CHAPTER IVEARLY VOYAGES AND EXPLORATIONS

ornate capital W

Whereverit may have been that man first appeared upon the earth, the period must certainly have been incalculably long ago, for he had time to spread to all parts of the habitable globe long before any sort of record begins. Little, if any, part of the world has yet been found where the evidences of man’s residence in the long-forgotten past do not exist. So long ago that all tradition of it is forgotten, and only the imperishable stone implements they used remain as traces of their presence, mankind had reached and settled the farthest northern and eastern coasts of Europe and Asia, and the southern extremities of Africa and India. These might have been reached by land; but similar traces exist in many islands which, so far as we can see, could never have been connected with each other or with any continent by lands now submerged (as perhaps has been the case in some other islands) since man originated. Such places, then, could have been reached and colonized only by means of boats, and that at an exceedingly remote time.

Some hint of what these prehistoric navigators might have been able to do may be gathered from the performances that we know of in the South Sea, where almost every island and coral atoll that could support a colony has apparently been inhabited, since long before even tradition begins, although some of them, like the Hawaiian group, are separated from all others by hundreds of miles of open sea.

It is exceedingly interesting and suggestive to read in a work like Professor Friedrich Ratzel’s “History of Mankind,” of the dispersion of population over the islands of the South Pacific Ocean, where a mixed population of black and yellow races possessed themselves of the whole of Oceanica long before white men had even heard of that part of the world. Thisastounding fact gains in significance when we remember that wide tracts of very deep ocean divide these islands, many of which are so small that they were found by exploring navigators only with difficulty. Cook and Beechey and other early voyagers note finding upon certain islands people who had come thither in their own boats over distances of six or eight hundred miles; and there are many instances of castaways surviving voyages of one thousand or fifteen hundred miles, even against the trade-winds. But these involuntary voyages were no longer than many others undertaken for war or trade, or because of famine or a mere love of wandering. Over-population of the limited spaces of most islands and groups led to the colonization of others; and it must often have been necessary to go far away to seek unoccupied or thinly peopled refuges. This could not have been done had men not been good shipwrights, not only, but careful students of the heavens by whose sun and moon and stars they steered, aiding themselves with charts made of sticks. The remotest groups, like the Sandwich Islands and Easter Island, were found and settled too long ago even for tradition to retain more than a fabulous story about it. “These Vikings of the Pacific,” says Ratzel, “continued to discover even small and remote islets. In the whole of the Pacific there is not one island of any size of which it was left to Europeans to demonstrate the habitability.” It has even been argued that the continent of America was peopled by Pacific Islanders, who made their way to it from Polynesia; but of this there is no direct evidence, and it seems unlikely, because the prevailing winds and currents flow from South America, rather than toward it, in this part of the Pacific.

But leaving these dim old times when barbarous men voyaged far and wide over seas, and races mingled that were born on opposite sides of wide waters, let us note what traveling our civilized ancestors did.

The evidences of ruined walls, graves, carvings, and stone tools show that that earliest of civilized races of which we now have any knowledge—the Hittites—were acquainted not only with the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea, but had boldly rounded the headlands of Spain, skirted the stormy Bay of Biscay, and settled colonies in England and France. Who were these Hittites? They were an Asiatic people, dwelling in the Taurus Mountains of the eastern part of Asia Minor, who increased into the most powerful nation of that part of the world about two thousand years before Christ, and carried on wars with the Egyptians, among others, until at last they were overcome by the rise of the empire of Assyria, north of them, about eleven hundred years before Christ. Doubtless they explored the African coast somewhat south of the Red Sea, and very likely knew thePersian Gulf and the route to India. My own opinion is that we are likely to give the people of antiquity too little credit rather than too much in the direction of a knowledge of geography.

Meanwhile there was rising along the Mediterranean from Palestine northward the most able commercial race of antiquity, who styled themselves Canaanites, as in the Bible, but whom the Greeks called Phenicians, the name by which we know them best. Their capitals were the cities Tyre and Sidon, the ruins of which are still to be seen on the Syrian coast a little way south of Beirut, and the wealth and commercial power of which will give us some interesting paragraphs for a future chapter. Suffice it here to say that their rulers were foremost among the loosely organized “nations” between the Nile and the Euphrates, and that they maintained their power through a long period, not only by their wealth and enterprise as traders, but mainly through their skill and energy as navigators. As we shall see when we come to consider their commerce in Chapter VII, they excelled in the building of ships, in an understanding of how to steer long courses by the heavenly bodies, and in sea knowledge generally. It is well known that the Phenicians traded in their ships down the west coast of Africa to and beyond the Canary Islands, which they also visited; made repeated voyages to the French coast and the British Islands; and may very likely have gone around into the Baltic, for they knew of its amber, though this might have been obtained by the overland trade routes. It is believed that they ascertained that Africa was, in fact, a huge island; for it was to prove this supposition that Pharaoh Necho (or Naku or Neku) II, an enlightened Egyptian monarch who reigned in the sixth century before Christ, hired a crew of Phenician seamen to man an expedition whose purpose it was to circumnavigate Africa. These men started down the Red Sea in 611B. C., and in 605B. C.came sailing home through the Strait of Gibraltar, to the delight of their friends and confusion of a kingdom full of I-told-you-sos.1Just twenty centuries elapsed before any one else repeated that feat, so far as I know;, and no wonder it was forgotten. This same Necho II did even more for maritime commerce, for he attempted to complete the canal, begun long before his time, connecting the Mediterranean with the Red Sea, and seems to have made a passage along which barges and small boats might be towed, which remained open for many centuries,and in part followed the line now covered by the Suez Canal. Earlier than that Darius, the Persian conqueror of Egypt, had dug a navigable canal from the Nile to the Red Sea; and this shows that there must have been large traffic in both seas at that time to justify such tasks.

AN EARLY ROMAN BIREME.

By this time the power and prosperity of Tyre and Sidon had declined, and Carthage, originally a colonial city, had become the most important center of Phenician influence; and from this port there sailed a century later (perhaps about 500B. C.) an exploring expedition under a Carthaginian king named Hanno, intended to study and establish trade with the West African coast. It was a large and powerful fleet, said to number sixty galleys; and that women were taken as well as men shows that it was intended to form settlements at suitable points, as, indeed, was done. The account of it has been preserved in a short writing called the “Periplus,” by an ancient but unknown Greek; and this inscription is regarded by most scholars as entirely authentic, since all its details conform to modern knowledge, even though it is impossible to identify surely the various points mentioned. It tells us that the terminus of Hanno’s exploration was an island beyond a gulf called Noti Cornu, in which he found a company of hairy women, whom the interpreters calledgorillas. It was in memory of this that the manlike apes which a few years ago were discovered on the west coast of Africa received the same name; but they are not known anywhere north of the Kamerun Mountains, while the farthest point any critic is willing to believe reached by Hanno is the Bight of Benin, some distance north of the Kameruns. It is easy to believe that the inquiring Carthaginians might have heard of these apes,—or perhaps of chimpanzees, now found as far north as the Gambia River,—and reported actually seeing them, in order to add glory to their name. At any rate, this expedition increased largely the ancient knowledge of the sea in that direction; and navigators now knew the shores of the Atlantic from the Gulf of Guinea to the North Sea; but there the knowledge of the world seems to have rested for more than a dozen centuries, principally, no doubt, because there seemed nothing beyond, either north or south, to invite the merchants who then, as ever since, have been the principal promoters of discovery. It is only within the past century thatvoyages of discovery have been undertaken purely for the sake of the increase of knowledge. Previous to that the object was always either military conquest or the extension of trade.

SHIP OF PTOLEMY PHILOPATOR.(About 240B. C.Banks of oars and lug-sails.)

Attention was now turned to the eastern seas, overland routes to India and even to China having become well known both to conquering armies and to mercantile caravans. The coasts of Abyssinia, of Arabia, of the Persian Gulf, and of western India were settled by a semi-civilized people for a thousand, perhaps two thousand, years before the Christian era; but they were broken into many independent tribes; and their ships, if they had any, only crept from one harbor to another near by, and neither knew nor cared what lay beyond the farther headlands. As time went on, however, and strong kingdoms arose in Egypt, Arabia, Syria, and Persia, consolidating these scattered tribes into nations, it became necessary to learn the sea-routes between more distant ports. Thus it came about that while the Pharaohs still flourished, Arabic commerce extended regularly along the coast of Abyssinia, and doubtless as far southward as Zanzibar, while the Malays had probably already reached and colonized Madagascar. There seems no reason to doubt that those remarkable ruins in stone which the late Mr. Thomas Bent has studied at and near Zimbabwe, in Mashonaland, East Africa, are the work of Arabian gold-miners, made perhaps a thousand or more years ago; and it is pretty certain that Arabic seamen even at that date regularly traded as far as the island of Madagascar.

The Persian Gulf has been another nursery of a seafaring people since long before the record of history begins; yet so slow were they to learn of anything outside their capes, that it was accounted a wonderful thing when, in the winter of 325-4B. C., Nearchus, the admiral of the fleet of Alexander the Great, voyaged from the mouth of the Indus to the head of the Persian Gulf. Soon afterward, however, under the house of the Ptolemies, rulers of Egypt, fleets sailed regularly between Red Sea ports and India and Ceylon.

But now for many long centuries the boundaries of the known world were not to be much enlarged (although methods of navigation were improved and commerce continued within the limits of Roman and Arabicdominion), for we know of the discovery of no new coasts until we begin to hear of the doings of an independent and far northern people, scarcely known to the civilized world, and certainly not regarded as a part of it.

On the bleak shores of the North Sea, where the fiords and creek-mouths of Scandinavia gave shelter not only from foreign enemies, but from each other, there had grown up a seafaring race of men, of Gothic ancestry, who had settled on the coasts of what are now Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. They styled themselves Norsemen, or men of the North, and did not object to the title Vikings, or Fiord-men; but their enemies called them pirates, and with much reason, for they ravaged and ruled all the coasts both north and south of the Baltic, voyaging northward to the “land of the midnight sun,” colonizing northern France in the tenth century, and taking practical possession of all they pleased of the British Isles—Ireland and northern Scotland in particular. Here these Norsemen met equally fierce foes, or found congenial partners, as the case might be, in the Scottish and Irish seamen of that day, who were themselves bold freebooters and wide voyagers; and when, in the middle of the ninth century, the Northmen had discovered, as they supposed, the Faroe Islands and Iceland, a little exploration soon showed them that the Irishculdees, or priests of the Christian church planted in Ireland by St. Patrick, had been there before them—first in 725, according to the Irish chronicles of Dicuilus, who seems worthy of credence. Indeed, it is believed by some antiquarians that these Irish sea-wanderers had colonized Iceland at the same early age; had reached Newfoundland, and regularly resorted to its banks for fishing and whaling (five hundred years before Cabot); and were even acquainted with the coast of the North American continent, where traditions assert that their colonies were planted on what are now the shores of Virginia and the Carolinas, which they called New Ireland.

These are entertaining old stories, and may have some truth in them, for it seems certain that the Irish reached Iceland, at least, in the eighth century. Icelandic history, however, begins with the visits of Norsemen in 850, followed by others, who, a few years later, took colonies there and set up an island population which before a century had elapsed numbered more than fifty thousand people. They had a republican form of government, and were quite independent of the King of Norway (Harold the Fair-haired, great-great-grandfather of William the Conqueror), from whom the earlier colonists had fled because of his oppression; but they kept up acquaintance with the mother-country, and merchants and adventurers were continually voyaging between Iceland and all the islands and coasts of that region, using stanch vessels sometimes one hundred feet in length, andeminently seaworthy; yet their only guides were the stars and such signs as seafaring men read in the water and weather about them.

A WAR EXPEDITION OF THE VIKINGS.Showing build, steering-oar, and rig (colored lug-sail), of Scandinavian exploring ships in the North Atlantic.

It continually happened, however, that they were driven far out of their courses, in such a region of gales, currents, and fogs as is the North Atlantic. In one such adventure, in the year 876, a sea-captain named Gunnbjörn Ulfkragesson was driven far to the west of Iceland, and when he got back to port told his friends that he had seen land. Probably he also told them that so far as he could see there was nothing but icy mountains, of which they already had enough, for no one seems to have investigated the matter further until more than a century later, when a turbulent viking of the rebellious house of Erik, called Erik the Red, was banished from Norway and fled to Iceland with his followers. He was soon convicted there also of manslaughter in a neighborhood quarrel, and again condemned to banishment. Iceland wanted to get rid of him and his brawlers, and Europe would not let him return. Whither should he go?

Then his thoughts turned toward the strange land in the west that tradition said Gunnbjörn had sighted. It is believed by the most carefulstudents that Gunnbjörn’s “rocks” were volcanic islets, which have now disappeared, and are represented only by certain shoals; but it would not be incredible that he had caught a glimpse of the Greenland coast itself.

At any rate, Erik had little hesitation in starting out to rediscover them. Why should he? Those rough-riders of the sea were used to voyages of equal length. It is about 200 miles from the Norwegian coast at Bergen to the Shetland Islands; 200 miles from the Shetlands, or 225 from the Hebrides, to the Faroes; and 275 miles thence to the nearest coast of Iceland,—reckoning all in straight lines, shorter than any ship could actually follow.

If his viking boat and viking crew could span those stretches of sea unguided, what hindered his crossing the little further space whose tempests had no terrors for this wild sea-king? In that unpossessed land, could he find it, he might be free to riot at his will (but one cannot help thinking there was more in the man than that!); and if he could open to his people a new country, what wealth and power might not come with it to him, for the humbling of his rivals at the court of Norway.

So Red Erik sailed away to the west in 984, and two years later returned to Iceland and reported that he had met first a far-extending icy coast, along whose front he had sailed southward until he could turn to the west and then northward, thus rounding its narrow southern extremity (Cape Farewell); and there he had found a habitable region, which he called Greenland, in order, as he said, to attract settlers by a pleasant name. Thus this wicked old Norseman was the first of American “real-estate boomers.”

Attracted by his story, a band of adventurers went back with him in 986, and established a settlement near the site of the present Danish town Julianshaab, just inside the cape, on an inlet that they named Eriksfiord.

Among these emigrants was one named Herjulf, whose son Bjarne2was a merchant captain who owned his own ship, and was then absent in Norway. Returning to Iceland shortly after Erik’s departure, he concluded at once to follow his father, and, with a willing crew and still loaded ship, set sail for the west. But incessant bad weather drove them they knew not whither during many days. At last the wind fell, the sun shone out, and they saw land; but its appearance did not agree with the description of Greenland, and knowing they were too far south, Bjarne turned north, and kept on, occasionally sighting the coast, until finally he reached Eriksfiord in safety. No one knows what headlands he looked upon; but if the Icelandic versified chronicles called sagas may be believed,—and the wisest students of history put faith in them,—he was the first European to see America of whom we have definite knowledge.

Several years passed by, however, before any one tried to profit by this accident and seek the lands that had been seen southward. Then Leif, the eldest son of old Red Erik, resolved to do so. He had talked with Bjarne and his men until he knew all the details of their story, and then he bought the same good old ship, and enlisted a crew of thirty-five men. This happened in Norway, where Leif then was, and it is said by some that the king aided and authorized the expedition. At any rate, after a public farewell they sailed away, and seem to have gone straight across the ocean; but whether they did this, or sailed by way of Iceland and Greenland, they easily found the unknown coasts Bjarne had described, and landed in Helluland, Markland, and Vinland, in the last of which they built huts and spent the winter of the year 1000.

The identification of these places has caused much discussion. That “Helluland” was Newfoundland and “Markland” Nova Scotia seems tolerably certain; but historians are not agreed as to where that winter was spent in “Vinland,” so called (meaning “Wineland”) because a German member of the crew gathered grapes there, from which wine could be made. When, in 1602, Gosnold discovered a fruitful island south of Cape Cod, he named it Martha’s Vineyard, believing that he had found the place.

When Leif reached Greenland again, the next spring, every one was vastly interested in his discoveries, and emigrants from Greenland, Iceland, and even from Europe went out to colonize the new lands; but the attempts, though spasmodically continued for a long time, seem never to have been really successful, so that no undisputed trace of the presence of these sea-wanderers on the mainland of North America is known to exist. That they knew the coast fairly well from Disco Island (70° N. lat.) southward to Virginia, is generally believed; but where Leif Erikson spent that first winter, or where the Vinland settlement of subsequent times was, is thus far a matter of conjecture. Some students of the sagas place it in New York harbor, others in Narragansett or Buzzard’s bay, near Boston, or in Nova Scotia. Formerly the general belief was that Newport, R. I., or the shore above there, was surely the site; but this was based, first, on the supposed European inscriptions on a rock in the Somerset River, at Dighton, just above Fall River, which were in reality only Indian markings; and, second, upon the “old round tower” at Newport, which few persons now believe was built prior to the coming of the English colonists with Roger Williams. The late Professor E. H. Horsford believed that he had found the site of the principal Norse settlement of the tenth century, called Norumbega, at Watertown, on the Charles River, a few miles west of Boston; and he made an argument from old maps, etc., to support his assertion that the ancientriver-walls, etc., there were really the remains of a town; but historians generally do not attach any importance to Professor Horsford’s theory.

Perhaps we shall never know where this “Vinland” was that Leif discovered, and where the queenly Gudrid dwelt and her son Schnorr—the first white child in America—was born; nor is it of much consequence that we should, for the settlements were few and transitory. That they existed, however, and that the shores of Canada and New England were occasionally visited from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries by Norsemen, cannot be gainsaid. That the Greenlanders did not all migrate to the warmer, well-timbered, and fruitful region in the south was probably due to the fact that it was so remote from their kindred, and so open to attack by the native red men, whom they calledskrellings.

A VIKING GALLEY.

Over the long but slow history of these American settlements of the Northmen we need not linger. Although Vinland seems to have been abandoned within a few decades, the Greenland settlements were maintained. A republican government was organized; Christianity was introduced, and remains of their stone churches and Augustinian monasteries have been identified. By the end of the fifteenth century, however, these colonies had completely disappeared, worn out in the hopeless struggle against climate and the savage Eskimos, but exterminated, at last, perhaps, by the Black Death—for the great plague which almost depopulated Europe in the fourteenth century seems to have reached even the desolate shores of Greenland, and to have consumed the last of these remote people, causing them to be utterly forgotten.

A more definite account of pre-Columbian North America than that of the sagas and other traditions of the Vinlanders, and one accepted as true by Mr. Major of the English Hakluyt Society and other competent geographical critics, is that of the voyages and reports of the brothers Nicolò and Antonio Zeno. These men belonged to a family distinguished in Venice; and toward the close of the fourteenth century they separately or together made many voyages in the North Atlantic, going far beyond any previous navigators of which they knew. They wrote letters home containing an account of these, but little publication was given to them, and they were forgotten until the revival of interest in geography following the early discoveries of Columbus. The documents possessed by the Zeno family were then made the basis of a pamphlet by a grand-nephew reciting what his ancestor had done, long before the time of Columbus. The mostinteresting thing in it is an account of how, about 1390, Nicolò Zeno fitted out a ship at the Faroes, went over to Greenland and there learned of an island which was called Estotiland, and which we know as Newfoundland. Not very far away to the southwest of it, he says, was the country of Drogeo, which fishermen whom he saw had visited. They claimed to have “discovered” none of these places, but spoke of them as formerly well known, although then little frequented by Europeans.

As to Drogeo,—which he speaks of as if it were the mainland,—that was still occasionally resorted to for fishing; and he relates the adventures of a white man who had been captured by the mainland savages a few years previously, and adopted by them on account of his knowledge of how to fish with a net, and to do other useful things. Such a course would be very characteristic of the aborigines of eastern North America, as we have since learned to know; and it is also natural that he should have been fought for by rival chiefs, as Zeno says happened to this man, who, by capture and exchange, or of his own motion, traveled about and saw much of the people of this “country” Drogeo. At any rate, the information given by Zeno tallies remarkably well with the truth about primitive North America and its inhabitants. “They have no kind of metal,” reported this wandering refugee, who finally drifted back to the coast, and was able to make his escape to a fishing-boat. Now the one really remarkable and distinctive fact about the North Americans was just this,—that with a considerable advance in other directions, they had never learned to fuse and forge or otherwise utilize iron or other metals, save a little metallic copper and silver in the Great Lakes region. But listen to the rest of his brief report:

They live by hunting, and carry lances of wood sharpened at the point. They have bows, the strings of which are made of beasts’ skins. They are very fierce, and have deadly fights amongst each other, and eat one another’s flesh [as was true, to a limited ceremonial extent, after battles]. They have chieftains and certain laws among themselves, but differing in the different tribes. The farther you go southwestward, however, the more refinement you meet with, because the climate is more temperate, and, accordingly, there [i. e., in Mexico] they have cities and temples dedicated to their idols, in which they sacrifice men and afterwards eat them. In those parts they have some knowledge of gold and silver.

Now, whether all this was the observation of a single rude sailor, or, as is more likely, summarizes what Zeno was able to learn from all sources at his command regarding the new western mainland and its people, it is correct and forcible. Had young Nicolò the editor, a century afterward, tried to invent something of the kind, he would surely have made his invention marvelous, for that was an age of fable and bombast. On the contrary,this is a simple and accurate statement of what we now know were the facts. Nor did he have any means of knowing anything more of the case than his family archives revealed, since he wrote and published this account of his uncle’s voyages only a few years after the first return of Columbus, and before any writer had visited the northern American coasts, or had learned the habits of the natives. I can but believe, therefore, that the report was made in good faith, and records simply what the Zeni did and saw and heard; and that these bold Venetian navigators knew more about North America, at least, before the end of the fourteenth century than Columbus had learned by the end of the fifteenth.

I have run ahead of my story, but I wanted to show how little impression these northern investigations and occupation of a new continent had made upon the Mediterranean “world,” which seems rarely to have heard of them, much less to have profited by the information, for more than four hundred years, in spite of the fact that there was constant communication between the Normans and British, at least, and the Mediterranean peoples.

Let us now go back to those southern countries and see what they had been doing toward maritime exploration during these thousand years and more when the Scandinavians were so busy in the north. It was principally perfecting the knowledge of the world their fathers knew. From the very first men had tried to make maps, and succeeded fairly well for small spaces; but to make a map of the whole world was a task that defied human knowledge for many centuries. After Aristotle’s time all men of education understood that the world was a sphere; and about 150B. C.Hipparchus, borrowing an idea from the Babylonians, taught the Greeks that the way to place their towns and mountains and rivers and the outlines of the coast correctly upon a model of the world, was to determine their position by observations of the heavenly bodies. Thus the ideas of latitude and longitude originated. He could not apply his method practically very far, because there were few or no accurate astronomical observations away from a few cities in Egypt and Greece; but two hundred and fifty years later Ptolemy, a learned mathematician of Alexandria, gathered all the facts obtainable, and made an attempt which bore a rude resemblance to the truth and served as the best and almost the only account of the world for several hundred years. Ptolemy flourished about 150A. D.His book describes Asia as far east as the Malayan peninsula, Africa south to Zanzibar and the Gulf of Guinea, and shows a knowledge of Europe as far north as the Shetland Islands (Ultima Thule) and Denmark; the original work seems to have contained no maps, but these were added to it about 500A. D.by another mathematician named Agathodæmon. It is called the Almagest.

Nothing of value was added to this during the long stagnant period of the world called the middle ages, when the love of learning declined and men fell back into the old traditions, even to the extent of being taught by their priests that it was a sin to believe that the world was round. In those times the Arabs of Bagdad nourished knowledge more than any one else, but even they did little for geography. Finally the people of Europe began to wake up and look at things for themselves, instead of tamely accepting whatever the Pope of Rome or somebody else told them, and going and coming as he directed, regardless of whether it was for their interest to do so or not. One of the first and one of the most important influences of this revival in a desire for learning and the means for larger activity among men was the sudden extension of navigation; and this could not have come about, nor amounted to much, had the mariner’s compass not been invented.

“Off, thou Norseland Terror, cloudingHellas with the jealous wraithWhich, the gods of old enshrouding,Froze their hearts, the poet saith!”

“Off, thou Norseland Terror, clouding

Hellas with the jealous wraith

Which, the gods of old enshrouding,

Froze their hearts, the poet saith!”

Nothing is more obscure than the history of this instrument. The Chinese have certainly known, from a remote antiquity, that a magnetized needle, permitted to move freely, would turn north and south; but they seem to have profited as little by it as by so many other useful things that, long afterward, in the hands of the more energetic men of the West, contributed so largely to the progress of civilization. They were accustomed to poise a sliver of magnetized steel upon a bit of cork and set it afloat in a bowl of water. One end was marked, but this, with characteristic Chinese perversity,was the one pointing toward the south, not toward the north, as with us. This rude and simple arrangement is still in use among the Koreans—or was until recently. With such a contrivance and little, it any, knowledge of the variation of the needle, the Chinese of a thousand years ago made longer voyages than they have done in more modern times, trading not only with India, but sailing regularly as early at least as the ninth century to the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf.

There is no direct evidence, but it seems incontestable, that it was from these eastern mariners that the Arabs received the compass, and gradually brought it into use in their home waters, where it became well known to the crusaders and other sea-going travelers of the middle ages. Little reliance could be placed upon it, however, until the sixteenth century, when the need for something trustworthy for long voyages made men turn their attention to the study and betterment of it.

Toward the end of the fourteenth century, as I have said, Europe was beginning to recover from the terrible visitations of the plague, and to wake from its lethargy and to look abroad; and various influences were at work to promote exploration by sea and land—and what a grand field for study there was!

At this time nearly all the commerce of Europe, mainly in Italian hands, was with India and China. The overland route was long, perilous, and expensive, and that across the Arabian Gulf hardly less so. At best, such traffic was slow and limited, and the first need of the reviving world was the discovery of some straighter and quicker road to the East. In this quest Portugal came forward under the brilliant leadership of Dom Henrique (Prince Henry), styled “the Navigator,” who was the younger son of King João (or John) I, and half an Englishman, since his mother was Philippa of Lancaster. It was Prince Henry’s ambition to extend geographical discovery and improve seamanship, and he enlisted the help of the best navigators obtainable, regardless of nationality. In order to observe the heavens to better advantage, and also to study the tides and other nautical phenomena, he established an observatory on the bleak headland of Cape Sagres, where he willingly spent a large portion of his time for the sake of science. Navigation was sorely in need of such help. Except that they had rude compasses, of whose laws of variation, etc., they were ignorant, the seamen of that day were little, if any, better equipped than were those who sailed the “ships of Tarshish” a thousand years before that. Astronomers had supplied them with rough tables of the declination of the sun, pole-star, etc., by which, with the help of a cross-staff,—a simple instrument for ascertaining angles,—they might make a guess at the latitude.Longitude was found only by observations of eclipses of the moon, and noting the difference between the time when it was due at home, according to the almanac, and the local time of its actual coming; but at sea the “observations” were little better than guessing.

Chart-making was an important branch of study at Sagres. So few and rare were sea-maps then that one was never seen in England until 1489. To the collection of information in this direction, and the improvement of nautical methods, Prince Henry and his aids applied themselves most diligently; but he died before much had been accomplished. Nautical studies went on, however, under the next king, John II, for whom Martin of Bohemia, the foremost astronomer of his time, devised a form of the astrolabe for use on shipboard, increasing accuracy in finding latitude.

It was with no better instruments than these (and sand-glasses in place of chronometers) as guides over chartless and unsounded seas that the way was found to India and to America, and the globe was circumnavigated; and that the same thing might be done again is shown by the fact that only last year (1897) a vessel, which had barely escaped destruction in a storm and lost all her instruments in the mid-Pacific, was brought safely into San Francisco by observation of the stars and “dead-reckoning” alone.

But Prince Henry (for I have run ahead of my story again) was not content to study and teach on land alone. He was fired with the ardor of discovery and conquest likely to augment Portugal’s wealth and influence in the East. Expedition after expedition was sent southward, and in 1435 Henry’s ships finally passed Cape Bojador. Great was the wonder and rejoicing thereat, for it had always been taught by the monks that this cape was the end of the earth; but it was not until 1462 that the Cape Verd Islands and Sierra Leone were reached. Prince Henry had been dead since 1460, but the influence of his wise and untiring enthusiasm and work lived on, and inspired the king and people of Portugal to renewed efforts at solving that riddle of Africa that perhaps the Egyptian sphinx was meant to typify. By 1469 trade had been opened with the Gold Coast, and a few years later the mouth of the Congo was found.

These advances showed that there was nothing unnatural or fearful in the southern latitudes, as sailors had been taught to believe from time immemorial,—a superstitious dread which the old chart-makers long sustained by their habit of filling the empty sea-spaces on their maps with fearsome and wondrous monsters,—and therefore, in 1486, King John II sent Bartholomew Dias in two sail-boats—pinnaces of fifty tons each—with orders to go as far as he could; and this bold captain, passing the last known headland of the Guinea coast, sailed on and on, tracing the WestAfrican coast, and landing here and there to examine the swampy shores, to get fresh water, and to hoist the castellated banner of Portugal in token of possession before the wondering eyes of naked negroes. At length he was blown and buffeted for days and days in heavy storms, and at their close found himself far to the eastward of his former longitude, whereupon he fought his way on and sighted land which he rightly determined must be the southern extremity of Africa. This was in 1487. Returning to Lisbon toward Christmas of that year, he reported his experiences, and dwelling especially upon the rough time he had had in the south, proposed to style the point of the continent Cape of all the Storms; but King John, foreseeing great things to follow for his country, said, “No; we will call it the Cape of Good Hope”; and so it remains to this day—but all the storms remain about it, too!

PORTION OF A FIFTEENTH CENTURY SEA-CHART, BY TOSCANELLI.Copied by permission of Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., from Justin Winsor’s “Narrative and Critical History of America.”

Now for some years previous to this time the monarchs of western Europe were much exercised over rumors of the existence somewhere in the Orient of an all-powerful and generally marvelous potentate styled (by them) Prester John, and reputed to be a conqueror of Asiatic, or perhaps African, infidels who later had become cut off from Christendom. The whole affair was a myth, probably arising from an indistinct knowledge of Abyssinia, whose negus afterward borrowed the title; but before this was realized popes and various “Catholic majesties” had sent embassies in search of Prester John’s court, some of which incidentally gained valuableinformation. Among the latter was Pedro Covilho, an emissary of Portugal, who, having failed to find Prester John in western India or Persia, made his way back to Egypt and Abyssinia, whence he sent home in 1486 or 1487 a report of progress that told John II some surprising news of the advancement of the Arabs of that part of the world in the sciences, and especially in those belonging to geography and navigation.

Covilho’s messenger was a Portuguese Jew, Rabbi Joseph of Lamego, who carried voluminous letters, one of which showed that Arabic mariners were then familiar with the whole length of the east coast of Africa, including Madagascar, and were perfectly well aware where it terminated at the south, and that there was no obstacle to passing around to the western side of the continent; and just at this interesting juncture Dias came sailing back in his pinnace to say that it was all true, for he had seen it.

Thus the sea-road was open to India and Cathay, and Portugal was eager to take advantage of it. She was then one of the leading powers of Europe, and the foremost one in colonial and commercial enterprise, striving to wrest from Genoa and Venice the supremacy in trade that they had so long enjoyed. Nevertheless almost ten years elapsed before the next expedition was sent southward to confirm Portugal’s possessions, and establish commerce with the Orient. John II had died, and Emmanuel the Fortunate reigned in his stead—a reign that has been called the heroic period of the nation’s history; and it must not be forgotten that “Little Portugal” was then so mighty that a year or so previously (May 4, 1493) the Pope (Alexander VI) had issued a bull in which he had divided, with intended equality, all undiscovered parts of the earth between Spain and Portugal, the former being given everything to the west, while to Portugal were reserved all future rights east of a certain north-and-south line.

The line of separation designated was the meridian of no variation of the compass-needle. The existence of such a line had been discovered by the same Christopher Columbus who was to thrill the world a few years later; but he did not know, what only experience developed, that this meridian was changeable, swinging many degrees east and then returning west in the course of two or three centuries. At that time the line seemed fixed some three hundred miles west of the Azores, and philosophers accounted for it later by a theory that it lay in the middle of the Atlantic because there it was subject to an equality of attraction toward both continents which held it steady. This was not true, but it was better than the less learned but more popular explanation of the magnetism of the compass—namely, that it was “an effluvium from the root of the tail of the Little Bear.” A year later, however (June 7, 1494), the treaty of Tordesillas,between Spain and Portugal, declared that the line of demarcation should be the meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verd Islands, or as nearly as possible in the center of the Atlantic. The supposition that there might be valuable lands within, that is, east of, that limit, inspired several of Portugal’s subsequent searchers.

DRAWN BY HENRY B. SNELL.“THE SEA-ROAD TO INDIA AND CATHAY.”

DRAWN BY HENRY B. SNELL.

“THE SEA-ROAD TO INDIA AND CATHAY.”

In 1497 King Emmanuel’s expedition was ready to sail—the largest and best equipped, probably, that had ever been sent out by any government, and its commander was Vasco da Gama, a young naval officer of renown. His fleet consisted of four vessels,—small caravels, of course, one of which was commanded by Dias,—and left the Tagus, after ceremonious farewells, in July. Da Gama stopped at various places, but reached and safely rounded the stormy cape in November. He had with him the information (and some say an Arabic map) sent home by Covilho, but his business was not to verify this, but to reach India and establish new Portuguese possessions. Why, then, did he not strike straight across from Cape Agulhas, as East Indiamen have done ever since? For the good reason that he had no guide, no means of finding his way across the southern ocean, where all the stars were strange; for sun observations for latitude were then unknown to European navigators, and rarely used on land. Instead of this, he was obliged to turn northward and skirt the coast for a thousand miles, stopping here and there, until he had passed far enough north of the equator to bring above the horizon the familiar home stars, for which he had “tables.”

At last, from the Arab port of Melindi, near Mombasa, he turned eastand sailed straight away to India, where he anchored before Calicut, then the most important port of southern India, on May 20. Returning the next year with ships richly laden, he was received with public rejoicings and given high honors; and he greatly astonished his friends of the navy by telling them that the Arabs used the compass, sea-charts, quadrants, and “had divers maritime mysteries not short of the Portugals.”

Da Gama lived many years, and sailed often to India and China after that; but chiefly on political expeditions, in which he disgraced his otherwise great name by inexcusable rapine and cruelty.

Meanwhile some exploration had been done toward the far north, as we shall see in the next chapter; and so the fifteenth century ended, with Europe understood as far as Nova Zembla, Africa circumnavigated, and the coasts of India, Malaya, southern China, and the larger Malayan islands fairly familiar to geographers. This is much, and yet it leaves unmentioned the greatest fact of all—the work of that grand, sad character, Christopher Columbus, upon whose grave near Seville has been written:

HE GAVE A NEW WORLD TO SPAIN.

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