Christopher Columbus and How He Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery Part 9

Everything but man was more lordly. He had been fed there so luxuriously that he was believed to have dwindled in character. Europe was the world of active intelligence, the inheritor of Greek and Roman power, and its typical man belonged naturally with the grander externals of the East.

There was a fitness in bringing the better man and the better nature into such relations that the one should sustain and enjoy the other.

[Sidenote: China.]

The earliest historical record of the peoples of Western Asia with China goes back, according to Yule, to the second century before Christ. Three hundred years later we find the first trace of Roman intercourse (A. D.

166). With India, China had some trade by sea as early as the fourth century, and with Babylonia possibly in the fifth century. There were Christian Nestorian missionaries there as early as the eighth century, and some of their teachings had been found there by Western travelers in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The communication of Ceylon with China was revived in the thirteenth century.

[Sidenote: Cathay.]

[Sidenote: Marco Polo.]

It was in the twelfth century, under the Mongol dynasty, that China became first generally known in Europe, under the name of Cathay, and then for the first time the Western nations received travelers' stories of the kingdom of the great Khan. Two Franciscans, one an Italian, Plano Carpini, the other a Fleming, Rubruquis, sent on missions for the Church, returned to Europe respectively in 1247 and 1255. It was not, however, till Marco Polo returned from his visit to Kublai Khan, in the latter part of the thirteenth century, that a new enlargement of the ideas of Europe respecting the far Orient took place. The influence of his marvelous tales continued down to the days of Columbus, and when the great discoverer came on the scene it was to find the public mind occupied with the hopes of reaching these Eastern realms by way of the south. The experimental and accidental voyagings of the Portuguese on the Atlantic were held to be but preliminary to a steadier progression down the coast of Africa.

[Sidenote: The African route and the ancients.]

[Sidenote: The African cape.]

Whether the ancients had succeeded in circ.u.mnavigating Africa is a question never likely to be definitely settled, and opposing views, as weighed by Bunbury in his _History of Ancient Geography_, are too evenly balanced to allow either side readily to make conquest of judicial minds. It is certain that Hipparchus had denied the possibility of it, and had supposed the Indian Ocean a land-bound sea, Africa extending at the south so as to connect with a southern prolongation of eastern Asia.

This view had been adopted by Ptolemy, whose opinions were dominating at this time the Western mind. Nevertheless, that Africa ended in a southern cape seems to have been conceived of by those who doubted the authority of Ptolemy early enough for Sanuto, in 1306, to portray such a cape in his planisphere. If Sanuto really knew of its existence the source of his knowledge is a subject for curious speculation. Not unlikely an African cape may have been surmised by the Venetian sailors, who, frequenting the Mediterranean coasts of Asia Minor, came in contact with the Arabs. These last may have cherished the traditions of maritime explorers on the east coast of Africa, who may have already discovered the great southern cape, perhaps without pa.s.sing it.

[Sidenote: African coast discovery, 1393.]

Navarrete records that as early as 1393 a company had been formed in Andalusia and Biscay for promoting discoveries down the coast of Africa.

It was an effort to secure in the end such a route to Asia as might enable the people of the Iberian peninsula to share with those of the Italian the trade with the East, which the latter had long conducted wholly or in part overland from the Levant. The port of Barcelona had indeed a share in this opulent commerce; but its product for Spain was insignificant in comparison with that for Italy.

[Sidenote: Prince Henry, the Navigator.]

The guiding spirit in this new habit of exploration was that scion of the royal family of Portugal who became famous eventually as Prince Henry the Navigator, and whose biography has been laid before the English reader within twenty years, abundantly elucidated by the careful hand of Richard H. Major. The Prince had a.s.sisted King Joo in the attack on the Moors at Ceuta, in 1415, and this success had opened to the Prince the prospect of possessing the Guinea coast, and of ultimately finding and pa.s.sing the antic.i.p.ated cape at the southern end of Africa.

[Sidenote: Cape Bojador.]

This was the mission to which the Prince early in the fifteenth century gave himself. His s.h.i.+ps began to crawl down the western Barbary coast, and each season added to the extent of their explorations, but Cape Bojador for a while blocked their way, just as it had stayed other hardy adventurers even before the birth of Henry. "We may wonder," says Helps, "that he never took personal command of any of his expeditions, but he may have thought that he served the cause better by remaining at home, and forming a centre whence the electric energy of enterprise was communicated to many discoverers and then again collected from them."

[Sidenote: Sagres.]

Meanwhile, Prince Henry had received from his father the government of Algaroe, and he selected the secluded promontory of Sagres, jutting into the sea at the southwestern extremity of Portugal, as his home, going here in 1418, or possibly somewhat later. Whether he so organized his efforts as to establish here a school of navigation is in dispute, but it is probably merely a question of what const.i.tutes a school. There seems no doubt that he built an observatory and drew about him skillful men in the nautical arts, including a somewhat famous Majorcan, Jayme.

He and his staff of workers took seamans.h.i.+p as they found it, with its cylindrical charts, and so developed it that it became in the hands of the Portuguese the evidence of the highest skill then attainable.

[Sidenote: Art of seamans.h.i.+p.]

Seamans.h.i.+p as then practiced has become an interesting study. Under the guidance of Humboldt, in his remarkable work, the _Examen Critique_, in which he couples a consideration of the nautical astronomy with the needs of this age of discovery, we find an easy path among the intricacies of the art. These complications have, in special aspects, been further elucidated by Navarrete, Margry, and a recent German writer, Professor Ernst Mayer.

[Sidenote: Lully's _Arte de Navegar_.]

It was just at the end of the thirteenth century (1295) that the _Arte de Navegar_ of Raymond Lully, or Lullius, gave mariners a handbook, which, so far as is made apparent, was not superseded by a better even in the time of Columbus.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PRINCE HENRY THE NAVIGATOR.

[From a Chronicle in the National Library at Paris.]]

[Sidenote: Sacrobosco.]

Another nautical text-book at this time was a treatise by John Holywood, a Yorks.h.i.+re man, who needs to be a little dressed up when we think of him as the Latinized Sacrobosco. His _Sphera Mundi_ was not put into type till 1472, just before Columbus's arrival in Portugal,--a work which is mainly paraphrased from Ptolemy's _Almagest_. It was one of the books which, by law, the royal cosmographer of Spain, at a later day, was directed to expound in his courses of instruction.

[Sidenote: The loadstone.]

The loadstone was known in western and northern Europe as early as the eleventh century, and for two or three centuries there are found in books occasional references to the magnet. We are in much doubt, however, as to the prevalence of its use in navigation. If we are to believe some writers on the subject, it was known to the Nors.e.m.e.n as early as the seventh century. Its use in the Levant, derived, doubtless, from the peoples navigating the Indian Ocean, goes back to an antiquity not easily to be limited.

[Sidenote: Magnetic needle.]

By the year 1200, a knowledge of the magnetic needle, coming from China through the Arabs, had become common enough in Europe to be mentioned in literature, and in another century its use did not escape record by the chroniclers of maritime progress. In the fourteenth century, the adventurous spirit of the Catalans and the Normans stretched the scope of their observations from the Hebrides on the north to the west coast of tropical Africa on the south, and to the westward, two fifths across the Atlantic to the neighborhood of the Azores,--voyages made safely under the direction of the magnet.

[Sidenote: Observations for lat.i.tude.]

[Sidenote: The astrolabe.]

There was not much difficulty in computing lat.i.tude either by the alt.i.tude of the polar star or by using tables of the sun's declination, which the astronomers of the time were equal to calculating. The astrolabe used for gauging the alt.i.tude was a simple instrument, which had been long in use among the Mediterranean seamen, and had been described by Raymond Lullius in the latter part of the thirteenth century. Before Columbus's time it had been somewhat improved by Johannes Muller of Konigsberg, who became better known from the Latin form of his native town as Regiomonta.n.u.s. He had, perhaps, the best reputation in his day as a nautical astronomer, and Humboldt has explained the importance of his labors in the help which he afforded in an age of discovery.

[Sidenote: Dead reckoning.]

It is quite certain that the navigators of Prince Henry, and even Columbus, practiced no artificial method for ascertaining the speed of their s.h.i.+ps. With vessels of the model of those days, no great rapidity was possible, and the utmost a s.h.i.+p could do under favorable circ.u.mstances was not usually beyond four miles an hour. The hourgla.s.s gave them the time, and afforded the multiple according as the eye adjusted the apparent number of miles which the s.h.i.+p was making hour by hour. This was the method by which Columbus, in 1492, calculated the distances, which he recorded day by day in his journal. Of course the practiced seaman made allowances for drift in the ocean currents, and met with more or less intelligence the various deterrent elements in beating to windward.

[Sidenote: The seaman's log.]

Humboldt, with his keen insight into all such problems concerning their relations to oceanic discoveries, tells us in his _Cosmos_ how he has made the history of the log a subject of special investigation in the sixth volume of his _Examen Critique de l'Histoire de la Geographie_, which, unfortunately, the world has never seen; but he gives, apparently, the results in his later _Cosmos_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE ASTROLABE OF REGIOMONTa.n.u.s.]

It is perhaps surprising that the Mediterranean peoples had not perceived a method, somewhat clumsy as it was, which had been in use by the Romans in the time of the republic. Though the habit of throwing the log is still, in our day, kept up on ocean steamers, I find that experienced commanders quite as willingly depend on the report of their engineers as to the number of revolutions which the wheel or screw has made in the twenty-four hours. In this they were antic.i.p.ated by these republicans of Rome who attached wheels of four feet diameter to the sides of their s.h.i.+ps and let the pa.s.sage of the water turn them. Their revolutions were then recorded by a device which threw a pebble into a tally-pot for each revolution.

[Ill.u.s.tration: REGIOMONTa.n.u.s'S ASTROLABE, 1468.

[After an original in the museum at Nuremberg, shown in E. Mayer's _Die Hilfsmittel der Schiffahrtskunde_.]]

From that time, so far as Humboldt could ascertain, down to a period later than Columbus, and certainly after the revival of long ocean voyages by the Catalans, Portuguese, and Normans, there seems to have been no skill beyond that of the eyes in measuring the speed of vessels.

After the days of Columbus, it is only when we come to the voyages of Magellan that we find any mention of such a device as a log, which consisted, as his chronicler explains, of some arrangements of cog-wheels and chains carried on the p.o.o.p.

[Sidenote: Prince Henry's character.]

Such were in brief the elements of seamans.h.i.+p in which Prince Henry the Navigator caused his sailors to be instructed, and which more or less governed the instrumentalities employed in his career of discovery. He was a man who, as his motto tells us, wished, and was able, to do well.

He was shadowed with few infirmities of spirit. He joined with the pluck of his half-English blood--for he was the grandson of John of Gaunt--a training for endurance derived in his country's prolonged contests with the Moor. He was the staple and lofty exemplar of this great age of discovery. He was more so than Columbus, and rendered the advent.i.tious career of the Genoese possible. He knew how to manage men, and stuck devotedly to his work. He respected his helpers too much to drug them with deceit, and there is a straightforward honesty of purpose in his endeavors. He was a trainer of men, and they grew courageous under his instruction. To sail into the supposed burning zone beyond Cape Bojador, and to face the destruction of life which was believed to be inevitable, required a courage quite as conspicuous as to cleave the floating verdure of the Sarga.s.so Sea, on a western pa.s.sage. It must be confessed that he shared with Columbus those proclivities which in the instigators of African slavery so easily slipped into cruelty. They each believed there was a merit, if a heathen's soul be at stake, in not letting commiseration get the better of piety.

[Sidenote: Cape Bojador pa.s.sed, 1434.]

It was not till 1434 that Prince Henry's captains finally pa.s.sed Cape Bojador. It was a strenuous and daring effort in the face of conceded danger, and under the impulse of the Prince's earnest urging. Gil Eannes returned from this accomplished act a hero in the eyes of his master.

Had it ever been pa.s.sed before? Not apparently in any way to affect the importance of this Portuguese enterprise. We can go back indeed, to the expedition of Hanno the Carthaginian, and in the commentaries of Carl Muller and Vivien de St. Martin track that navigator outside the Pillars of Hercules, and follow him southerly possibly to Cape Verde or its vicinity; and this, if Major's arguments are to be accepted, is the only antecedent venture beyond Cape Bojador, though there have been claims set up for the Genoese, the Catalans, and the Dieppese. That the map of Marino Sanuto in 1306, and the so-called Laurentian portolano of 1351, both of which establish a vague southerly limit to Africa, rather give expression to a theory than chronicle the experience of navigators is the opinion of Major. It is of course possible that some indefinite knowledge of oriental tracking of the eastern coast of Africa, and developing its terminal shape southerly, may have pa.s.sed, as already intimated, with other nautical knowledge, by the Red Sea to the Mediterranean peoples. To attempt to settle the question of any circ.u.mnavigation of Africa before the days of Diaz and Da Gama, by the evidence of earlier maps, makes us confront very closely geographical theories on the one hand, and on the other a possible actual knowledge filtered through the Arabs. All this renders it imprudent to a.s.sume any tone of certainty in the matter.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SKETCH MAP OF AFRICAN DISCOVERY.]