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.

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[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.

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