Sea Thoughts - 2

Sea Thoughts - 2

                               The history of the exploration of the world up to the day when 

Columbus set sail from Palos is just such a history of steps. The Phoenicians coasting 

from harbour to harbour through the Mediterranean; the Romans marching from camp to

 camp, from country to country; the Jutes venturing in their frail craft into the stormy northern 

seas, making voyages a little longer and more daring every time, until they reached England; the

captains of Prince Henry of Portugal feeling their way from voyage to voyage down the

coast of Africa—there are no bold flights into the incredible here, but patient and

business-like progress from one stepping-stone to another. 

                                                                        Dangers and hardships there

were, and brave followings of the faint will-o'-the-wisp of faith in what lay beyond; but

there were no great launchings into space. They but followed a line that was the

continuance or projection of the line they had hitherto followed; what they did was brave

and glorious, but it was reasonable. What Columbus did, on the contrary, was, as we shall

see later, against all reason and knowledge. It was a leap in the dark towards some star

invisible to all but him; for he who sets forth across the desert sand or sea must have a

brighter sun to guide him than that which sets and rises on the day of the small man.

Our familiarity with maps and atlases makes it difficult for us to think of the world in

other terms than those of map and diagram; knowledge and science have focussed things

for us, and our imagination has in consequence shrunk. It is almost impossible, when

thinking of the earth as a whole, to think about it except as a picture drawn, or as a small

globe with maps traced upon it. I am sure that our imagination has a far narrower angle—

to borrow a term from the science of lenses—than the imagination of men who lived in

the fifteenth century. They thought of the world in its actual terms—seas, islands,

continents, gulfs, rivers, oceans. Columbus had seen maps and charts—among them the

famous 'portolani' of Benincasa at Genoa; but I think it unlikely that he was so familiar

with them as to have adopted their terms in his thoughts about the earth. He had seen the

Mediterranean and sailed upon it before he had seen a chart of it; he knew a good deal of

the world itself before he had seen a map of it. He had more knowledge of the actual

earth and sea than he had of pictures or drawings of them; and therefore, if we are to keep

in sympathetic touch with him, we must not think too closely of maps, but of land and sea

themselves.

The world that Columbus had heard about as being within the knowledge of men

extended on the north to Iceland and Scandinavia, on the south to a cape one hundred

miles south of the Equator, and to the east as far as China and Japan. North and South

were not important to the spirit of that time; it was East and West that men thought of

when they thought of the expansion and the discovery of the world. And although they

admitted that the earth was a sphere, I think it likely that they imagined (although the

imagination was contrary to their knowledge) that the line of West and East was far

longer, and full of vaster possibilities, than that of North and South. North was familiar

ground to them—one voyage to England, another to Iceland, another to Scandinavia;

there was nothing impossible about that. Southward was another matter; but even here

there was no ambition to discover the limit of the world. It is an error continually made

by the biographers of Columbus that the purpose of Prince Henry's explorations down the

coast of Africa was to find a sea road to the West Indies by way of the East. It was

nothing of the kind. There was no idea in the minds of the Portuguese of the land which

Columbus discovered, and which we now know as the West Indies. Mr. Vignaud

contends that the confusion arose from the very loose way in which the term India was

applied in the Middle Ages. Several Indias were recognised. There was an India beyond

the Ganges; a Middle India between the Ganges and the Indus; and a Lesser India, in

which were included Arabia, Abyssinia, and the countries about the Red Sea. These

divisions were, however, quite vague, and varied in different periods. In the time of

Columbus the word India meant the kingdom of Prester John, that fabulous monarch who

had been the subject of persistent legends since the twelfth century; and it was this India

to which the Portuguese sought a sea road. They had no idea of a barrier cape far to the

south, the doubling of which would open a road for them to the west; nor were they, as

Mr. Vignaud believes, trying to open a route for the spice trade with the Orient. They had

no great spice trade, and did not seek more; what they did seek was an extension of their

ordinary trade with Guinea and the African coast. To the maritime world of the fifteenth

century, then, the South as a geographical region and as a possible point of discovery had

no attractions.