of Bristol there was commerce with
Iceland. There can be no doubt that sailors brought the account of
this enterprise, and of this Vineland, to Bristol. When the Cabots
went westward it is likely that it was this land which they had a
mind to seek.
The result of their expedition was that they reached and explored the
western coasts of Newfoundland and of Labrador, but found nothing of
such promise as tempted them to bring back any glowing reports of the
new-found land. Its effect was indeed to extinguish the interest of
England in these western voyages for many years.
In the very last year of the century the coast of South America was
touched by two expeditions, one Spanish, the other Portuguese. The
former had on board that Amerigo Vespucci who later wrote an account
of the voyage and after whom America has its name. The expedition
with which Amerigo sailed touched the coast of what we now call
Brazil, and it seems to have been a surprise to discover that this
part of the continent lay within the north and south line which had
been drawn on the chart to define the westernmost possession of the
Portuguese.
[Sidenote: A circumnavigation]
Within the first quarter of the following century the Spaniards
exploring northward had proved the continuity of the great continent
with that land which Cabot had reached. Southward a Portugee,
Magellan, had sailed through the straits which bear his name, had
rounded Cape Horn and come out into the Pacific. This boldest
perhaps of all seamen, in an age of bold seamen, pressed still
westward over the ocean, to meet his death from the spear of a native
in the far west islands of the Philippines. He had, in fact, made
{13} real the vision of Columbus--to reach the East by sailing west.
His ship, the _Victoria_, returned safely to Europe, being the first
to accomplish a circumnavigation, or voyage round the world, in 1522.
The voyage had occupied three years all but a fortnight.
[Illustration: SHIPS OF THE TIME OF HENRY VIII.]
And by this time the coast of the Pacific on the western side of
America had been reached at several points by travellers overland,
and the extent and contour of the New World could be tolerably well
mapped out except in its north-western quarter.
{14}