BUT NOW THAT PEOPLE HAD BROKEN THROUGH THE BONDS OF THEIR NARROW
MEDIAEVAL 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.
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 mediaeval 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 bleeched 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.
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 mediaeval 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
Phoenicians 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
"Presser 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
"Presser John" and his descendants Henry took part in the search. Thirty
years after his death, the riddle was solved.
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 1548, 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 Faroe 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.
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 Faroe 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.
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 Nunez 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.
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.
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 Phoenicians, the AEgeans, 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.