PART II. VOYAGE AND DISCOVERY

Marco Polo

All through the Middle Ages it had been to the cities of the Mediterranean, first of all to Amalfi and Pisa, then to Marseilles, Barcelona, Genoa, and Venice, that Europe had turned as her obvious medium of communication with the East and all its fabulous wonders. In the thirteenth century a Venetian merchant, Marco Polo, setting forth with his father and uncle, had visited the kingdom of Cathay, or China, and brought back twenty years later not only marvellous tales of the court of Khubla Khan in Pekin, but also precious stones, rubies, sapphires, diamonds, and emeralds in such abundance that he was soon nicknamed by his fellow citizens ‘Marco of the Millions’.

Into the delighted ears of the guests he invited to a banquet on his return he poured descriptions of a land where ‘merchants are so numerous and so rich that their wealth can neither be told nor believed. They and their ladies do nothing with their own hands, but live as delicately as if they were kings.’ What seems to have struck his mediaeval mind with most astonishment were the enormous public baths in the ‘City of Heaven’ in southern China, of which there were four thousand, ‘the largest and most beautiful baths in the world.’

The banquets also given by the great Khan excelled any European feasts. They were attended by many thousands of guests, and their host, raised on a dais, had as his servants the chief nobles, who would wind rich towels round their mouths that they might not breathe upon the royal plates. For presents the Khan was accustomed to receive at a time some five thousand camels, or an equal number of elephants, draped in silken cloths worked with silver and gold. His government surpassed in its organization anything Europe had imagined since the fall of the Roman Empire, such, for instance, as the postal system, by means of messengers on foot and horse, that linked up Pekin with lands a hundred days distant, or the beneficent regard of a ruler who in times of bad harvests not only remitted taxation but dispatched grain to the principal districts that had suffered.

Coal was used in China freely, ‘a kind of black stone cut from the mountains in veins,’ as Marco Polo describes it. ‘It maintains the fire’, he added, ‘better than wood, and throughout the whole of Cathay this fuel is used.’

Besides dilating on the wealth and prosperity of China, the Venetian had also much to say of Zipangu, or Japan, of Tibet and Bengal, of Ceylon, ‘the finest island in the world,’ and of Java, supposed then to be ‘above three thousand miles wide’.

Other travellers were to confirm many of his statements, but none told their tale so simply and realistically as Polo, while not a few, like the English Sir John Mandeville in the fourteenth century, supplied fiction in large doses where it seemed to them that truth might bore their readers. The eagerness with which either fact or fiction was swallowed bears witness, at any rate, first to the extraordinary fascination excited in mediaeval minds by such names as ‘Cathay’ or ‘Zipangu’; and next to the general Western belief in the inexhaustible riches of the East and their determination to secure at least a portion.

When the Seljuk Turks, with their fierce animosity towards Christendom, had settled like a curtain between East and West, the dangers and expense of trading and commerce with Arabia and Asia Minor of course increased. Venice and Genoa still brought back shiploads of silks, spices, and perfumes for Western markets, but the price of these goods was increased by the tolls paid to Turkish sultans and emirs for leave to transfer merchandise from camels to trading-sloops. Then came the fall of Constantinople, when Venice, by a treaty with ‘the Conqueror’ in the following year, appeared to secure wonderful trading privileges. Mohammed, however, made such promises only to break them when convenient, and, so soon as he could afford to do so, because he was securely established in Europe, the tolls he demanded became heavier, not lighter, the restrictions he placed upon trade more and more galling to Christian merchants, until the usual purchasers of Venetian goods grew exasperated at prices that doubled and trebled continually.

Voyage and Discovery

There were but two methods of avoiding this ever-increasing policy of exploitation apart from doing without such luxuries: either a complete conquest of the Turks, that would compel them to open up afresh the old caravan routes to the East; or else the discovery of a new route that would avoid their dominions altogether. Largely through the blind selfishness of Mediterranean cities, and especially of Venice, we have seen that the golden opportunity of aiding the Byzantine Empire had been lost for ever. Thus the first method failed. It remains to deal with the second, the voyages of discovery with which the Middle Ages fittingly close.

Henry ‘the Navigator’

Towards the end of the fourteenth century there was born in Portugal a prince, Henry, third son of King John I, and grandson by an English mother of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. While he was still a boy this prince earned fame for his share in the capture of Ceuta, a Moorish town exactly opposite Gibraltar on the North African coast. To the ordinary Portuguese mind this conquest raised hopes of a gradual absorption of the southern Mediterranean seaboard, possibly of competition in the Levant with Genoa and Venice; but Prince Henry saw farther than ordinary minds. The problem that he set himself and any one, Arab or European, who seemed likely to supply a solution was—What would happen if, instead of entering the Mediterranean, Portuguese ships were to sail due south? How big was this unknown stretch of land called Africa, in the maps of which geographers hid their ignorance by placing labels, such as ‘Here are hippografs! Here are two-headed monsters!’? Would it not be possible to reach the far-famed wonders of Cathay by sailing first south and then east round Africa, thus avoiding trade routes through Syria and southern Russia?

It was fortunate that Prince Henry was a mathematician and geographer himself, for many people told him in answer to his inquiries that Africa ended at Cape Nam, not so many miles south of Tangier, and others that the white man who dared to sail beyond a certain point would be turned black by the heat of the sun, while the waters boiled about his vessel and the winds blew sheets of flame across the horizon.

Prince Henry refused to believe such tales. He could not sail himself, because he was so often occupied with wars in Africa against the Moors; but year after year he fitted out ships at his own expense, and chose the most daring mariners whom he could find, bribing them with promises of reward and fame to navigate the unknown African coast. He himself built a naval arsenal at Sagres on a southern promontory of Portugal, and here, when not busy with affairs of state, he would study the heavens, make charts, and watch anxiously for the returning sails of his brave adventurers.

During Prince Henry’s lifetime Portuguese or Italians in his pay discovered not only Madeira, or ‘the island of wood’, as they christened it from its many forests, but the Canaries, Cape Verde Islands, and the African coast as far south as Gambia and Sierra Leone. Soon there was no longer any need to bribe mariners into taking risks, for those who first led the way on these adventurous voyages brought back with them negroes and gold dust as evidence that they had been to lands where men could live, and where there were possibilities of untold wealth. Thus the work of exploration continued joyfully.

It was in 1471, some years after the death of Prince Henry, that Portuguese navigators crossed the Equator without being broiled black by the sun or raising sheets of flame, as the superstitious had predicted. The next important step on this new road to Asia was the voyage of Bartholomew Diaz, who, sailing ever southwards, swept in an icy wind without knowing it round the Cape, past Table Mountain, and then, turning eastwards, landed at last on the little island of Santa Cruz in Algoa Bay, where he planted a cross. He would have explored the mainland also, but Kaffirs armed with heavy stones collected and drove back the landing-party.

Diaz, emboldened by his success, wished to sail farther, but his crew were weary of adventure, and with tears of regret in his eyes he was forced to yield to their threats of mutiny and turn homewards. At Lisbon, describing his voyage, he said that on account of its dangers he had called the southernmost point of Africa the ‘Cape of Storms’, but the King of Portugal, hearing that this was indeed the limit of the continent, and that in all probability the way to Asia lay beyond, would not consent to such an ill-omened name. ‘It shall be the Cape of Good Hope,’ he declared, and so it has remained.

Vasco da Gama

In 1498 the work of exploration begun by Diaz was completed by another famous navigator, Vasco da Gama. National hopes of wealth and glory were centred in his task, and when he and his company marched forth to their ships a large crowd went with them to the shore, carrying candles, and singing a solemn litany. Then the sails of his four vessels dipped below the horizon and were not seen for two years and eight months, but when at last men and women had begun to despair at the great silence, their hero reappeared amongst them, bringing news more wonderful and glorious than anything that Portugal had dared to hope.

There is little space to tell in this chapter the adventures that Vasco da Gama related to the King and his court. He and his crews, it seemed, had sailed for weeks amid ‘a lonely dreary waste of seas and boundless sky’: they had skirmished with Hottentots and ‘doubled the Cape’, caught in such a whirl of breakers and stormy winds that the walls of the wooden ships had oozed water, and despair and sickness had seized upon all. Vasco da Gama, even when ill and depressed, was not to be turned from his purpose. Eastwards and northwards he set his sails, in the teeth of laments and threats from his sailors, and so on Christmas Day landed on a part of the coast to which in memory of the most famous Dies Natalis he gave the name of Natal.

From Natal, battling the dread disease of scurvy brought on by a prolonged diet of salt meat, the Portuguese commander pursued his way, attacked, as often as he landed for water and fresh food, by fierce Mahometan tribes, until at last, guided by an Arabian pilot whom he had picked up, he came to the harbours of Calicut in India, where was a Christian king. The new route to Asia had been discovered. ‘A lucky venture—plenty of emeralds.... You owe great thanks to God for having brought you to a country holding such riches,’ declared the natives, and loud was the rejoicing of the Portuguese at this glorious national prospect.

The likely effects of Vasco da Gama’s voyage did not pass unnoticed elsewhere in Europe. ‘Soon,’ exclaimed a Venetian merchant in deep gloom, ‘it will be cheaper to buy goods in Lisbon than in Venice.’ The death-knell of the great Republic’s commercial prosperity sounded in these words.

Christopher Columbus

In the meanwhile, some years before Vasco da Gama’s triumphant achievement, a still greater discovery was made that was destined in the course of time to change the whole commercial aspect of the world. Its author was a Genoese sailor, Christopher Columbus, who, tradition says, once sailed as far north as Iceland, and in the south to the island of Porto Santo. Always in his spare time he could be found bent over maps and charts, calculating, weaving around his reasoned mathematical arguments the tales of shipwrecked mariners, until at last he brought to the ears of his astonished fellow men and women a scheme for finding Cathay, neither by sailing south nor east, but due west across the Atlantic.

Here is a fourteenth-century description of the Atlantic, a dismal picture still popularly accepted in the fifteenth: ‘A vast and boundless ocean on which ships dared not venture out of sight of land. For even if sailors knew the directions of the winds they would not know whither those winds would carry them; and, as there is no inhabited country beyond, they would run great risks of being lost in the mist and vapour. The limit of the west is the Atlantic Ocean.’

Many people still believed that the world was flat, and that to sail across the Atlantic was to incur the risk of being driven by the winds over the edge into space. Thus Columbus met with either reproof for contemplating such risks, or ridicule for his folly, but so convinced was he of his own wisdom that he only grew the more enthusiastic as a result of opposition.

Without money or royal patronage he could not hope to make the voyage a success, and so he laid his scheme before the King of Portugal, usually a willing patron of adventure. Unfortunately for Columbus, the discoveries along the African coast promised such wealth and trade to Portugal that her ruler did not feel inclined to take risks in other directions that, while they must involve expense, as yet held no guarantee of repayment.

‘I went to take refuge in Portugal,’ wrote Columbus at a later date, ‘since the King of that country was more versed in discovery than any other, but ... in fourteen years I could not make him understand what I said.’ Driven at last from Portugal by a decided refusal, Christopher went to Spain, sending his brother Bartholomew with a letter explaining his project to King Henry VII of England. It is interesting to note that the keen-witted Tudor, as soon as the scheme was laid before him, is said to have expressed his readiness to learn more and to lend his support; but Bartholomew had been shipwrecked on his voyage northwards, and owing to this delay Columbus had already received the patronage of Spain and set out on his voyage before his brother returned with the news.

It was Queen Isabel of Castile, wife of King Ferdinand of Aragon,50 who after considerable hesitation, and against the advice of a council of leading bishops and statesmen, determined finally to pledge her sympathy, and tradition says her jewels if necessary, in the mariner’s cause. Part of the attraction of his project lay in its appeal to her Castilian imagination, for Castile had been ever haunted by the possibilities of the bleak grey ocean that rolled at the gates of Galicia; but still more potent than the thought of discovery was the desire of spreading the Catholic Faith. This hope also inspired Columbus, who regarded his enterprise as in the nature of a crusade, believing that he had been called to preach the Gospel to the millions of heathen inhabiting Cathay.

When Columbus set forth on his first voyage to ‘the Indies’, as he roughly called the unknown territory he sought, those who sailed in his three ships were many of them ‘pressed’ men, that is, sailors ordered on board by their town, that having incurred royal displeasure was given this way of appeasing it. Thus they were without enthusiasm or any belief in what they thought their admiral’s mad and dangerous adventure, and from the time that they lost sight of land they never ceased to grumble and utter threats of mutiny. At one time it was the extraordinary variations in the compass that brought them trembling to complain; at another the steadiness of the wind blowing from the East that they believed would never change and allow them to return home; finally it was the sluggish waters of the Sargassa Sea, amid whose weeds they saw themselves destined to drift until they died of starvation and thirst. To every suggestion of setting the sails eastward Columbus turned a deaf ear: but for the rest he threatened, cajoled, or argued, as the occasion seemed to demand, his own heart sinking each time the cry of ‘Land!’ was raised and the ardently desired vision proved only to be some bank of clouds lying low upon the horizon.

At length came the news that a moving light had been seen in the darkness. ‘It appeared like a candle that went up and down,’ says Columbus in his diary, and all waited eagerly for dawn that revealed at last a wooded island, later called the Bahamas, but then believed to be part of the mainland of Asia. Clad in armour, and carrying the royal banner of Spain, the great discoverer of the West stepped ashore, and there, humbly kneeling, he and his crews raised to Heaven a Te Deum of thankfulness and joy.

Columbus made five voyages to the West in all, for the way once shown proved easy enough, nor did he need to ‘press’ crews for the enterprise, but rather to guard against unwelcome stowaways. The brown-skinned Indians, gaily coloured parrots, gold nuggets, and strange roots that he brought back as witness of his first success were enough to inflame the minds and ambitions of Spaniards with such high hopes of wealth and glory that they almost fought to be allowed to join the expeditions.

Vasco da Gama was rewarded for his voyage to India with a large pension and the Portuguese title of ‘Dom’: he died in honoured old age. It is sad to find that after the first triumphant return, when no glory and praise seemed too great to bestow on their hero, the Spaniards turned against Columbus. They blamed him because gold was not more abundant; because his settlers quarrelled and started feuds with the natives; because, although a very great mariner, he did not prove a ‘governor’ able to control and manage other men easily. Not a few were jealous of his genius, and determined to bring about his ruin out of spite.

From his third voyage to the West Columbus was sent back by his enemies in chains, ill with wounded pride at his shameful treatment. Queen Isabel, hearing of it, instantly ordered his release, and tried to soothe his indignation; but not long afterwards she herself died, and Ferdinand, left to himself, was wholly intent on Aragonese ambitions in the Mediterranean. To him the conquest of Naples was far more important than any discovery of Cathay, and so Columbus’s complaints went unheeded and he died in poverty forgotten by all save a few. ‘After twenty years of toil and peril,’ he exclaimed bitterly, as he was borne ashore from his last voyage, ‘I do not own even a roof in Spain.’

The New World to which he had won an entrance was given the name of another, namely, of a Florentine, Amerigo Vespucci, who, sailing beyond the West Indies, reached the mainland.

The effect of Columbus’s discovery upon the life of Europe was momentous. No longer the Atlantic lay like a grey wall between man and the Unknown. It had become a highway, not to Cathay but to a greater West, where were riches beyond all human dreaming, ready as a harvest for the enterprising and hardworking.

The central road of mediaeval commerce had been the Mediterranean, the highway of the modern world was to be the Atlantic, and the commercial future of Europe lay not with the city republics of the South but with the nations of the North and West, with Portugal and Spain, with Flanders and England, that had lain upon the fringe of the Old World but stood at the very heart of the New.

Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. 368–73.

Emperor Andronicus II 1282–1328

Emperor John V 1341–91

Sultan Orkhan 1325–59

Sultan Mohammed II 1451–81

Stephen Dushan 1331–55

Marco Polo 1254–1324

Henry ‘the Navigator’ 1394–1460

Cape of Good Hope rounded 1486