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Title: The Story of Geographical Discovery
How the World Became Known
Author: Joseph Jacobs
Release Date: December 7, 2004 [EBook #14291]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY ***
Produced by Robert J. Hall.
[Illustration: Arms granted to SEBASTIAN DEL CANO, Captain of the
_Victoria_, the first vessel that circumnavigated the Globe
[_For a description, see pp._ 129-30]]
The Story of Geographical Discovery
How the World Became Known
By Joseph Jacobs
With Twenty-four Maps, &c.
PREFACE
In attempting to get what is little less than a history of the world,
from a special point of view, into a couple of hundred duodecimo
pages, I have had to make three bites at my very big cherry. In the
Appendix I have given in chronological order, and for the first
time on such a scale in English, the chief voyages and explorations
by which our knowledge of the world has been increased, and the
chief works in which that knowledge has been recorded. In the body
of the work I have then attempted to connect together these facts
in their more general aspects. In particular I have grouped the
great voyages of 1492-1521 round the search for the Spice Islands
as a central motive. It is possible that in tracing the Portuguese
and Spanish discoveries to the need of titillating the parched
palates of the mediævals, who lived on salt meat during winter and
salt fish during Lent, I may have unduly simplified the problem.
But there can be no doubt of the paramount importance attached
to the spices of the East in the earlier stages. The search for
the El Dorado came afterwards, and is still urging men north to
the Yukon, south to the Cape, and in a south-easterly direction
to "Westralia."
Besides the general treatment in the text and the special details
in the Appendix, I have also attempted to tell the story once more
in a series of maps showing the gradual increase of men's knowledge
of the globe. It would have been impossible to have included all
these in a book of this size and price but for the complaisance
of several publishing firms, who have given permission for the
reproduction on a reduced scale of maps that have already been
prepared for special purposes. I have specially to thank Messrs.
Macmillan for the two dealing with the Portuguese discoveries,
and derived from Mr. Payne's excellent little work on European
Colonies; Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin, & Co., of Boston, for several
illustrating the discovery of America, from Mr. J. Fiske's "School
History of the United States;" and Messrs. Phillips for the arms
of Del Cano, so clearly displaying the "spicy" motive of the first
circumnavigation of the globe.
I have besides to thank the officials of the Royal Geographical
Society, especially Mr. Scott Keltie and Dr. H. R. Mill, for the
readiness with which they have placed the magnificent resources
of the library and map-room of that national institution at my
disposal, and the kindness with which they have answered my queries
and indicated new sources of information.
J. J.
CONTENTS
CHAP.
PREFACE
LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS
INTRODUCTION
I. THE WORLD AS KNOWN TO THE ANCIENTS
II. THE SPREAD OF CONQUEST IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
III. GEOGRAPHY IN THE DARK AGES
IV. MEDIÆVAL TRAVELS--MARCO POLO, IBN BATUTA
V. ROADS AND COMMERCE
VI. TO THE INDIES EASTWARD--PORTUGUESE ROUTE--PRINCE HENRY AND VASCO
DA GAMA
VII. TO THE INDIES WESTWARD--SPANISH ROUTE--COLUMBUS AND MAGELLAN
VIII. TO THE INDIES NORTHWARD--ENGLISH, FRENCH, DUTCH, AND RUSSIAN ROUTES
IX. PARTITION OF AMERICA
X. AUSTRALIA AND THE SOUTH SEAS--TASMAN AND COOK
XI. EXPLORATION AND PARTITION OF AFRICA--PARK, LIVINGSTON, AND STANLEY
XII. THE POLES--FRANKLIN, ROSS, NORDENSKIOLD, AND NANSEN
ANNALS OF DISCOVERY
LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS
COAT-OF-ARMS OF DEL CANO (from Guillemard, _Magellan_. By kind
permission of Messrs. Phillips).--It illustrates the importance
attributed to the Spice Islands as the main object of Magellan's
voyage. For the blazon, see pp. 129-30.
THE EARLIEST MAP OF THE WORLD (from the Rev. C. J. Ball's _Bible
Illustrations_, 1898).--This is probably of the eighth century
B.C., and indicates the Babylonian view of the world surrounded by
the ocean, which is indicated by the parallel circles, and traversed
by the Euphrates, which is seen meandering through the middle, with
Babylon, the great city, crossing it at the top. Beyond the ocean
are seven successive projections of land, possibly indicating the
Babylonian knowledge of surrounding countries beyond the Euxine
and the Red Sea.
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO PTOLEMY.--It will be observed that the Greek
geographer regarded the Indian Ocean as a landlocked body of water,
while he appears to have some knowledge of the so ces of the Nile.
The general tendency of the map is to extend Asia very much to
the east, which led to the miscalculation encouraging Columbus to
discover America.
THE ROMAN ROADS OF EUROPE (drawn specially for this work).--These
give roughly the limits within which the inland geographical knowledge
of the ancients reach some degrees of accuracy.
GEOGRAPHICAL MONSTERS (from an early edition of Mandeville's
_Travels_).--Most of the mediæval maps were dotted over with similar
monstrosities.
THE HEREFORD MAP.--This, one of the best known of mediæval maps,
was drawn by Richard of Aldingham about 1307. Like most of these
maps, it has the East with the terrestrial paradise at the top,
and Jerusalem is represented as the centre.
PEUTINGER TABLE, WESTERN PART.--This is the only Roman map extant;
it gives lines of roads from the eastern shores of Britain to the
Adriatic Sea. It is really a kind of bird's-eye view taken from
the African coast. The Mediterranean runs as a thin strip through
the lower part of the map. The lower section joins on to the upper.
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO IBN HAUKAL (from Lelewel, _Géographie du
mon age_).--This map, like most of the Arabian maps, has the south
at the top. It is practically only a diagram, and is thus similar
to the Hereford Map in general form.--Misr=Egypt, Fars=Persia,
Andalus=Spain.
COAST-LINE OF THE MEDITERRANEAN (from the _Portulano_ of Dulcert,
1339, given in Nordenskiold's _Facsimile Atlas_).--To illustrate
the accuracy with which mariners' charts gave the coast-lines as
contrasted with the merely symbolical representation of other mediæval
maps.
FRA MAURO MAP, 1457 (from Lelewel, _loc. Cit._).--Here, as usual,
the south is placed at the top of the map. Besides the ordinary
mediæval conceptions, Fra Mauro included the Portuguese discoveries
along the coast of Africa up to his time, 1457.
PORTUGUESE DISCOVERIES IN AFRICA (from E. J. Payne, _European Colonies_,
1877).--Giving the successive points reached by the Portuguese
navigators during the fifteenth century.
PORTUGUESE INDIES (from Payne, _loc. Cit._).--All the ports mentioned
in ordinary type were held by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century.
THE TOSCANELLI MAP (from Kretschmer, _Entdeckung Amerikas_, 1892).--This
is a reconstruction of the map which Columbus got from the Italian
astronomer and cartographer Toscanelli and used to guide him in
his voyage across the Atlantic. Its general resemblance to the
Behaim Globe will be remarked.
THE BEHAIM GLOBE.--This gives the information about the world possessed
in 1492, just as Columbus was starting, and is mainly based upon the
map of Toscanelli, which served as his guide. It will be observed
that there is no other continent between Spain and Zipangu or Japan,
while the fabled islands of St. Brandan and Antilia are represented
bridging the expanse between the Azores and Japan.
AMERIGO VESPUCCI (from Fiske's _School History of the United States_,
by kind permission of Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin, & Co.)
FERDINAND MAGELLAN (from Fiske's _School History of the United
States_, by kind permission of Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin, & Co.)
MAP OF THE WORLD, from the Ptolemy Edition of 1548 (after Kretschmer's
_Entdeckungsgeschichte Amerikas_).--It will be observed that Mexico
is supposed to be joined on to Asia, and that the North Pacific
was not even known to exist.
RUSSIAN ASIA (after the Atlas published by the Russian Academy of
Sciences in 1737, by kind permission of Messrs. Hachette). Japan
is represented as a peninsula.
AUSTRALIA AS KNOWN IN 1745 (from D'Anville's _Atlas_, by kind permission
of Messrs. Hachette).--It will be seen that the Northern and Western
coasts were even by this time tolerably well mapped out, leaving
only the eastern coast to be explored by Cook.
AUSTRALIA, showing routes of explorations (prepared specially for
the present volume). The names of the chief explorers are given
at the top of the map.
AFRICA AS KNOWN IN 1676 (from Dapper's _Atlas_).--This includes
a knowledge of most of the African river sand lakes due to the
explorations of the Portuguese.
AFRICA (made specially for this volume, to show chief explorations
and partition).--The names of the explorers are given at the foot
of the map itself.
NORTH POLAR REGIONS, WESTERN HALF (prepared specially for the present
volume from the _Citizen's Atlas_, by kind permission of Messrs.
Bartholomew).--This gives the results of the discoveries due to
Franklin expeditions and most of the searchers after the North-West
Passage.
NORTH POLAR REGIONS, EASTERN HALF.--This gives the Siberian coast
investigated by the Russians and Nordenskiold, as well as Nansen's
_Farthest North_.
CLIMBING THE NORTH POLE (prepared specially for this volume). Giving
in graphic form the names of the chief Arctic travellers and the
latitude N. reached from John Davis (1587) to Nansen (1895).
THE STORY OF
GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY
INTRODUCTION
How was the world discovered? That is to say, how did a certain
set of men who lived round the Mediterranean Sea, and had acquired
the art of recording what each generation had learned, become
successively aware of the other parts of the globe? Every part of
the earth, so far as we know, has been inhabited by man during the
five or six thousand years in which Europeans have been storing up
their knowledge, and all that time the inhabitants of each part, of
course, were acquainted with that particular part: the Kamtschatkans
knew Kamtschatka, the Greenlanders, Greenland; the various tribes of
North American Indians knew, at any rate, that part of America over
which they wandered, long before Columbus, as we say, "discovered"
it.
Very often these savages not only know their own country, but can
express their knowledge in maps of very remarkable accuracy. Cortes
traversed over 1000 miles through Central America, guided only by
a calico map of a local cacique. An Eskimo named Kalliherey drew
out, from his own knowledge of the coast between Smith Channel
and Cape York, a map of it, varying only in minute details from
the Admiralty chart. A native of Tahiti, named Tupaia, drew out
for Cook a map of the Pacific, extending over forty-five degrees
of longitude (nearly 3000 miles), giving the relative size and
position of the main islands over that huge tract of ocean. Almost
all geographical discoveries by Europeans have, in like manner,
been brought about by means of guides, who necessarily knew the
country which their European masters wished to "discover."
What, therefore, we mean by the history of geographical discovery is
the gradual bringing to the knowledge of the nations of civilisation
surrounding the Mediterranean Sea the vast tracts of land extending
in all directions from it. There are mainly two divisions of this
history--the discovery of the Old World and that of the New, including
Australia under the latter term. Though we speak of geographical
discovery, it is really the discovery of new tribes of men that
we are thinking of. It is only quite recently that men have sought
for knowledge about lands, apart from the men who inhabit them.
One might almost say that the history of geographical discovery,
properly so called, begins with Captain Cook, the motive of whose
voyages was purely scientific curiosity. But before his time men
wanted to know one another for two chief reasons: they wanted to
conquer, or they wanted to trade; or perhaps we could reduce the
motives to one--they wanted to conquer, because they wanted to
trade. In our own day we have seen a remarkable mixture of all three
motives, resulting in the European partition of Africa--perhaps the
most remarkable event of the latter end of the nineteenth century.
Speke and Burton, Livingstone and Stanley, investigated the interior
from love of adventure and of knowledge; then came the great chartered
trading companies; and, finally, the governments to which these
belong have assumed responsibility for the territories thus made
known to the civilised world. Within forty years the map of Africa,
which was practically a blank in the interior, and, as will be
shown, was better known in 1680 than in 1850, has been filled up
almost completely by researches due to motives of conquest, of
trade, or of scientific curiosity.
In its earlier stages, then, the history of geographical discovery
is mainly a history of conquest, and what we shall have to do will
be to give a short history of the ancient world, from the point
of view of how that world became known. "Became known to whom?"
you may ask; and we must determine that question first. We might,
of course, take the earliest geographical work known to us--the
tenth chapter of Genesis--and work out how the rest of the world
became known to the Israelites when they became part of the Roman
Empire; but in history all roads lead to Rome or away from it,
and it is more useful for every purpose to take Rome as our
centre-point. Yet Rome only came in as the heir of earlier empires
that spread the knowledge of the earth and man by conquest long
before Rome was of importance; and even when the Romans were the
masters of all this vast inheritance, they had not themselves the
ability to record the geographical knowledge thus acquired, and it
is to a Greek named Ptolemy, a professor of the great university
of Alexandria, to whom we owe our knowledge of how much the ancient
world knew of the earth. It will be convenient to determine this
first, and afterwards to sketch rapidly the course of historical
events which led to the knowledge which Ptolemy records.
In the Middle Ages, much of this knowledge, like all other, was
lost, and we shall have to record how knowledge was replaced by
imagination and theory. The true inheritors of Greek science during
that period were the Arabs, and the few additions to real geographical
knowledge at that time were due to them, except in so far as commercial
travellers and pilgrims brought a more intimate knowledge of Asia
to the West.
The discovery of America forms the beginning of a new period, both
in modern history and in modern geography. In the four hundred
years that have elapsed since then, more than twice as much of
the inhabited globe has become known to civilised man than in the
preceding four thousand years. The result is that, except for a few
patches of Africa, South America, and round the Poles, man knows
roughly what are the physical resources of the world he inhabits,
and, except for minor details, the history of geographical discovery
is practically at an end.
Besides its interest as a record of war and adventure, this history
gives the successive stages by which modern men have been made what
they are. The longest known countries and peoples have, on the whole,
had the deepest influence in the forming of the civilised character.
Nor is the practical utility of this study less important. The way
in which the world has been discovered determines now-a-days the
world's history. The great problems of the twentieth century will
have immediate relation to the discoveries of America, of Africa,
and of Australia. In all these problems, Englishmen will have most
to say and to do, and the history of geographical discovery is,
therefore, of immediate and immense interest to Englishmen.
[_Authorities:_ Cooley, _History of Maritime and Inland Discoveries_,
3 vols., 1831; Vivien de Saint Martin, _Histoire de la Géographie_,
1873.]
CHAPTER I
THE WORLD AS KNOWN TO THE ANCIENTS
Before telling how the ancients got to know that part of the world
with which they finally became acquainted when the Roman Empire
was at its greatest extent, it is as well to get some idea of the
successive stages of their knowledge, leaving for the next chapter
the story of how that knowledge was obtained. As in most branches of
organised knowledge, it is to the Greeks that we owe our acquaintance
with ancient views of this subject. In the early stages they possibly
learned something from the Phoenicians, who were the great traders
and sailors of antiquity, and who coasted along the Mediterranean,
ventured through the Straits of Gibraltar, and traded with the
British Isles, which they visited for the tin found in Cornwall. It
is even said that one of their admirals, at the command of Necho,
king of Egypt, circumnavigated Africa, for Herodotus reports that
on the homeward voyage the sun set in the sea on the right hand.
But the Phoenicians kept their geographical knowledge to themselves
as a trade secret, and the Greeks learned but little from them.
The first glimpse that we have of the notions which the Greeks
possessed of the shape and the inhabitants of the earth is afforded
by the poems passing under the name of HOMER. These poems show an
intimate knowledge of Northern Greece and of the western coasts of
Asia Minor, some acquaintance with Egypt, Cyprus, and Sicily; but
all the rest, even of the Eastern Mediterranean, is only vaguely
conceived by their author. Where he does not know he imagines,
and some of his imaginings have had a most important influence
upon the progress of geographical knowledge. Thus he conceives of
the world as being a sort of flat shield, with an extremely wide
river surrounding it, known as Ocean. The centre of this shield
was at Delphi, which was regarded as the "navel" of the inhabited
world. According to Hesiod, who is but little later than Homer, up
in the far north were placed a people known as the _Hyperboreani_, or
those who dwelt at the back of the north wind; whilst a corresponding
place in the south was taken by the Abyssinians. All these four
conceptions had an important influence upon the views that men had
of the world up to times comparatively recent. Homer also mentioned
the pigmies as living in Africa. These were regarded as fabulous,
till they were re-discovered by Dr. Schweinfurth and Mr. Stanley
in our own time.
It is probably from the Babylonians that the Greeks obtained the
idea of an all-encircling ocean. Inhabitants of Mesopotamia would
find themselves reaching the ocean in almost any direction in which
they travelled, either the Caspian, the Black Sea, the Mediterranean,
or the Persian Gulf. Accordingly, the oldest map of the world which
has been found is one accompanying a cuneiform inscription, and
representing the plain of Mesopotamia with the Euphrates flowing
through it, and the whole surrounded by two concentric circles,
which are named briny waters. Outside these, however, are seven
detached islets, possibly representing the seven zones or climates
into which the world was divided according to the ideas of the
Babylonians, though afterwards they resorted to the ordinary four
cardinal points. What was roughly true of Babylonia did not in
any way answer to the geographical position of Greece, and it is
therefore probable that in the first place they obtained their
ideas of the surrounding ocean from the Babylonians.
[Illustration: THE EARLIEST MAP OF THE WORLD]
It was after the period of Homer and Hesiod that the first great
expansion of Greek knowledge about the world began, through the
extensive colonisation which was carried on by the Greeks around
the Eastern Mediterranean. Even to this day the natives of the
southern part of Italy speak a Greek dialect, owing to the wide
extent of Greek colonies in that country, which used to be called
"Magna Grecia," or "Great Greece." Marseilles also one of the Greek
colonies (600 B.C.), which, in its turn, sent out other colonies
along the Gulf of Lyons. In the East, too, Greek cities were dotted
along the coast of the Black Sea, one of which, Byzantium, was
destined to be of world-historic importance. So, too, in North
Africa, and among the islands of the Ægean Sea, the Greeks colonised
throughout the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., and in almost every
case communication was kept up between the colonies and the
mother-country.
Now, the one quality which has made the Greeks so distinguished
in the world's history was their curiosity; and it was natural
that they should desire to know, and to put on record, the large
amount of information brought to the mainland of Greece from the
innumerable Greek colonies. But to record geographical knowledge,
the first thing that is necessary is a map, and accordingly it is
a Greek philosopher named ANAXIMANDER of Miletus, of the sixth
century B.C., to whom we owe the invention of map-drawing. Now,
in order to make a map of one's own country, little astronomical
knowledge is required. As we have seen, savages are able to draw
such maps; but when it comes to describing the relative positions
of countries divided from one another by seas, the problem is not
so easy. An Athenian would know roughly that Byzantium (now called
Constantinople) was somewhat to the east and to the north of him,
because in sailing thither he would have to sail towards the rising
sun, and would find the climate getting colder as he approached
Byzantium. So, too, he might roughly guess that Marseilles was
somewhere to the west and north of him; but how was he to fix the
relative position of Marseilles and Byzantium to one another? Was
Marseilles more northerly than Byzantium? Was it very far away
from that city? For though it took longer to get to Marseilles,
the voyage was winding, and might possibly bring the vessel
comparatively near to Byzantium, though there might be no direct
road between the two cities. There was one rough way of determining
how far north a place stood: the very slightest observation of the
starry heavens would show a traveller that as he moved towards
the north, the pole-star rose higher up in the heavens. How much
higher, could be determined by the angle formed by a stick pointing
to the pole-star, in relation to one held horizontally. If, instead
of two sticks, we cut out a piece of metal or wood to fill up the
enclosed angle, we get the earliest form of the sun-dial, known as
the _gnomon_, and according to the shape of the gnomon the latitude
of a place is determined. Accordingly, it is not surprising to find
that the invention of the gnomon is also attributed to Anaximander,
for without some such instrument it would have been impossible for
him to have made any map worthy of the name. But it is probable
that Anaximander did not so much invent as introduce the gnomon,
and, indeed, Herodotus, expressly states that this instrument was
derived from the Babylonians, who were the earliest astronomers, so
far as we know. A curious point confirms this, for the measurement
of angles is by degrees, and degrees are divided into sixty seconds,
just as minutes are. Now this division into sixty is certainly
derived from Babylonia in the case of time measurement, and is
therefore of the same origin as regards the measurement of angles.
We have no longer any copy of this first map of the world drawn
up by Anaximander, but there is little doubt that it formed the
foundation of a similar map drawn by a fellow-townsman of Anaximander,
HECATÆUS of Miletus, who seems to have written the first formal
geography. Only fragments of this are extant, but from them we are
able to see that it was of the nature of a _periplus_, or seaman's
guide, telling how many days' sail it was from one point to another,
and in what direction. We know also that he arranged his whole
subject into two books, dealing respectively with Europe and Asia,
under which latter term he included part of what we now know as
Africa. From the fragments scholars have been able to reproduce
the rough outlines of the map of the world as it presented itself
to Hecatæus. From this it can be seen that the Homeric conception of
the surrounding ocean formed a chief determining feature in Hecatæus's
map. For the rest, he was acquainted with the Mediterranean, Red,
and Black Seas, and with the great rivers Danube, Nile, Euphrates,
Tigris, and Indus.
The next great name in the history of Greek geography is that of
HERODOTUS of Halicarnassus, who might indeed be equally well called
the Father of Geography as the Father of History. He travelled
much in Egypt, Babylonia, Persia, and on the shores of the Black
Sea, while he was acquainted with Greece, and passed the latter
years of his life in South Italy. On all these countries he gave
his fellow-citizens accurate and tolerably full information, and
he had diligently collected knowledge about countries in their
neighbourhood. In particular he gives full details of Scythia (or
Southern Russia), and of the satrapies and royal roads of Persia.
As a rule, his information is as accurate as could be expected at
such an early date, and he rarely tells marvellous stories, or if
he does, he points out himself their untrustworthiness. Almost the
only traveller's yarn which Herodotus reports without due scepticism
is that of the ants of India that were bigger than foxes and burrowed
out gold dust for their ant-hills.
One of the stories he relates is of interest, as seeming to show
an anticipation of one of Mr. Stanley's journeys. Five young men
of the Nasamonians started from Southern Libya, W. of the Soudan,
and journeyed for many days west till they came to a grove of trees,
when they were seized by a number of men of very small stature, and
conducted through marshes to a great city of black men of the same
size, through which a large river flowed. This Herodotus identifies
with the Nile, but, from the indication of the journey given by
him, it would seem more probable that it was the Niger, and that
the Nasamonians had visited Timbuctoo! Owing to this statement
of Herodotus, it was for long thought that the Upper Nile flowed
east and west.
After Herodotus, the date of whose history may be fixed at the
easily remembered number of 444 B.C., a large increase of knowledge
was obtained of the western part of Asia by the two expeditions of
Xenophon and of Alexander, which brought the familiar knowledge of
the Greeks as far as India. But besides these military expeditions
we have still extant several log-books of mariners, which might
have added considerably to Greek geography. One of these tells
the tale of an expedition of the Carthaginian admiral named Hanno,
down the western coast of Africa, as far as Sierra Leone, a voyage
which was not afterwards undertaken for sixteen hundred years.
Hanno brought back from this voyage hairy skins, which, he stated,
belonged to men and women whom he had captured, and who were known
to the natives by the name of Gorillas. Another log-book is that
of a Greek named Scylax, who gives the sailing distances between
nearly all ports on the Mediterranean and Black Seas, and the number
of days required to pass from one to another. From this it would seem
that a Greek merchant vessel could manage on the average fifty miles
a day. Besides this, one of Alexander's admirals, named Nearchus,
learned to carry his ships from the mouth of the Indus to the Arabian
Gulf. Later on, a Greek sailor, Hippalus, found out that by using
the monsoons at the appropriate times, he could sail direct from
Arabia to India without laboriously coasting along the shores of
Persia and Beluchistan, and in consequence the Greeks gave his
name to the monsoon. For information about India itself, the Greeks
were, for a long time, dependent upon the account of Megasthenes,
an ambassador sent by Seleucus, one of Alexander's generals, to
the Indian king of the Punjab.
While knowledge was thus gained of the East, additional information
was obtained about the north of Europe by the travels of one PYTHEAS,
a native of Marseilles, who flourished about the time of Alexander
the Great (333 B.C.), and he is especially interesting to us as
having been the first civilised person who can be identified as
having visited Britain. He seems to have coasted along the Bay
of Biscay, to have spent some time in England,--which he reckoned
as 40,000 stadia (4000 miles) in circumference,--and he appears
also to have coasted along Belgium and Holland, as far as the mouth
of the Elbe. Pytheas is, however, chiefly known in the history
of geography as having referred to the island of Thule, which he
described as the most northerly point of the inhabited earth, beyond
which the sea became thickened, and of a jelly-like consistency. He
does not profess to have visited Thule, and his account probably
refers to the existence of drift ice near the Shetlands.
All this new information was gathered together, and made accessible
to the Greek reading world, by ERATOSTHENES, librarian of Alexandria
(240-196 B.C.), who was practically the founder of scientific geography.
He was the first to attempt any accurate measurement of the size of
the earth, and of its inhabited portion. By his time the scientific
men of Greece had become quite aware of the fact that the earth
was a globe, though they considered that it was fixed in space
at the centre of the universe. Guesses had even been made at the
size of this globe, Aristotle fixing its circumference at 400,000
stadia (or 40,000 miles), but Eratosthenes attempted a more accurate
measurement. He compared the length of the shadow thrown by the sun
at Alexandria and at Syene, near the first cataract of the Nile,
which he assumed to be on the same meridian of longitude, and to be
at about 5000 stadia (500 miles) distance. From the difference in
the length of the shadows he deduced that this distance represented
one-fiftieth of the circumference of the earth, which would accordingly
be about 250,000 stadia, or 25,000 geographical miles. As the actual
circumference is 24,899 English miles, this was a very near
approximation, considering the rough means Eratosthenes had at his
disposal.
Having thus estimated the size of the earth, Eratosthenes then
went on to determine the size of that portion which the ancients
considered to be habitable. North and south of the lands known to
him, Eratosthenes and all the ancients considered to be either
too cold or too hot to be habitable; this portion he reckoned to
extend to 38,000 stadia, or 3800 miles. In reckoning the extent
of the habitable portion from east to west, Eratosthenes came to
the conclusion that from the Straits of Gibraltar to the east of
India was about 80,000 stadia, or, roughly speaking, one-third of
the earth's surface. The remaining two-thirds were supposed to be
covered by the ocean, and Eratosthenes prophetically remarked that
"if it were not that the vast extent of the Atlantic Sea rendered it
impossible, one might almost sail from the coast of Spain to that
of India along the same parallel." Sixteen hundred years later, as
we shall see, Columbus tried to carry out this idea. Eratosthenes
based his calculations on two fundamental lines, corresponding in a
way to our equator and meridian of Greenwich: the first stretched,
according to him, from Cape St. Vincent, through the Straits of
Messina and the island of Rhodes, to Issus (Gulf of Iskanderun); for
his starting-line in reckoning north and south he used a meridian
passing through the First Cataract, Alexandria, Rhodes, and Byzantium.
The next two hundred years after Eratosthenes' death was filled
up by the spread of the Roman Empire, by the taking over by the
Romans of the vast possessions previously held by Alexander and
his successors and by the Carthaginians, and by their spread into
Gaul, Britain, and Germany. Much of the increased knowledge thus
obtained was summed up in the geographical work of STRABO, who
wrote in Greek about 20 B.C. He introduced from the extra knowledge
thus obtained many modifications of the system of Eratosthenes,
but, on the whole, kept to his general conception of the world. He
rejected, however, the existence of Thule, and thus made the world
narrower; while he recognised the existence of Ierne, or Ireland;
which he regarded as the most northerly part of the habitable world,
lying, as he thought, north of Britain.
Between the time of Strabo and that of Ptolemy, who sums up all
the knowledge of the ancients about the habitable earth, there was
only one considerable addition to men's acquaintance with their
neighbours, contained in a seaman's manual for the navigation of
the Indian Ocean, known as the _Periplus_ of the Erythræan Sea.
This gave very full and tolerably accurate accounts of the coasts
from Aden to the mouth of the Ganges, though it regarded Ceylon
as much greater, and more to the south, than it really is; but
it also contains an account of the more easterly parts of Asia,
Indo-China, and China itself, "where the silk comes from." This
had an important influence on the views of Ptolemy, as we shall
see, and indirectly helped long afterwards to the discovery of
America.
[Illustration: PTOLEMAEI ORBIS]
It was left to PTOLEMY of Alexandria to sum up for the ancient
world all the knowledge that had been accumulating from the time
of Eratosthenes to his own day, which we may fix at about 150 A.D.
He took all the information he could find in the writings of the
preceding four hundred years, and reduced it all to one uniform
scale; for it is to him that we owe the invention of the method
and the names of latitude and longitude. Previous writers had been
content to say that the distance between one point and another
was so many stadia, but he reduced all this rough reckoning to
so many degrees of latitude and longitude, from fixed lines as
starting-points. But, unfortunately, all these reckonings were
rough calculations, which are almost invariably beyond the truth;
and Ptolemy, though the greatest of ancient astronomers, still
further distorted his results by assuming that a degree was 500
stadia, or 50 geographical miles. Thus when he found in any of
his authorities that the distance between one port and another was
500 stadia, he assumed, in the first place, that this was accurate,
and, in the second, that the distance between the two places was
equal to a degree of latitude or longitude, as the case might be.
Accordingly he arrived at the result that the breadth of the habitable
globe was, as he put it, twelve hours of longitude (corresponding
to 180°)--nearly one-third as much again as the real dimensions
from Spain to China. The consequence of this was that the distance
from Spain to China _westward_ was correspondingly diminished by
sixty degrees (or nearly 4000 miles), and it was this error that
ultimately encouraged Columbus to attempt his epoch-making voyage.
Ptolemy's errors of calculation would not have been so extensive
but that he adopted a method of measurement which made them
accumulative. If he had chosen Alexandria for the point of departure
in measuring longitude, the errors he made when reckoning westward
would have been counterbalanced by those reckoning eastward, and
would not have resulted in any serious distortion of the truth; but
instead of this, he adopted as his point of departure the Fortunatæ
Insulæ, or Canary Islands, and every degree measured to the east
of these was one-fifth too great, since he assumed that it was
only fifty miles in length. I may mention that so great has been
the influence of Ptolemy on geography, that, up to the middle of
the last century, Ferro, in the Canary Islands, was still retained
as the zero-point of the meridians of longitude.
Another point in which Ptolemy's system strongly influenced modern
opinion was his departure from the previous assumption that the
world was surrounded by the ocean, derived from Homer. Instead
of Africa being thus cut through the middle by the ocean, Ptolemy
assumed, possibly from vague traditional knowledge, that Africa
extended an unknown length to the south, and joined on to an equally
unknown continent far to the east, which, in the Latinised versions
of his astronomical work, was termed "terra australis incognita,"
or "the unknown south land." As, by his error with regard to the
breadth of the earth, Ptolemy led to Columbus; so, by his mistaken
notions as to the "great south land," he prepared the way for the
discoveries of Captain Cook. But notwithstanding these errors,
which were due partly to the roughness of the materials which he
had to deal with, and partly to scientific caution, Ptolemy's work
is one of the great monuments of human industry and knowledge. For
the Old World it remained the basis of all geographical knowledge
up to the beginning of the last century, just as his astronomical
work was only finally abolished by the work of Newton. Ptolemy
has thus the rare distinction of being the greatest authority on
two important departments of human knowledge--astronomy and
geography--for over fifteen hundred years. Into the details of
his description of the world it is unnecessary to go. The map will
indicate how near he came to the main outlines of the Mediterranean,
of Northwest Europe, of Arabia, and of the Black Sea. Beyond these
regions he could only depend upon the rough indications and guesses
of untutored merchants. But it is worth while referring to his method
of determining latitude, as it was followed up by most succeeding
geographers. Between the equator and the most northerly point known
to him, he divides up the earth into horizontal strips, called
by him "climates," and determined by the average length of the
longest day in each. This is a very rough method of determining
latitude, but it was probably, in most cases, all that Ptolemy
had to depend upon, since the measurement of angles would be a
rare accomplishment even in modern times, and would only exist
among a few mathematicians and astronomers in Ptolemy's days. With
him the history of geographical knowledge and discovery in the
ancient world closes.
In this chapter I have roughly given the names and exploits of
the Greek men of science, who summed up in a series of systematic
records the knowledge obtained by merchants, by soldiers, and by
travellers of the extent of the world known to the ancients. Of this
knowledge, by far the largest amount was gained, not by systematic
investigation for the purpose of geography, but by military expeditions
for the purpose of conquest. We must now retrace our steps, and
give a rough review of the various stages of conquest. We must now
retrace our steps, and give a rough review of the various stages
of conquest by which the different regions of the Old World became
known to the Greeks and the Roman Empire, whose knowledge Ptolemy
summarises.
[_Authorities:_ Bunbury, _History of Ancient Geography,_ 2 vols.,
1879; Tozer, _History of Ancient Geography,_ 1897.]
CHAPTER II
THE SPREAD OF CONQUEST IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
In a companion volume of this series, "The Story of Extinct
Civilisations in the East," will be found an account of the rise
and development of the various nations who held sway over the west
of Asia at the dawn of history. Modern discoveries of remarkable
interest have enabled us to learn the condition of men in Asia
Minor as early as 4000 B.C. All these early civilisations existed
on the banks of great rivers, which rendered the land fertile through
which they passed.
We first find man conscious of himself, and putting his knowledge
on record, along the banks of the great rivers Nile, Euphrates,
and Tigris, Ganges and Yang-tse-Kiang. But for our purposes we
are not concerned with these very early stages of history. The
Egyptians got to know something of the nations that surrounded
them, and so did the Assyrians. A summary of similar knowledge
is contained in the list of tribes given in the tenth chapter of
Genesis, which divides all mankind, as then known to the Hebrews,
into descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japhet--corresponding, roughly,
to Asia, Europe, and Africa. But in order to ascertain how the
Romans obtained the mass of information which was summarised for
them by Ptolemy in his great work, we have merely to concentrate
our attention on the remarkable process of continuous expansion
which ultimately led to the existence of the Roman Empire.
All early histories of kingdoms are practically of the same type.
A certain tract of country is divided up among a certain number
of tribes speaking a common language, and each of these tribes
ruled by a separate chieftain. One of these tribes then becomes
predominant over the rest, through the skill in war or diplomacy
of one of its chiefs, and the whole of the tract of country is thus
organised into one kingdom. Thus the history of England relates
how the kingdom of Wessex grew into predominance over the whole
of the country; that of France tells how the kings who ruled over
the Isle of France spread their rule over the rest of the land;
the history of Israel is mainly an account of how the tribe of
Judah obtained the hegemony of the rest of the tribes; and Roman
history, as its name implies, informs us how the inhabitants of
a single city grew to be the masters of the whole known world.
But their empire had been prepared for them by a long series of
similar expansions, which might be described as the successive
swallowing up of empire after empire, each becoming overgrown in
the process, till at last the series was concluded by the Romans
swallowing up the whole. It was this gradual spread of dominion
which, at each stage, increased men's knowledge of surrounding
nations, and it therefore comes within our province to roughly sum
up these stages, as part of the story of geographical discovery.
Regarded from the point of view of geography, this spread of man's
knowledge might be compared to the growth of a huge oyster-shell,
and, from that point of view, we have to take the north of the
Persian Gulf as the apex of the shell, and begin with the Babylonian
Empire. We first have the kingdom of Babylon--which, in the early
stages, might be best termed Chaldæa--in the south of Mesopotamia
(or the valley between the two rivers, Tigris and Euphrates), which,
during the third and second millennia before our era, spread along
the valley of the Tigris. But in the fourteenth century B.C., the
Assyrians to the north of it, though previously dependent upon
Babylon, conquered it, and, after various vicissitudes, established
themselves throughout the whole of Mesopotamia and much of the
surrounding lands. In 604 B.C. the capital of this great empire was
moved once more to Babylon, so that in the last stage, as well as in
the first, it may be called Babylonia. For purposes of distinction,
however, it will be as well to call these three successive stages
Chaldæa, Assyria, and Babylonia.
Meanwhile, immediately to the east, a somewhat similar process
had been gone through, though here the development was from north
to south, the Medes of the north developing a powerful empire in
the north of Persia, which ultimately fell into the hands of Cyrus
the Great in 546 B.C. He then proceeded to conquer the kingdom of
Lydia, in the northwest part of Asia Minor, which had previously
inherited the dominions of the Hittites. Finally he proceeded to
seize the empire of Babylonia, by his successful attack on the
capital, 538 B.C. He extended his rule nearly as far as India on
one side, and, as we know from the Bible, to the borders of Egypt
on the other. His son Cambyses even succeeded in adding Egypt for
a time to the Persian Empire. The oyster-shell of history had
accordingly expanded to include almost the whole of Western Asia.
The next two centuries are taken up in universal history by the
magnificent struggle of the Greeks against the Persian Empire--the
most decisive conflict in all history, for it determined whether
Europe or Asia should conquer the world. Hitherto the course of
conquest had been from east to west, and if Xerxes' invasion had
been successful, there is little doubt that the westward tendency
would have continued. But the larger the tract of country which an
empire covers--especially when different tribes and nations are
included in it--the weaker and less organised it becomes. Within
little more than a century of the death of Cyrus the Great the
Greeks discovered the vulnerable point in the Persian Empire, owing
to an expedition of ten thousand Greek mercenaries under Xenophon,
who had been engaged by Cyrus the younger in an attempt to capture
the Persian Empire from his brother. Cyrus was slain, 401 B.C., but
the ten thousand, under the leadership of Xenophon, were enabled,
to hold their own against all the attempts of the Persians to destroy
them, and found their way back to Greece.
Meanwhile the usual process had been going on in Greece by which a
country becomes consolidated. From time to time one of the tribes
into which that mountainous country was divided obtained supremacy
over the rest: at first the Athenians, owing to the prominent part
they had taken in repelling the Persians; then the Spartans, and
finally the Thebans. But on the northern frontiers a race of hardy
mountaineers, the Macedonians, had consolidated their power, and,
under Philip of Macedon, became masters of all Greece. Philip had
learned the lesson taught by the successful retreat of the ten
thousand, and, just before his death, was preparing to attack the
Great King (of Persia) with all the forces which his supremacy in
Greece put at his disposal. His son Alexander the Great carried
out Philip's intentions. Within twelve years (334-323 B.C.) he had
conquered Persia, Parthia, India (in the strict sense, _i.e._ the
valley of the Indus), and Egypt. After his death his huge empire
was divided up among his generals, but, except in the extreme east,
the whole of it was administered on Greek methods. A Greek-speaking
person could pass from one end to the other without difficulty, and
we can understand how a knowledge of the whole tract of country
between the Adriatic and the Indus could be obtained by Greek scholars.
Alexander founded a large number of cities, all bearing his name, at
various points of his itinerary; but of these the most important
was that at the mouth of the Nile, known to this day as Alexandria.
Here was the intellectual centre of the whole Hellenic world, and
accordingly it was here, as we have seen, that Eratosthenes first
wrote down in a systematic manner all the knowledge about the habitable
earth which had been gained mainly by Alexander's conquests.
Important as was the triumphant march of Alexander through Western
Asia, both in history and in geography, it cannot be said to have
added so very much to geographical knowledge, for Herodotus was
roughly acquainted with most of the country thus traversed, except
towards the east of Persia and the north-west of India. But the
itineraries of Alexander and his generals must have contributed
more exact knowledge of the distances between the various important
centres of population, and enabled Eratosthenes and his successors
to give them a definite position on their maps of the world. What
they chiefly learned from Alexander and his immediate successors
was a more accurate knowledge of North-West India. Even as late
as Strabo, the sole knowledge possessed at Alexandria of Indian
places was that given by Megasthenes, the ambassador to India in
the third century B.C.
Meanwhile, in the western portion of the civilised world a similar
process had gone on. In the Italian peninsula the usual struggle
had gone on between the various tribes inhabiting it. The fertile
plain of Lombardy was not in those days regarded as belonging to
Italy, but was known as Cisalpine Gaul. The south of Italy, as we
have seen, was mainly inhabited by Greek colonists, and was called
Great Greece. Between these tracts of country the Italian territory
was inhabited by three sets of federate tribes--the Etrurians,
the Samnites, and the Latins. During the 230 years between 510
B.C. and 280 B.C. Rome was occupied in obtaining the supremacy
among these three sets of tribes, and by the latter date may be
regarded as having consolidated Central Italy into an Italian
federation, centralised at Rome. At the latter date, the Greek
king Pyrrhus of Epirus, attempted to arouse the Greek colonies
in Southern Italy against the growing power of Rome; but his
interference only resulted in extending the Roman dominion down
to the heel and big toe of Italy.
If Rome was to advance farther, Sicily would be the next step,
and just at that moment Sicily was being threatened by the other
great power of the West--Carthage. Carthage was the most important
of the colonies founded by the Phoenicians (probably in the ninth
century B.C.), and pursued in the Western Mediterranean the policy
of establishing trading stations along the coast, which had
distinguished the Phoenicians from their first appearance in history.
They seized all the islands in that division of the sea, or at any
rate prevented any other nation from settling in Corsica, Sardinia,
and the Balearic Isles. In particular Carthage took possession
of the western part of Sicily, which had been settled by sister
Phoenician colonies. While Rome did everything in its power to
consolidate its conquests by admitting the other Italians to some
share in the central government, Carthage only regarded its foreign
possessions as so many openings for trade. In fact, it dealt with
the western littoral of the Mediterranean something like the East
India Company treated the coast of Hindostan: it established factories
at convenient spots. But just as the East India Company found it
necessary to conquer the neighbouring territory in order to secure
peaceful trade, so Carthage extended its conquests all down the
western coast of Africa and the south-east part of Spain, while Rome
was extending into Italy. To continue our conchological analogy, by
the time of the first Punic War Rome and Carthage had each expanded
into a shell, and between the two intervened the eastern section of
the island of Sicily. As the result of this, Rome became master
of Sicily, and then the final struggle took place with Hannibal in
the second Punic War, which resulted in Rome becoming possessed
of Spain and Carthage. By the year 200 B.C. Rome was practically
master of the Western Mediterranean, though it took another century
to consolidate its heritage from Carthage in Spain and Mauritania.
During that century--the second before our era--Rome also extended
its Italian boundaries to the Alps by the conquest of Cisalpine
Gaul, which, however, was considered outside Italy, from which it
was separated by the river Rubicon. In that same century the Romans
had begun to interfere in the affairs of Greece, which easily fell
into their hands, and thus prepared the way for their inheritance
of Alexander's empire.
This, in the main, was the work of the first century before our
era, when the expansion of Rome became practically concluded. This
was mainly the work of two men, Cæsar and Pompey. Following the
example of his uncle, Marius, Cæsar extended the Roman dominions
beyond the Alps to Gaul, Western Germany, and Britain; but from
our present standpoint it was Pompey who prepared the way for Rome
to carry on the succession of empire in the more civilised portions
of the world, and thereby merited his title of "Great." He pounded
up, as it were, the various states into which Asia Minor was divided,
and thus prepared the way for Roman dominion over Western Asia and
Egypt. By the time of Ptolemy the empire was thoroughly consolidated,
and his map and geographical notices are only tolerably accurate
within the confines of the empire.
[Illustration: EUROPE. Showing the principal Roman Roads.]
One of the means by which the Romans were enabled to consolidate
their dominion must be here shortly referred to. In order that
their legions might easily pass from one portion of this huge empire
to another, they built roads, generally in straight lines, and so
solidly constructed that in many places throughout Europe they
can be traced even to the present day, after the lapse of fifteen
hundred years. Owing to them, in a large measure, Rome was enabled
to preserve its empire intact for nearly five hundred years, and
even to this day one can trace a difference in the civilisation
of those countries over which Rome once ruled, except where the
devastating influence of Islam has passed like a sponge over the
old Roman provinces. Civilisation, or the art of living together
in society, is practically the result of Roman law, and this sense
all roads in history lead to Rome.
The work of Claudius Ptolemy sums up to us the knowledge that the
Romans had gained by their inheritance, on the western side, of
the Carthaginian empire, and, on the eastern, of the remains of
Alexander's empire, to which must be added the conquests of Cæsar
in North-West Europe. Cæsar is, indeed, the connecting link between
the two shells that had been growing throughout ancient history. He
added Gaul, Germany, and Britain to geographical knowledge, and,
by his struggle with Pompey, connected the Levant with his northerly
conquests. One result of his imperial work must be here referred
to. By bringing all civilised men under one rule, he prepared them
for the worship of one God. This was not without its influence on
travel and geographical discovery, for the great barrier between
mankind had always been the difference of religion, and Rome, by
breaking down the exclusiveness of local religions, and substituting
for them a general worship of the majesty of the Emperor, enabled
all the inhabitants of this vast empire to feel a certain communion
with one another, which ultimately, as we know, took on a religious
form.
The Roman Empire will henceforth form the centre from which to
regard any additions to geographical knowledge. As we shall see,
part of the knowledge acquired by the Romans was lost in the Dark
Ages succeeding the break-up of the empire; but for our purposes
this may be neglected and geographical discovery in the succeeding
chapters may be roughly taken to be additions and corrections of
the knowledge summed up by Claudius Ptolemy.
CHAPTER III
GEOGRAPHY IN THE DARK AGES
We have seen how, by a slow process of conquest and expansion, the
ancient world got to know a large part of the Eastern Hemisphere,
and how this knowledge was summed up in the great work of Claudius
Ptolemy. We have now to learn how much of this knowledge was lost
or perverted--how geography, for a time, lost the character of
a science, and became once more the subject of mythical fancies
similar to those which we found in its earliest stages. Instead of
knowledge which, if not quite exact, was at any rate approximately
measured, the mediæval teachers who concerned themselves with the
configuration of the inhabited world substituted their own ideas
of what ought to be.[1] This is a process which applies not alone
to geography, but to all branches of knowledge, which, after the
fall of the Roman Empire, ceased to expand or progress, became mixed
up with fanciful notions, and only recovered when a knowledge of
ancient science and thought was restored in the fifteenth century.
But in geography we can more easily see than in other sciences
the exact nature of the disturbing influence which prevented the
acquisition of new knowledge.
[Footnote 1: It is fair to add that Professor Miller's researches
have shown that some of the "unscientific" qualities of the mediæval
_mappoe mundi_ were due to Roman models.]
Briefly put, that disturbing influence was religion, or rather
theology; not, of course, religion in the proper sense of the word,
or theology based on critical principles, but theological conceptions
deduced from a slavish adherence to texts of Scripture, very often
seriously misunderstood. To quote a single example: when it is
said in Ezekiel v. S, "This is Jerusalem: I have set it in the
midst of the nations... round about her," this was not taken by
the mediæval monks, who were the chief geographers of the period,
as a poetical statement, but as an exact mathematical law, which
determined the form which all mediæval maps took. Roughly speaking,
of course, there was a certain amount of truth in the statement,
since Jerusalem would be about the centre of the world as known
to the ancients--at least, measured from east to west; but, at
the same time, the mediæval geographers adopted the old Homeric
idea of the ocean surrounding the habitable world, though at times
there was a tendency to keep more closely to the words of Scripture
about the four corners of the earth. Still, as a rule, the orthodox
conception of the world was that of a circle enclosing a sort of T
square, the east being placed at the top, Jerusalem in the centre;
the Mediterranean Sea naturally divided the lower half of the circle,
while the Ægean and Red Seas were regarded as spreading out right
and left perpendicularly, thus dividing the top part of the world,
or Asia, from the lower part, divided equally between Europe on
the left and Africa on the right. The size of the Mediterranean
Sea, it will be seen, thus determined the dimensions of the three
continents. One of the chief errors to which this led was to cut
off the whole of the south of Africa, which rendered it seemingly
a short voyage round that continent on the way to India. As we
shall see, this error had important and favourable results on
geographical discovery.
[Illustration: GEOGRAPHICAL MONSTERS]
Another result of this conception of the world as a T within an
O, was to expand Asia to an enormous extent; and as this was a
part of the world which was less known to the monkish map-makers
of the Middle Ages, they were obliged to fill out their ignorance
by their imagination. Hence they located in Asia all the legends
which they had derived either from Biblical or classical sources.
Thus there was a conception, for which very little basis is to be
found in the Bible, of two fierce nations named Gog and Magog,
who would one day bring about the destruction of the civilised
world. These were located in what would have been Siberia, and
it was thought that Alexander the Great had penned them in behind
the Iron Mountains. When the great Tartar invasion came in the
thirteenth century, it was natural to suppose that these were no
less than the Gog and Magog of legend. So, too, the position of
Paradise was fixed in the extreme east, or, in other words, at the
top of mediæval maps. Then, again, some of the classical authorities,
as Pliny and Solinus, had admitted into their geographical accounts
legends of strange tribes of monstrous men, strangely different from
normal humanity. Among these may be mentioned the Sciapodes, or
men whose feet were so large that when it was hot they could rest
on their backs and lie in the shade. There is a dim remembrance
of these monstrosities in Shakespeare's reference to
"The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders."
In the mythical travels of Sir John Maundeville there are illustrations
of these curious beings, one of which is here reproduced. Other
tracts of country were supposed to be inhabited by equally monstrous
animals. Illustrations of most of these were utilised to fill up
the many vacant spaces in the mediæval maps of Asia.
One author, indeed, in his theological zeal, went much further in
modifying the conceptions of the habitable world. A Christian merchant
named Cosmas, who had journeyed to India, and was accordingly known
as COSMAS INDICOPLEUSTES, wrote, about 540 A.D., a work entitled
"Christian Topography," to confound what he thought to be the erroneous
views of Pagan authorities about the configuration of the world. What
especially roused his ire was the conception of the spherical form
of the earth, and of the Antipodes, or men who could stand upside
down. He drew a picture of a round ball, with four men standing
upon it, with their feet on opposite sides, and asked triumphantly
how it was possible that all four could stand upright? In answer
to those who asked him to explain how he could account for day
and night if the sun did not go round the earth, he supposed that
there was a huge mountain in the extreme north, round which the sun
moved once in every twenty-four hours. Night was when the sun was
going round the other side of the mountain. He also proved, entirely
to his own satisfaction, that the sun, instead of being greater,
was very much smaller than the earth. The earth was, according to
him, a moderately sized plane, the inhabited parts of which were
separated from the antediluvian world by the ocean, and at the
four corners of the whole were the pillars which supported the
heavens, so that the whole universe was something like a big glass
exhibition case, on the top of which was the firmament, dividing
the waters above and below it, according to the first chapter of
Genesis.
[Illustration: THE HEREFORD MAP.]
Cosmas' views, however interesting and amusing they are, were too
extreme to gain much credence or attention even from the mediæval
monks, and we find no reference to them in the various _mappoe
mundi_ which sum up their knowledge, or rather ignorance, about the
world. One of the most remarkable of these maps exists in England
at Hereford, and the plan of it given on p. 53 will convey as much
information as to early mediæval geography as the ordinary reader
will require. In the extreme east, _i.e._ at the top, is represented
the Terrestrial Paradise; in the centre is Jerusalem; beneath this,
the Mediterranean extends to the lower edge of the map, with its
islands very carefully particularised. Much attention is given
to the rivers throughout, but very little to the mountains. The
only real increase of actual knowledge represented in the map is
that of the north-east of Europe, which had I naturally become
better known by the invasion of the Norsemen. But how little real
knowledge was possessed of this portion of Europe is proved by
the fact that the mapmaker placed near Norway the Cynocephali, or
dog-headed men, probably derived from some confused accounts of
Indian monkeys. Near them are placed the Gryphons, "men most wicked,
for among their misdeeds they also make garments for themselves and
their horses out of the skins of their enemies." Here, too, is
placed the home of the Seven Sleepers, who lived for ever as a
standing miracle to convert the heathen. The shape given to the
British Islands will be observed as due to the necessity of keeping
the circular form of the inhabited world. Other details about England
we may leave for the present.
It is obvious that maps such as the Hereford one would be of no
practical utility to travellers who desired to pass from one country
to another; indeed, they were not intended for any such purpose.
Geography had ceased to be in any sense a practical science; it
only ministered to men's sense of wonder, and men studied it mainly
in order to learn about the marvels of the world. When William
of Wykeham drew up his rules for the Fellows and Scholars of New
College, Oxford, he directed them in the long winter evenings to
occupy themselves with "singing, or reciting poetry, or with the
chronicles of the different kingdoms, or with the _wonders of the
world_." Hence almost all mediæval maps are filled up with pictures
of these wonders, which were the more necessary as so few people
could read. A curious survival of this custom lasted on in map-drawing
almost to the beginning of this century, when the spare places in
the ocean were adorned with pictures of sailing ships or spouting
sea monsters.
When men desired to travel, they did not use such maps as these,
but rather itineraries, or road-books, which did not profess to
give the shape of the countries through which a traveller would
pass, but only indicated the chief towns on the most-frequented
roads. This information was really derived from classical times,
for the Roman emperors from time to time directed such road-books
to be drawn up, and there still remains an almost complete itinerary
of the Empire, known as the Peutinger Table, from the name of the
German merchant who first drew the attention of the learned world
to it. A condensed reproduction is given on the following page,
from which it will be seen that no attempt is made to give anything
more than the roads and towns. Unfortunately, the first section of
the table, which started from Britain, has been mutilated, and we
only get the Kentish coast. These itineraries were specially useful,
as the chief journeys of men were in the nature of pilgrimages; but
these often included a sort of commercial travelling, pilgrims
often combining business and religion on their journeys. The chief
information about Eastern Europe which reached the West was given
by the succession of pilgrims who visited Palestine up to the time
of the Crusades. Our chief knowledge of the geography of Europe
daring the five centuries between 500 and 1000 A.D. is given in
the reports of successive pilgrims.
[Illustration: THE PEUTINGER TABLE--WESTERN PART.]
This period may be regarded as the Dark Age of geographical knowledge,
during which wild conceptions like those contained in the Hereford
map were substituted for the more accurate measurements of the
ancients. Curiously enough, almost down to the time of Columbus
the learned kept to these conceptions, instead of modifying them by
the extra knowledge gained during the second period of the Middle
Ages, when travellers of all kinds obtained much fuller information
of Asia, North Europe, and even, as, we shall see, of some parts
of America.
It is not altogether surprising that this period should have been
so backward in geographical knowledge, since the map of Europe
itself, in its political divisions, was entirely readjusted during
this period. The thousand years of history which elapsed between 450
and 1450 were practically taken up by successive waves of invasion
from the centre of Asia, which almost entirely broke up the older
divisions of the world.
In the fifth century three wandering tribes, invaded the Empire, from
the banks of the Vistula, the Dnieper, and the Volga respectively. The
Huns came from the Volga, in the extreme east, and under Attila, "the
Hammer of God," wrought consternation in the Empire; the Visigoths,
from the Dnieper, attacked the Eastern Empire; while the Vandals,
from the Vistula, took a triumphant course through Gaul and Spain,
and founded for a time a Vandal empire in North Africa. One of the
consequences of this movement was to drive several of the German
tribes into France, Italy, and Spain, and even over into Britain;
for it is from this stage in the world's history that we can trace
the beginning of England, properly so called, just as the invasion
of Gaul by the Franks at this time means the beginning of French
history. By the eighth century the kingdom of the Franks extended
all over France, and included most of Central Germany; while on
Christmas Day, 800, Charles the Great was crowned at Rome, by the
Pope, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, which professed to revive
the glories of the old empire, but made a division between the
temporal power held by the Emperor and the spiritual power held
by the Pope.
One of the divisions of the Frankish Empire deserves attention,
because upon its fate rested the destinies of most of the nations
of Western Europe. The kingdom of Burgundy, the buffer state between
France and Germany, has now entirely disappeared, except as the
name of a wine; but having no natural boundaries, it was disputed
between France and Germany for a long period, and it may be fairly
said that the Franco-Prussian War was the last stage in its history
up to the present. A similar state existed in the east of Europe,
viz. the kingdom of Poland, which was equally indefinite in shape,
and has equally formed a subject of dispute between the nations
of Eastern Europe. This, as is well known, only disappeared as
an independent state in 1795, when it finally ceased to act as a
buffer between Russia and the rest of Europe. Roughly speaking,
after the settlement of the Germanic tribes within the confines of
the Empire, the history of Europe, and therefore its historical
geography, may be summed up as a struggle for the possession of
Burgundy and Poland.
But there was an important interlude in the south-west of Europe,
which must engage our attention as a symptom of a world-historic
change in the condition of civilisation. During the course of the
seventh and eighth centuries (roughly, between 622 and 750) the
inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula burst the seclusion which they
had held since the beginning, almost, of history, and, inspired
by the zeal of the newly-founded religion of Islam, spread their
influence from India to Spain, along the southern littoral of the
Mediterranean. When they had once settled down, they began to recover
the remnants of Græco-Roman science that had been lost on the north
shores of the Mediterranean. The Christians of Syria used Greek
for their sacred language, and accordingly when the Sultans of
Bagdad desired to know something of the wisdom of the Greeks, they
got Syriac-speaking Christians to translate some of the scientific
works of the Greeks, first into Syriac, and thence into Arabic. In
this way they obtained a knowledge of the great works of Ptolemy,
both in astronomy--which they regarded as the more important, and
therefore the greatest, Almagest--and also in geography, though
one can easily understand the great modifications which the strange
names of Ptolemy must have undergone in being transcribed, first
into Syriac and then into Arabic. We shall see later on some of
the results of the Arabic Ptolemy.
The conquests of the Arabs affected the knowledge of geography
in a twofold way: by bringing about the Crusades, and by renewing
the acquaintance of the west with the east of Asia. The Arabs were
acquainted with South-Eastern Africa as far south as Zanzibar and
Sofala, though, following the views of Ptolemy as to the Great
Unknown South Land, they imagined that these spread out into the
Indian Ocean towards India. They seem even to have had some vague
knowledge of the sources of the Nile. They were also acquainted
with Ceylon, Java, and Sumatra, and they were the first people to
learn the various uses to which the cocoa-nut can be put. Their
merchants, too, visited China as early as the ninth century, and we
have from their accounts some of the earliest descriptions of the
Chinese, who were described by them as a handsome people, superior
in beauty to the Indians, with fine dark hair, regular features,
and very like the Arabs. We shall see later on how comparatively
easy it was for a Mohammedan to travel from one end of the known
world to the other, owing to the community of religion throughout
such a vast area.
Some words should perhaps be said on the geographical works of the
Arabs. One of the most important of these, by Yacut, is in the form
of a huge Gazetteer, arranged in alphabetical order; but the greatest
geographical work of the Arabs is by EDRISI, geographer to King Roger
of Sicily, 1154, who describes the world somewhat after the manner
of Ptolemy, but with modifications of some interest. He divides the
world into seven horizontal strips, known as "climates," and ranging
from the equator to the British Isles. These strips are subdivided
into eleven sections, so that the world, in Edrisi's conception,
is like a chess-board, divided into seventy-seven squares, and his
work consists of an elaborate description of each of these squares
taken one by one, each climate being worked through regularly, so
that you might get parts of France in the eighth and ninth squares,
and other parts in the sixteenth and seventeenth. Such a method
was not adapted to give a clear conception of separate countries,
but this was scarcely Edrisi's object. When the Arabs--or, indeed,
any of the ancient or mediæval writers--wanted wanted to describe
a land, they wrote about the tribe or nation inhabiting it, and
not about the position of the towns in it; in other words, they
drew a marked distinction between ethnology and geography.
[Illustration: THE WORLD ACCORDING TO IBN HAUKAL.]
But the geography of the Arabs had little or no influence upon
that of Europe, which, so far as maps went, continued to be based
on fancy instead of fact almost up to the time of Columbus.
Meanwhile another movement had been going on during the eighth and
ninth centuries, which helped to make Europe what it is, and extended
considerably the common knowledge of the northern European peoples.
For the first time since the disappearance of the Phoenicians,
a great naval power came into existence in Norway, and within a
couple of centuries it had influenced almost the whole sea-coast
of Europe. The Vikings, or Sea-Rovers, who kept their long ships
in the _viks_, or fjords, of Norway, made vigorous attacks all
along the coast of Europe, and in several cases formed stable
governments, and so made, in a way, a sort of crust for Europe,
preventing any further shaking of its human contents. In Iceland, in
England, in Ireland, in Normandy, in Sicily, and at Constantinople
(where they formed the _Varangi_, or body-guard of the Emperor),
as well as in Russia, and for a time in the Holy Land, Vikings or
Normans founded kingdoms between which there was a lively interchange
of visits and knowledge.
They certainly extended their voyages to Greenland, and there is a
good deal of evidence for believing that they travelled from Greenland
to Labrador and Newfoundland. In the year 1001, an Icelander named
Biorn, sailing to Greenland to visit his father, was driven to
the south-west, and came to a country which they called Vinland,
inhabited by dwarfs, and having a shortest day of eight hours,
which would correspond roughly to 50° north latitude. The Norsemen
settled there, and as late as 1121 the Bishop of Greenland visited
them, in order to convert them to Christianity. There is little
reason to doubt that this Vinland was on the mainland of North
America, and the Norsemen were therefore the first Europeans to
discover America. As late as 1380, two Venetians, named Zeno, visited
Iceland, and reported that there was a tradition there of a land
named Estotiland, a thousand miles west of the Faroe Islands, and
south of Greenland. The people were reported to be civilised and
good seamen, though unacquainted with the use of the compass, while
south of them were savage cannibals, and still more to the south-west
another civilised people, who built large cities and temples, but
offered up human victims in them. There seems to be here a dim
knowledge of the Mexicans.
The great difficulty in maritime discovery, both for the ancients
and the men of the Middle Ages, was the necessity of keeping close
to the shore. It is true they might guide themselves by the sun
during the day, and by the pole-star at night, but if once the
sky was overcast, they would become entirely at a loss for their
bearings. Hence the discovery of the polar tendency of the magnetic
needle was a necessary prelude to any extended voyages away from
land. This appears to have been known to the Chinese from quite
ancient times, and utilised on their junks as early as the eleventh
century. The Arabs, who voyaged to Ceylon and Java, appear to have
learnt its use from the Chinese, and it is probably from them that
the mariners of Barcelona first introduced its use into Europe.
The first mention of it is given in a treatise on Natural History
by Alexander Neckam, foster-brother of Richard, Coeur de Lion.
Another reference, in a satirical poem of the troubadour, Guyot
of Provence (1190), states that mariners can steer to the north
star without seeing it, by following the direction of a needle
floating in a straw in a basin of water, after it had been touched
by a magnet. But little use, however, seems to have been made of
this, for Brunetto Latini, Dante's tutor, when on a visit to Roger
Bacon in 1258, states that the friar had shown him the magnet and
its properties, but adds that, however useful the discovery, "no
master mariner would dare to use it, lest he should be thought to
be a magician." Indeed, in the form in which it was first used
it would be of little practical utility, and it was not till the
method was found of balancing it on a pivot and fixing it on a
card, as at present used, that it became a necessary part of a
sailor's outfit. This practical improvement is attributed to one
Flavio Gioja, of Amalfi, in the beginning of the fourteenth century.
[Illustration: THE MEDITERRANEAN COAST IN THE PORTULANI.]
When once the mariner's compass had come into general use, and
its indications observed by master mariners in their voyages, a
much more practical method was at hand for determining the relative
positions of the different lands. Hitherto geographers (_i.e._,
mainly the Greeks and Arabs) had had to depend for fixing relative
positions on the vague statements in the itineraries of merchants and
soldiers; but now, with the aid of the compass, it was not difficult
to determine the relative position of one point to another, while
all the windings of a road could be fixed down on paper without
much difficulty. Consequently, while the learned monks were content
with the mixture of myth and fable which we have seen to have formed
the basis of their maps of the world, the seamen of the Mediterranean
were gradually building up charts of that sea and the neighbouring
lands which varied but little from the true position. A chart of
this kind was called a Portulano, as giving information of the
best routes from port to port, and Baron Nordenskiold has recently
shown how all these _portulani_ are derived from a single Catalan
map which has been lost, but must have been compiled between 1266
and 1291. And yet there were some of the learned who were not above
taking instruction from the practical knowledge of the seamen.
In 1339, one Angelico Dulcert, of Majorca, made an elaborate map
of the world on the principle of the portulano, giving the coast
line--at least of the Mediterranean--with remarkable accuracy. A
little later, in 1375, a Jew of the same island, named Cresquez,
made an improvement on this by introducing into the eastern parts
of the map the recently acquired knowledge of Cathay, or China,
due to the great traveller Marco Polo. His map (generally known as
the Catalan Map, from the language of the inscriptions plentifully
scattered over it) is divided into eight horizontal strips, and on
the preceding page will be found a reduced reproduction, showing how
very accurately the coast line of the Mediterranean was reproduced
in these portulanos.
With the portulanos, geographical knowledge once more came back to
the lines of progress, by reverting to the representation of fact,
and, by giving an accurate representation of the coast line, enabled
mariners to adventure more fearlessly and to return more safely,
while they gave the means for recording any further knowledge. As
we shall see, they aided Prince Henry the Navigator to start that
series of geographical investigation which led to the discoveries
that close the Middle Ages. With them we may fairly close the history
of mediæval geography, so far as it professed to be a systematic
branch of knowledge.
We must now turn back and briefly sum up the additions to knowledge
made by travellers, pilgrims, and merchants, and recorded in literary
shape in the form of travels.
[_Authorities:_ Lelewel, _Géographie du Moyen Age_, 4 vols. and
atlas, 1852; C. R. Beazley, _Dawn of Geography_, 1897, and Introduction
to _Prince Henry the Navigator_, 1895; Nordenskiold, _Periplus_,
1897.]
CHAPTER IV
MEDIÆVAL TRAVELS
In the Middle Ages--that is, in the thousand years between the
irruption of the barbarians into the Roman Empire in the fifth
century and the discovery of the New World in the fifteenth--the
chief stages of history which affect the extension of men's knowledge
of the world were: the voyages of the Vikings in the eighth and
ninth centuries, to which we have already referred; the Crusades,
in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; and the growth of the
Mongol Empire in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The extra
knowledge obtained by the Vikings did not penetrate to the rest
of Europe; that brought by the Crusades, and their predecessors,
the many pilgrimages to the Holy Land, only restored to Western
Europe the knowledge already stored up in classical antiquity;
but the effect of the extension of the Mongol Empire was of more
wide-reaching importance, and resulted in the addition of knowledge
about Eastern Asia which was not possessed by the Romans, and has
only been surpassed in modern times during the present century.
Towards the beginning of the thirteenth century, Chinchiz Khan,
leader of a small Tatar tribe, conquered most of Central and Eastern
Asia, including China. Under his son, Okkodai, these Mongol Tatars
turned from China to the West, conquered Armenia, and one of the
Mongol generals, named Batu, ravaged South Russia and Poland, and
captured Buda-Pest, 1241. It seemed as if the prophesied end of
the world had come, and the mighty nations Gog and Magog had at
last burst forth to fulfil the prophetic words. But Okkodai died
suddenly, and these armies were recalled. Universal terror seized
Europe, and the Pope, as the head of Christendom, determined to send
ambassadors to the Great Khan, to ascertain his real intentions.
He sent a friar named John of Planocarpini, from Lyons, in 1245,
to the camp of Batu (on the Volga), who passed him on to the court
of the Great Khan at Karakorum, the capital of his empire, of which
only the slightest trace is now left on the left bank of the Orkhon,
some hundred miles south of Lake Baikal.
Here, for the first time, they heard of a kingdom on the east coast
of Asia which was not yet conquered by the Mongols, and which was
known by the name of Cathay. Fuller information was obtained by
another friar, named WILLIAM RUYSBROEK, or Rubruquis, a Fleming,
who also visited Karakorum as an ambassador from St. Louis, and got
back to Europe in 1255, and communicated some of his information to
Roger Bacon. He says: "These Cathayans are little fellows, speaking
much through the nose, and, as is general with all those Eastern
people, their eyes are very narrow.... The common money of Cathay
consists of pieces of cotton paper; about a palm in length and
breadth, upon which certain lines are printed, resembling the seal
of Mangou Khan. They do their writing with a pencil such as painters
paint with, and a single character of theirs comprehends several
letters, so as to form a whole word." He also identifies these
Cathayans with the Seres of the ancients. Ptolemy knew of these as
possessing the land where the silk comes from, but he had also heard
of the Sinæ, and failed to identify the two. It has been conjectured
that the name of China came to the West by the sea voyage, and is
a Malay modification, while the names Seres and Cathayans came
overland, and thus caused confusion.
Other Franciscans followed these, and one of them, John of Montecorvino,
settled at Khanbalig (imperial city), or Pekin, as Archbishop (ob.
1358); while Friar Odoric of Pordenone, near Friuli, travelled in
India and China between 1316 and 1330, and brought back an account
of his voyage, filled with most marvellous mendacities, most of
which were taken over bodily into the work attributed to Sir John
Maundeville.
The information brought back by these wandering friars fades, however,
into insignificance before the extensive and accurate knowledge of
almost the whole of Eastern Asia brought back to Europe by Marco
Polo, a Venetian, who spent eighteen years of his life in the East.
His travels form an epoch in the history of geographical discovery
only second to the voyages of Columbus.
In 1260, two of his uncles, named Nicolo and Maffeo Polo, started
from Constaninople on a trading venture to the Crimea, after which
they were led to visit Bokhara, and thence on to the court of the
Great Khan, Kublai, who received them very graciously, and being
impressed with the desirability of introducing Western civilisation
into the new Mongolian empire, he entrusted them with a message to
the Pope, demanding one hundred wise men of the West to teach the
Mongolians the Christian religion and Western arts. The two brothers
returned to their native place, Venice, in 1269, but found no Pope
to comply with the Great Khan's request; for Clement IV. had died
the year before, and his successor had not yet been appointed. They
waited about for a couple of years till Gregory X. was elected, but he
only meagrely responded to the Great Khan's demands, and instructed
two Dominicans to accompany the Polos, who on this occasion took
with them their young nephew Marco, a lad of seventeen. They started
in November 1271, but soon lost the company of the Dominicans,
who lost heart and went back.
They went first to Ormuz, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, then
struck northward through Khorasan Balkh to the Oxus, and thence
on to the Plateau of Pomir. Thence they passed the Great Desert
of Gobi, and at last reached Kublai in May 1275, at his summer
residence in Kaipingfu. Notwithstanding that they had not carried
out his request, the Khan received them in a friendly manner, and
was especially taken by Marco, whom he took into his own service;
and quite recently a record has been found in the Chinese annals,
stating that in the year 1277 a certain Polo was nominated a
Second-Class Commissioner of the PrivyCouncil. His duty was to
travel on various missions to Eastern Tibet, to Cochin China, and
even to India. The Polos amassed much wealth owing to the Khan's
favour, but found him very unwilling to let them return to Europe.
Marco Polo held several important posts; for three years he was
Governor of the great city of Yanchau, and it seemed likely that
he would die in the service of Kublai Khan.
But, owing to a fortunate chance, they were at last enabled to get
back to Europe. The Khan of Persia desired to marry a princess of
the Great Khan's family, to whom he was related, and as the young
lady upon whom the choice fell could not be expected to undergo
the hardships of the overland journey from China to Persia, it was
decided to send her by sea round the coast of Asia. The Tatars
were riot good navigators, and the Polos at last obtained permission
to escort the young princess on the rather perilous voyage. They
started in 1292, from Zayton, a port in Fokien, and after a voyage
of over two years round the South coast of Asia, successfully carried
the lady to her destined home, though she ultimately had to marry
the son instead of the father, who had died in the interim. They
took leave of her, and travelled through Persia to their own place,
which they reached in 1295. When they arrived at the ancestral
mansion of the Polos, in their coarse dress of Tatar cut, their
relatives for some time refused to believe that they were really
the long-lost merchants. But the Polos invited them to a banquet,
in which they dressed themselves all in their best, and put on new
suits for every course, giving the clothes they had taken off to
the servants. At the conclusion of the banquet they brought forth
the shabby dresses in which they had first arrived, and taking
sharp knives, began to rip up the seams, from which they took vast
quantities of rubies, sapphires, carbuncles, diamonds, and emeralds,
into which form they had converted most of their property. This
exhibition naturally changed the character of the welcome they
received from their relatives, who were then eager to learn how
they had come by such riches.
In describing the wealth of the Great Khan, Marco Polo, who was
the chief spokesman of the party, was obliged to use the numeral
"million" to express the amount of his wealth and the number of
the population over whom he ruled. This was regarded as part of
the usual travellers' tales, and Marco Polo was generally known
by his friends as "Messer Marco Millione."
Such a reception of his stories was no great encouragement to Marco
to tell the tale of his remarkable travels, but in the year of
his arrival at Venice a war broke out between Genoa and the Queen
of the Adriatic, in which Marco Polo was captured and cast into
prison at Genoa. There he found as a fellow-prisoner one Rusticano
of Pisa, a man of some learning and a sort of predecessor of Sir
Thomas Malory, since he had devoted much time to re-writing, in
prose, abstracts of the many romances relating to the Round Table.
These he wrote, not in Italian (which can scarcely be said to have
existed for literary purposes in those days), but in French, the
common language of chivalry throughout Western Europe. While in
prison with Marco Polo, he took down in French the narrative of
the great traveller, and thus preserved it for all time. Marco
Polo was released in 1299, and returned to Venice, where he died
some time after 9th January 1334, the date of his will.
Of the travels thus detailed in Marco Polo's book, and of their
importance and significance in the history of geographical discovery,
it is impossible to give any adequate account in this place. It
will, perhaps, suffice if we give the summary of his claims made
out by Colonel Sir Henry Yule, whose edition of his travels is
one of the great monuments of English learning:--
"He was the first traveller to trace a route across the whole longitude
of Asia, naming and describing kingdom after kingdom which he had seen
with his own eyes: the deserts of Persia, the flowering plateaux and
wild gorges of Badakhshan, the jade-bearing rivers of Khotan, the
Mongolian Steppes, cradle of the power that had so lately threatened
to swallow up Christendom, the new and brilliant court that had been
established by Cambaluc; the first traveller to reveal China in
all its wealth and vastness, its mighty rivers, its huge cities,
its rich manufactures, its swarming population, the inconceivably
vast fleets that quickened its seas and its inland waters; to tell
us of the nations on its borders, with all their eccentricities
of manners and worship; of Tibet, with its sordid devotees; of
Burma, with its golden pagodas and their tinkling crowns; of Laos,
of Siam, of Cochin China, of Japan, the Eastern Thule, with its
rosy pearls and golden-roofed palaces; the first to speak of that
museum of beauty and wonder, still so imperfectly ransacked, the
Indian Archipelago, source of those aromatics then so highly prized,
and whose origin was so dark; of Java, the pearl of islands; of
Sumatra, with its many kings, its strange costly products, and
its cannibal races; of the naked savages of Nicobar and Andaman;
of Ceylon, the island of gems, with its sacred mountain, and its
tomb of Adam; of India the Great, not as a dreamland of Alexandrian
fables, but as a country seen and personally explored, with its
virtuous Brahmans, its obscene ascetics, its diamonds, and the
strange tales of their acquisition, its sea-beds of pearl, and
its powerful sun: the first in mediæval times to give any distinct
account of the secluded Christian empire of Abyssinia, and the
semi-Christian island of Socotra; to speak, though indeed dimly,
of Zanzibar, with its negroes and its ivory, and of the vast and
distant Madagascar, bordering on the dark ocean of the South, with
its Ruc and other monstrosities, and, in a remotely opposite region,
of Siberia and the Arctic Ocean, of dog-sledges, white bears, and
reindeer-riding Tunguses."
[Illustration: FRA MAURO'S MAP, 1457.]
Marco Polo's is thus one of the greatest names in the history of
geography; it may, indeed, be doubted whether any other traveller
has ever added so extensively to our detailed knowledge of the
earth's surface. Certainly up to the time of Mr. Stanley no man
had on land visited so many places previously unknown to civilised
Europe. But the lands he discovered, though already fully populated,
were soon to fall into disorder, and to be closed to any civilising
influences. Nothing for a long time followed from these discoveries,
and indeed almost up to the present day his accounts were received
with incredulity, and he himself was regarded more as "Marco Millione"
than as Marco Polo.
Extensive as were Marco Polo's travels, they were yet exceeded in
extent, though not in variety, by those of the greatest of Arabian
travellers, Mohammed Ibn Batuta, a native of Tangier, who began his
travels in 1334, as part of the ordinary duty of a good Mohammedan
to visit the holy city of Mecca. While at Alexandria he met a learned
sage named Borhan Eddin, to whom he expressed his desire to travel.
Borhan said to him, "You must then visit my brother Farid Iddin and
my brother Rokn Eddin in Scindia, and my brother Borhan Eddin in
China. When you see them, present my compliments to them." Owing
mainly to the fact that the Tatar princes had adopted Islamism
instead of Christianity, after the failure of Gregory X. to send
Christian teachers to China, Ibn Batuta was ultimately enabled to
greet all three brothers of Borhan Eddin. Indeed, he performed
a more extraordinary exploit, for he was enabled to convey the
greetings of the Sheikh Kawan Eddin, whom he met in China, to a
relative of his residing in the Soudan. During the thirty years
of his travels he visited the Holy Land, Armenia, the Crimea,
Constantinople (which he visited in company with a Greek princess,
who married one of the Tatar Khans), Bokhara, Afghanistan, and
Delhi. Here he found favour with the emperor Mohammed Inghlak,
who appointed him a judge, and sent him on an embassy to China,
at first overland, but, as this was found too dangerous a route,
he went ultimately from Calicut, via Ceylon, the Maldives, and
Sumatra, to Zaitun, then the great port of China. Civil war having
broken out, he returned by the same route to Calicut, but dared
not face the emperor, and went on to Ormuz and Mecca, and returned
to Tangier in 1349. But even then his taste for travel had not been
exhausted. He soon set out for Spain, and worked his way through
Morocco, across the Sahara, to the Soudan. He travelled along the Niger
(which he took for the Nile), and visited Timbuctoo. He ultimately
returned to Fez in 1353, twenty-eight years after he had set out on
his travels. Their chief interest is in showing the wide extent of
Islam in his day, and the facilities which a common creed gave for
extensive travel. But the account of his journeys was written in
Arabic, and had no influence on European knowledge, which, indeed,
had little to learn from him after Marco Polo, except with regard
to the Soudan. With him the history of mediæval geography may be
fairly said to end, for within eighty years of his death began
the activity of Prince Henry the Navigator, with whom the modern
epoch begins.
Meanwhile India had become somewhat better known, chiefly by the
travels of wandering friars, who visited it mainly for the sake of
the shrine of St. Thomas, who was supposed to have been martyred
in India. Mention should also be made of the early spread of the
Nestorian Church throughout Central Asia. As early as the seventh
century the Syrian Christians who followed the views of Nestorius
began spreading them eastward, founding sees in Persia and Turkestan,
and ultimately spreading as far as Pekin. There was a certain revival
of their missionary activity under the Mongol Khans, but the restricted
nature of the language in which their reports were written prevented
them from having any effect upon geographical knowledge, except in
one particular, which is of some interest. The fate of the Lost
Ten Tribes of Israel has always excited interest, and a legend arose
that they had been converted to Christianity, and existed somewhere
in the East under a king who was also a priest, and known as Prester
John. Now, in the reports brought by some of the Nestorian priests
westward, it was stated that one of the Mongol princes named Ung Khan
had adopted Christianity, and as this in Syriac sounded something
like "John the Cohen," or "Priest," he was identified with the Prester
John of legend, and for a long time one of the objects of travel in
the East was to discover this Christian kingdom. It was, however,
later ascertained that there did exist such a Christian kingdom in
Abyssinia, and as owing to the erroneous views of Ptolemy, followed
by the Arabs, Abyssinia was considered to spread towards Farther
India, the land of Prester John was identified in Abyssinia. We
shall see later on how this error helped the progress of geographical
discovery.
The total addition of these mediæval travels to geographical knowledge
consisted mainly in the addition of a wider extent of land in China,
and the archipelago of Japan, or Cipangu, to the map of the world.
The accompanying map displays the various travels and voyages of
importance, and will enable the reader to understand how students
of geography, who added on to Ptolemy's estimate of the extent of
the world east and west the new knowledge acquired by Marco Polo,
would still further decrease the distance westward between Europe
and Cipangu, and thus prepare men for the voyage of Columbus.
[_Authorities:_ Sir Henry Yule, _Cathay and the Way Thither_, 1865;
_The Book of Ser Marco Polo_, 1875.]
CHAPTER V
ROADS AND COMMERCE
We have now conducted the course of our inquiries through ancient
times and the Middle Ages up to the very eve of the great discoveries
of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and we have roughly indicated
what men had learned about the earth during that long period, and,
how they learned it. But it still remains to consider by what means
they arrived at their knowledge, and why they sought for it. To some
extent we may have answered the latter question when dealing with
the progress of conquest, but men did not conquer merely for the
sake of conquest. We have still to consider the material advantages
attaching to warfare. Again when men go on their wars of discovery,
they have to progress, for the most part, along paths already beaten
for them by the natives of the country they intend to conquer; and
often when they have succeeded in warfare, they have to consolidate
their rule by creating new and more appropriate means of communication.
To put it shortly, we have still to discuss the roads of the ancient
and mediæval worlds, and the commerce for which those roads were
mainly used.
A road may be, for our purposes, most readily defined as the most
convenient means of communication between two towns; and this logically
implies that the towns existed before the roads were made; and in a
fuller investigation of any particular roads, it will be necessary
to start by investigating why men collect their dwellings at certain
definite spots. In the beginning, assemblies of men were made chiefly
or altogether for defensive purposes, and the earliest towns were
those which, from their natural position, like Athens or Jerusalem,
could be most easily defended. Then, again, religious motives often
had their influence in early times, and towns would grow round temples
or cloisters. But soon considerations of easy accessibility rule in
the choice of settlements, and for that purpose towns on rivers,
especially at fords of rivers, as Westminster, or in well-protected
harbours like Naples, or in the centre of a district, as Nuremberg
or Vienna, would form the most convenient places of meeting for
exchange of goods. Both on a river, or on the sea-shore, the best
means of communication would be by ships or boats; but once such
towns had been established, it would be necessary to connect them
with one another by land routes, and these would be determined
chiefly by the lie of the land. Where mountains interfered, a large
detour would have to be made--as, for example, round the Pyrenees;
if rivers intervened, fords would have to be sought for, and a new
town probably built at the most convenient place of passage. When
once a recognised way had been found between any two places, the
conservative instincts of man would keep it in existence, even
though a better route were afterwards found.
The influence of water communication is of paramount importance
in determining the situation of towns in early times. Towns in
the corners of bays, like Archangel, Riga, Venice, Genoa, Naples,
Tunis, Bassorah, Calcutta, would naturally be the centre-points
of the trade of the bay. On rivers a suitable spot would be where
the tides ended, like London, or at conspicuous bends of a stream,
or at junctures with affluents, as Coblentz or Khartoum. One nearly
always finds important towns at the two ends of a peninsula, like
Hamburg and Lubeck, Venice and Genoa; though for naval purposes
it is desirable to have a station at the head of the peninsula,
to command both arms of the sea, as at Cherbourg, Sevastopol, or
Gibraltar. Roads would then easily be formed across the base of
the peninsula, and to its extreme point.
At first the inhabitants of any single town would regard those
of all others as their enemies, but after a time they would find
it convenient to exchange some of their superfluities for those
of their neighbours, and in this way trade would begin. Markets
would become neutral ground, in which mutual animosities would
be, for a time, laid aside for the common advantage; and it would
often happen that localities on the border line of two states would
be chosen as places for the exchange of goods, ultimately giving
rise to the existence of a fresh town. As commercial intercourse
increased, the very inaccessibility of fortress towns on the heights
would cause them to be neglected for settlements in the valleys or
by the river sides, and, as a rule, roads pick out valleys or level
ground for their natural course. For military purposes, however, it
would sometimes be necessary to depart from the valley routes,
and, as we shall see, the Roman roads paid no regard to these
requirements.
The earliest communication between nations, as we have seen, was
that of the Phoenicians by sea. They founded factories, or neutral
grounds for trade, at appropriate spots all along the Mediterranean
coasts, and the Greeks soon followed their example in the Ægean
and Black Seas. But at an early date, as we know from the Bible,
caravan routes were established between Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia,
and later on these were extended into Farther Asia. But in Europe
the great road-builders were the Romans. Rome owed its importance
in the ancient world to its central position, at first in Italy,
and then in the whole of the Mediterranean. It combined almost
all the advantages necessary for a town: it was in the bend of
a river, yet accessible from the sea; its natural hills made it
easily defensible, as Hannibal found to his cost; while its central
position in the Latian Plain made it the natural resort of all
the Latin traders. The Romans soon found it necessary to utilise
their central position by rendering themselves accessible to the
rest of Italy, and they commenced building those marvellous roads,
which in most cases have remained, owing to their solid construction.
"Building" is the proper word to use, for a Roman road is really a
broad wall built in a deep ditch so as to come up above the level
of the surface. Scarcely any amount of traffic could wear this
solid substructure away, and to this day throughout Europe traces
can be found of the Roman roads built nearly two thousand years
ago. As the Roman Empire extended, these roads formed one of the
chief means by which the lords of the world were enabled to preserve
their conquests. By placing a legion in a central spot, where many
of these roads converged, they were enabled to strike quickly in
any direction and overawe the country. Stations were naturally
built along these roads, and to the present day many of the chief
highways of Europe follow the course of the old Roman roads. Our
modern civilisation is in a large measure the outcome of this network
of roads, and we can distinctly trace a difference in the culture of
a nation where such roads never existed--as in Russia and Hungary,
as contrasted with the west of Europe, where they formed the best
means of communication. It was only in the neighbourhood of these
highways that the fullest information was obtained of the position
of towns, and the divisions of peoples; and a sketch map like the
one already given, of the chief Roman roads of antiquity, gives
also, as it were, a skeleton of the geographical knowledge summed
up in the great work of Ptolemy.
But of more importance for the future development of geographical
knowledge were the great caravan routes of Asia, to which we must
now turn our attention. Asia is the continent of plateaux which
culminate in the Steppes of the Pamirs, appropriately called by
their inhabitants "the Roof of the World." To the east of these,
four great mountain ranges run, roughly, along the parallels of
latitude--the Himalayas to the south, the Kuen-Iun, Thian Shan,
and Altai to the north. Between the Himalayas and the Kuen-lun is
the great Plateau of Tibet, which runs into a sort of cul-de-sac
at its western end in Kashmir. Between the Kuen-lun and the Thian
Shan we have the Gobi Steppe of Mongolia, running west of Kashgar
and Yarkand; while between the Thian Shan and the Altai we have
the great Kirghiz Steppe. It is clear that only two routes are
possible between Eastern and Western Asia: that between the Kuen-lun
and the Thian Shan via Kashgar and Bokhara, and that south of the
Altai, skirting the north of the great lakes Balkash, Aral, and
Caspian, to the south of Russia. The former would lead to Bassorah
or Ormuz, and thence by sea, or overland, round Arabia to Alexandria;
the latter and longer route would reach Europe via Constantinople.
Communication between Southern Asia and Europe would mainly be
by sea, along the coast of the Indies, taking advantage of the
monsoons from Ceylon to Aden, and then by the Red Sea. Alexandria,
Bassorah, and Ormuz would thus naturally be the chief centres of
Eastern trade, while communication with the Mongols or with China
would go along the two routes above mentioned, which appear to have
existed during all historic time. It was by these latter routes
that the Polos and the other mediæval travellers to Cathay reached
that far-distant country. But, as we know from Marco Polo's travels,
China could also be reached by the sea voyage; and for all practical
purposes, in the late Middle Ages, when the Mongol empire broke
up, and traffic through mid Asia was not secure, communication
with the East was via Alexandria.
Now it is important for our present inquiry to realise how largely
Europe after the Crusades was dependent on the East for most of the
luxuries of life. Nothing produced by the looms of Europe could
equal the silk of China, the calico of India, the muslin of Mussul.
The chief gems which decorated the crowns of kings and nobles,
the emerald, the topaz, the ruby, the diamond, all came from the
East--mainly from India. The whole of mediæval medical science was
derived from the Arabs, who sought most of their drugs from Arabia
or India. Even for the incense which burned upon the innumerable
altars of Roman Catholic Europe, merchants had to seek the materials
in the Levant. For many of the more refined handicrafts, artists had
to seek their best material from Eastern traders: such as shellac
for varnish, or mastic for artists' colours (gamboge from Cambodia,
ultramarine from lapis lazuli); while it was often necessary, under
mediæval circumstances, to have resort to the musk or opopanax of
the East to counteract the odours resulting from the bad sanitary
habits of the West. But above all, for the condiments which were
almost necessary for health, and certainly desirable for seasoning
the salted food of winter and the salted fish of Lent. Europeans
were dependent upon the spices of the Asiatic islands. In Hakluyt's
great work on "English Voyages and Navigations," he gives in his
second volume a list, written out by an Aleppo merchant, William
Barrett, in 1584, of the places whence the chief staples of the
Eastern trade came, and it will be interesting to give a selection
from his long account.
Cloves from Maluco, Tarenate, Amboyna, by way of Java.
Nutmegs from Banda.
Maces from Banda, Java, and Malacca.
Pepper Common from Malabar.
Sinnamon from Seilan (Ceylon).
Spicknard from Zindi (Scinde) and Lahor.
Ginger Sorattin from Sorat (Surat) within Cambaia (Bay of Bengal).
Corall of Levant from Malabar.
Sal Ammoniacke from Zindi and Cambaia.
Camphora from Brimeo (Borneo) near to China.
Myrrha from Arabia Felix.
Borazo (Borax) from Cambaia and Lahor.
Ruvia to die withall, from Chalangi.
Allumme di Rocca (Rock Alum) from China and Constantinople.
Oppopanax from Persia.
Lignum Aloes from Cochin, China, and Malacca.
Laccha (Shell-lac) from Pegu and Balaguate.
Agaricum from Alemannia.
Bdellium from Arabia Felix.
Tamarinda from Balsara (Bassorah).
Safran (Saffron) from Balsara and Persia.
Thus from Secutra (Socotra).
Nux Vomica from Malabar.
Sanguis Draconis (Dragon's Blood) from Secutra.
Musk from Tartarie by way of China.
Indico (Indigo) from Zindi and Cambaia.
Silkes Fine from China.
Castorium (Castor Oil) from Almania.
Masticke from Sio.
Oppium from Pugia (Pegu) and Cambaia.
Dates from Arabia Felix and Alexandria.
Sena from Mecca.
Gumme Arabicke from Zaffo (Jaffa).
Ladanum (Laudanum) from Cyprus and Candia.
Lapis Lazzudis from Persia.
Auripigmentum (Gold Paint) from many places of Turkey.
Rubarbe from Persia and China.
These are only a few selections from Barrett's list, but will
sufficiently indicate what a large number of household luxuries,
and even necessities, were derived from Asia in the Middle Ages.
The Arabs had practically the monopoly of this trade, and as Europe
had scarcely anything to offer in exchange except its gold and
silver coins, there was a continuous drain of the precious metals
from West to East, rendering the Sultans and Caliphs continuously
richer, and culminating in the splendours of Solomon the Magnificent.
Alexandria was practically the centre of all this trade, and most
of the nations of Europe found it necessary to establish factories
in that city, to safeguard the interests of their merchants, who
all sought for Eastern luxuries in its port Benjamin of Tudela,
a Jew, who visited it about 1172, gives the following description
of it:--
"The city is very mercantile, and affords an excellent market to
all nations. People from all Christian kingdoms resort to Alexandria,
from Valencia, Tuscany, Lombardy, Apulia, Amalfi, Sicilia, Raguvia,
Catalonia, Spain, Roussillon, Germany, Saxony, Denmark, England,
Flandres, Hainault, Normandy, France, Poitou, Anjou, Burgundy,
Mediana, Provence, Genoa, Pisa, Gascony, Arragon, and Navarre.
From the West you meet Mohammedans from Andalusia, Algarve, Africa,
and Arabia, as well as from the countries towards India, Savila,
Abyssinia, Nubia, Yemen, Mesopotamia, and Syria, besides Greeks
and Turks. From India they import all sorts of spices, which are
bought by Christian merchants. The city is full of bustle, and
every nation has its own fonteccho (or hostelry) there."
Of all these nations, the Italians had the shortest voyage to make
before reaching Alexandria, and the Eastern trade practically fell
into their hands before the end of the thirteenth century. At first
Amalfi and Pisa were the chief ports, and, as we have seen, it
was at Amalfi that the mariner's compass was perfected; but soon
the two maritime towns at the heads of the two seas surrounding
Italy came to the front, owing to the advantages of their natural
position. Genoa and Venice for a long time competed with one another
for the monopoly of this trade, but the voyage from Venice was
more direct, and after a time Genoa had to content itself with
the trade with Constantinople and the northern overland route from
China. From Venice the spices, the jewels, the perfumes, and stuffs
of the East were transmitted north through Augsburg and Nürnberg
to Antwerp and Bruges and the Hanse Towns, receiving from them
the gold they had gained by their fisheries and textile goods.
England sent her wool to Italy, in order to tickle her palate and
her nose with the condiments and perfumes of the East.
The wealth and importance of Venice were due almost entirely to
this monopoly of the lucrative Eastern trade. By the fifteenth
century she had extended her dominions all along the lower valley
of the Po, into Dalmatia, parts of the Morea, and in Crete, till
at last, in 1489, she obtained possession of Cyprus, and thus had
stations all the way from Aleppo or Alexandria to the north of the
Adriatic. But just as she seemed to have reached the height of her
prosperity--when the Aldi were the chief printers in Europe, and
the Bellini were starting the great Venetian school of painting--a
formidable rival came to the front, who had been slowly preparing
a novel method of competition in the Eastern trade for nearly the
whole of the fifteenth century. With that method begins the great
epoch of modern geographical discovery.
[_Authorities:_ Heyd, _Commerce du Levant_, 2 vols., 1878.]
CHAPTER VI
TO THE INDIES EASTWARD--PRINCE HENRY AND VASCO DA GAMA
Up to the fifteenth century the inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula
were chiefly occupied in slowly moving back the tide of Mohammedan
conquest, which had spread nearly throughout the country from 711
onwards. The last sigh of the Moor in Spain was to be uttered in
1492--an epoch-making year, both in history and in geography. But
Portugal, the western side of the peninsula, had got rid of her
Moors at a much earlier date--more that 200 years before--though
she found it difficult to preserve her independence from the
neighbouring kingdom of Castile. The attempt of King Juan of Castile
to conquer the country was repelled by João, a natural son of the
preceding king of Portugal, and in 1385 he became king, and freed
Portugal from any danger on the side of Castile by his victory
at Aljubarrota. He married Philippa, daughter of John of Gaunt;
and his third son, Henry, was destined to be the means of
revolutionising men's views of the inhabited globe. He first showed
his mettle in the capture of Ceuta, opposite Gibraltar, at the
time of the battle of Agincourt, 1415, and by this means he first
planted the Portuguese banner on the Moorish coast. This contact
with the Moors may possibly have first suggested to Prince Henry
the idea of planting similar factory-fortresses among the Mussulmans
of India; but, whatever the cause, he began, from about the year
1418, to devote all his thoughts and attention to the possibility
of reaching India otherwise than through the known routes, and
for that purpose established himself on the rocky promontory of
Sagres, almost the most western spot on the continent of Europe.
Here he established an observatory, and a seminary for the training of
theoretical and practical navigators. He summoned thither astronomers
and cartographers and skilled seamen, while he caused stouter and
larger vessels to be built for the express purpose of exploration.
He perfected the astrolabe (the clumsy predecessor of the modern
sextant) by which the latitude could be with some accuracy determined;
and he equipped all his ships with the compass, by which their
steering was entirely determined. He brought from Majorca (which,
as we have seen, was the centre of practical map-making in the
fourteenth century) one Mestre Jacme, "a man very skilful in the
art of navigation, and in the making of maps and instruments."
With his aid, and doubtless that of others, he set himself to study
the problem of the possibility of a sea voyage to India round the
coast of Africa.
[Illustration: PROGRESS OF PORTUGUESE DISCOVERY]
We have seen that Ptolemy, with true scientific caution, had left
undefined the extent of Africa to the south; but Eratosthenes and
many of the Roman geographers, even after Ptolemy, were not content
with this agnosticism, but boldly assumed that the coast of Africa
made a semicircular sweep from the right horn of Africa, just south
of the Red Sea, with which they were acquainted, round to the
north-western shore, near what we now term Morocco. If this were
the fact, the voyage by the ocean along this sweep of shore would
be even shorter than the voyage through the Mediterranean and Red
Seas, while of course there would be no need for disembarking at
the Isthmus of Suez. The writers who thus curtailed Africa of its
true proportions assumed another continent south of it, which,
however, was in the torrid zone, and completely uninhabitable.
Now the north-west coast of Africa was known in Prince Henry's
days as far as Cape Bojador. It would appear that Norman sailors
had already advanced beyond Cape Non, or Nun, which was so called
because it was supposed that nothing existed beyond it. Consequently
the problems that Prince Henry had to solve were whether the coast of
Africa trended sharply to the east after Cape Bojador, and whether
the ideas of the ancients about the uninhabitability of the torrid
zone were justified by fact. He attempted to solve these problems by
sending out, year after year, expeditions down the north-west coast
of Africa, each of which penetrated farther than its predecessor.
Almost at the beginning he was rewarded by the discovery, or
re-discovery, of Madeira in 1420, by João Gonsalvez Zarco, one of
the squires of his household. For some time he was content with
occupying this and the neighbouring island of Porto Santo, which,
however, was ruined by the rabbits let loose upon it. On Madeira
vines from Burgundy were planted, and to this day form the chief
industry of the island. In 1435 Cape Bojador was passed, and in
1441 Cape Branco discovered. Two years later Cape Verde was reached
and passed by Nuno Tristão, and for the first time there were signs
that the African coast trended eastward. By this time Prince Henry's
men had become familiar with the natives along the shore and no less
than one thousand of them had been brought back and distributed
among the Portuguese nobles as pages and attendants. In 1455 a
Venetian, named Alvez Cadamosto, undertook a voyage still farther
south for purposes of trade, the Prince supplying the capital, and
covenanting for half profits on results. They reached the mouth
of the Gambia, but found the natives hostile. Here for the first
time European navigators lost sight of the pole-star and saw the
brilliant constellation of the Southern Cross. The last discovery
made during Prince Henry's life was that of the Cape Verde Islands,
by one of his captains, Diogo Gomez, in 1460--the very year of his
death. As the successive discoveries were made, they were jotted
down by the Prince's cartographers on portulanos, and just before
his death the King of Portugal sent to a Venetian monk, Fra Mauro,
details of all discoveries up to that time, to be recorded on a
_mappa mundi_, a copy of which still exists (p. 77).
The impulse thus given by Prince Henry's patient investigation of
the African coast continued long after his death. In 1471 Fernando
de Poo discovered the island which now bears his name, while in
the same year Pedro d'Escobar crossed the equator. Wherever the
Portuguese investigators landed they left marks of their presence,
at first by erecting crosses, then by carving on trees Prince Henry's
motto, "Talent de bien faire," and finally they adopted the method
of erecting stone pillars, surmounted by a cross, and inscribed
with the king's arms and name. These pillars were called _padraos_.
In 1484, Diego Cam, a knight of the king's household, set up one
of these pillars at the mouth of a large river, which he therefore
called the Rio do Padrao; it was called by the natives the Zaire, and
is now known as the River Congo. Diego Cam was, on this expedition,
accompanied by Martin Behaim of Nürnberg, whose globe is celebrated
in geographical history as the last record of the older views (p.
115).
Meanwhile, from one of the envoys of the native kings who visited
the Portuguese Court, information was received that far to the east
of the countries hitherto discovered there was a great Christian
king. This brought to mind the mediæval tradition of Prester John,
and accordingly the Portuguese determined to make a double attempt,
both by sea and by land, to reach this monarch. By sea the king
sent two vessels under the command of Bartholomew Diaz, while by
land he despatched, in the following year, two men acquainted with
Arabic, Pedro di Covilham and Affonso de Payba. Covilham reached
Aden, and there took ship for Calicut, being the first Portuguese
to sail the Indian Ocean. He then returned to Sofala, and obtained
news of the Island of the Moon, now known as Madagascar. With this
information he returned to Cairo, where he found ambassadors from
João, two Jews, Abraham of Beja and Joseph of Lamejo. These he
sent back with the information that ships that sailed down the
coast of Guinea would surely reach the end of Africa, and when
they arrived in the Eastern Ocean they should ask for Sofala and
the Island of the Moon. Meanwhile Covilham returned to the Red
Sea, and made his way into Abyssinia, where he married and settled
down, transmitting from time to time information to Portugal which
gave Europeans their first notions of Abyssinia.
The voyage by land in search of Prester John had thus been completely
successful, while, at the same time, information had been obtained
giving certain hopes of the voyage by sea. This had, in its way,
been almost as successful, for Diaz had rounded the cape now known
as the Cape of Good Hope, but to which he proposed giving the title
of Cabo Tormentoso, or "Stormy Cape." King João, however, recognising
that Diaz's voyage had put the seal upon the expectations with
which Prince Henry had, seventy years before, started his series
of explorations, gave it the more auspicious name by which it is
now known.
For some reason which has not been adequately explained, no further
attempt was made for nearly ten years to carry out the final
consummation of Prince Henry's plan by sending out another expedition.
In the meantime, as we shall see, Columbus had left Portugal, after
a mean attempt had been made by the king to carry out his novel
plan of reaching India without his aid; and, as a just result,
the discovery of a western voyage to the Indies (as it was then
thought) had been successfully accomplished by Columbus, in the
service of the Catholic monarchs of Spain, in 1492. This would
naturally give pause to any attempt at reaching India by the more
cumbersome route of coasting along Africa, which had turned out
to be a longer process than Prince Henry had thought. Three years
after Columbus's discovery King João died, and his son and successor
Emmanuel did not take up the traditional Portuguese method of reaching
India till the third year of his reign.
By this time it had become clear, from Columbus's second voyage,
that there were more difficulties in the way of reaching the Indies
by his method than had been thought; and the year after his return
from his second voyage in 1496, King Emmanuel determined on once
more taking up the older method. He commissioned Vasco da Gama,
a gentleman of his court, to attempt the eastward route to India
with three vessels, carrying in all about sixty men. Already by this
time Columbus's bold venture into the unknown seas had encouraged
similar boldness in others, and instead of coasting down the whole
extent of the western coast of Africa, Da Gama steered direct for
Cape Verde Islands, and thence out into the ocean, till he reached
the Bay of St. Helena, a little to the north of the Cape of Good
Hope.
For a time he was baffled in his attempt to round the Cape by the
strong south-easterly winds, which blow there continually during
the summer season; but at last he commenced coasting along the
eastern shores of Africa, and at every suitable spot he landed
some of his sailors to make inquiries about Covilham and the court
of Prester John. But in every case he found the ports inhabited
by fanatical Moors, who, as soon as they discovered that their
visitors were Christians, attempted to destroy them, and refused
to supply them with pilots for the further voyage to India. This
happened at Mozambique, at Quiloa, and at Mombasa, and it was not
till he arrived at Melinda that he was enabled to obtain provisions
and a pilot, Malemo Cana, an Indian of Guzerat, who was quite familiar
with the voyage to Calicut. Under his guidance Gama's fleet went
from Melinda to Calicut in twenty-three days. Here the Zamorin, or
sea-king, displayed the same antipathy to his Christian visitors.
The Mohammedan traders of the place recognised at once the dangerous
rivalry which the visit of the Portuguese implied, with their monopoly
of the Eastern trade, and represented Gama and his followers as
merely pirates. Vasco, however, by his firm behaviour, managed
to evade the machinations of his trade rivals, and induced the
Zamorin to regard favourably an alliance with the Portuguese king.
Contenting himself with this result, he embarked again, and after
visiting Melinda, the only friendly spot he had found on the east
coast of Africa, he returned to Lisbon in September 1499, having
spent no less than two years on the voyage. King Emmanuel received
him with great favour, and appointed him Admiral of the Indies.
The significance of Vasco da Gama's voyage was at once seen by
the persons whose trade monopoly it threatened--the Venetians,
and the Sultan of Egypt. Priuli, the Venetian chronicler, reports:
"When this news reached Venice the whole city felt it greatly,
and remained stupefied, and the wisest held it as the worst news
that had ever arrived"--as indeed they might, for it prophesied the
downfall of the Venetian Empire. The Sultan of Egypt was equally
moved, for the greatest source of his riches was derived from the
duty of five per cent. which he levied on all merchandise entering
his dominions, and ten per cent. upon all goods exported from them.
Hitherto there had been all manner of bickerings between Venice and
Egypt, but this common danger brought them together. The Sultan
represented to Venice the need of common action in order to drive
away the new commerce; but Egypt was without a navy, and had indeed
no wood suitable for shipbuilding. The Venetians took the trouble
to transmit wood to Cairo, which was then carried by camels to
Suez, where a small fleet was prepared to attack the Portuguese
on their next visit to the Indian Ocean.
The Portuguese had in the meantime followed up Vasco da Gama's voyage
with another attempt, which was, in its way, even more important. In
1500 the king sent no less than thirteen ships under the command
of Pedro Alvarez Cabral, with Franciscans to convert, and twelve
hundred fighting men to overawe, the Moslems of the Indian Ocean.
He determined on steering even a more westerly course than Vasco da
Gama, and when he arrived in 17° south of the line, he discovered land
which he took possession of in the name of Portugal, and named Santa
Cruz. The actual cross which he erected on this occasion is still
preserved in Brazil, for Cabral had touched upon the land now known
by that name. It is true that one of Columbus's companions, Pinzon,
had already touched upon the coast of Brazil before Cabral, but it
is evident from his experience that, even apart from Columbus, the
Portuguese would have discovered the New World sooner or later. It
is, however, to be observed that in stating this, as all historians
do, they leave out of account the fact that, but for Columbus,
sailors would still have continued the old course of coasting along
the shore, by which they would never have left the Old World. Cabral
lost several of his ships and many of his men, and, though he brought
home a rich cargo, was not regarded as successful, and Vasco da
Gama was again sent out with a large fleet in 1502, with which
he conquered the Zamorin of Calicut and obtained rich treasures.
In subsidiary voyages the Portuguese navigators discovered the
islands of St. Helena, Ascension, the Seychelles, Socotra, Tristan
da Cunha, the Maldives, and Madagascar.
Meanwhile King Emmanuel was adopting the Venetian method of
colonisation, which consisted in sending a Vice-Doge to each of
its colonies for a term of two years, during which his duty was to
encourage trade and to collect tribute. In a similar way, Emmanuel
appointed a Viceroy for his Eastern trade, and in 1505 Almeida
had settled in Ceylon, with a view to monopolising the cinnamon
trade of that place.
[Illustration: PORTUGUESE INDIES]
But the greatest of the Portuguese viceroys was Affonso de Albuquerque,
who captured the important post of Goa, on the mainland of India,
which still belongs to Portugal, and the port of Ormuz, which,
we have seen, was one of the centres of the Eastern trade. Even
more important was the capture of the Moluccas, or Spice Islands,
which were discovered in 1511, after the Portuguese had seized
Malacca. By 1521 the Portuguese had full possession of the Spice
Islands, and thus held the trade of condiments entirely in their
own hands. The result was seen soon in the rise of prices in the
European markets. Whereas at the end of the fifteenth century pepper,
for instance, was about 17s. a pound, from 1521 and onwards its
average price grew to be 25s., and so with almost all the ingredients
by which food could be made more tasty. One of the circumstances,
however, which threw the monopoly into the hands of the Portuguese
was the seizure of Egypt in 1521 by the Turks under Selim I., which
would naturally derange the course of trade from its old route
through Alexandria. From the Moluccas easy access was found to
China, and ultimately to Japan, so that the Portuguese for a time
held in their hands the whole of the Eastern trade, on which Europe
depended for most of its luxuries.
As we shall see, the Portuguese only won by a neck--if we may use
a sporting expression--in the race for the possession of the Spice
Islands. In the very year they obtained possession of them, Magellan,
on his way round the world, had reached the Philippines, within a
few hundred miles of them, and his ship, the _Victoria_, actually
sailed through them that year. In fact, 1521 is a critical year in
the discovery of the world, for both the Spanish and Portuguese
(the two nations who had attempted to reach the Indies eastward and
westward) arrived at the goal of their desires, the Spice Islands,
in that same year, while the closure of Egypt to commerce occurred
opportunely to divert the trade into the hands of the Portuguese.
Finally, the year 1521 was signalised by the death of King Emmanuel
of Portugal, under whose auspices the work of Prince Henry the
Navigator was completed.
It must here be observed that we are again anticipating matters. As
soon as the discovery of the New World was announced, the Pope was
appealed to, to determine the relative shares of Spain and Portugal
in the discoveries which would clearly follow upon Columbus's voyage.
By his Bull, dated 4th May 1493, Alexander VI. granted all discoveries
to the west to Spain, leaving it to be understood that all to the
east belonged to Portugal. The line of demarcation was an imaginary
one drawn from pole to pole, and passing one hundred leagues west
of the Azores and Cape Verde Islands, which were supposed, in the
inaccurate geography of the time, to be in the same meridian. In
the following year the Portuguese monarch applied for a revision
of the _raya_, as this would keep him out of all discovered in
the New World altogether; and the line of demarcation was then
shifted 270 leagues westward, or altogether 1110 miles west of
the Cape Verdes. By a curious coincidence, within six years Cabral
had discovered Brazil, which fell within the angle thus cut off by
the _raya_ from South America. Or was it entirely a coincidence?
May not Cabral have been directed to take this unusually westward
course in order to ascertain if any land fell within the Portuguese
claims? When, however, the Spice Islands were discovered, it remained
to be discussed whether the line of demarcation, when continued
on the other side of the globe, brought them within the Spanish
or Portuguese "sphere of influence," as we should say nowadays.
By a curious chance they happened to be very near the line, and,
with the inaccurate maps of the period, a pretty subject of quarrel
was afforded between the Portuguese and Spanish commissioners who
met at Badajos to determine the question. This was left undecided
by the Junta, but by a family compact, in 1529, Charles V. ceded
to his brother-in-law, the King of Portugal, any rights he might
have to the Moluccas, for the sum of 350,000 gold ducats, while
he himself retained the Philippines, which have been Spanish ever
since.
By this means the Indian Ocean became, for all trade purposes, a
Portuguese lake throughout the sixteenth century, as will be seen
from the preceding map, showing the trading stations of the Portuguese
all along the shores of the ocean. But they only possessed their
monopoly for fifty years, for in 1580 the Spanish and Portuguese
crowns became united on the head of Philip II., and by the time
Portugal recovered its independence, in 1640, serious rivals had
arisen to compete with her and Spain for the monopoly of the Eastern
trade.
[_Authorities_: Major, _Prince Henry the Navigator_, 1869; Beazeley,
_Prince Henry the Navigator_, 1895; F. Hummerich, _Vasco da Gama_,
1896.]
CHAPTER VII
TO THE INDIES WESTWARD--THE SPANISH ROUTE--COLUMBUS AND MAGELLAN
While the Portuguese had, with slow persistency, devoted nearly a
century to carrying out Prince Henry's idea of reaching the Indies
by the eastward route, a bold yet simple idea had seized upon a
Genoese sailor, which was intended to achieve the same purpose by
sailing westward. The ancients, as we have seen, had recognised
the rotundity of the earth, and Eratosthenes had even recognised
the possibility of reaching India by sailing westward. Certain
traditions of the Greeks and the Irish had placed mysterious islands
far out to the west in the Atlantic, and the great philosopher
Plato had imagined a country named Atlantis, far out in the Indian
Ocean, where men were provided with all the gifts of nature. These
views of the ancients came once more to the attention of the learned,
owing to the invention of printing and the revival of learning,
when the Greek masterpieces began to be made accessible in Latin,
chiefly by fugitive Greeks from Constantinople, which had been
taken by the Turks in 1453. Ptolemy's geography was printed at
Rome in 1462, and with maps in 1478. But even without the maps
the calculation which he had made of the length of the known world
tended to shorten the distance between Portugal and Farther India
by 2500 miles. Since his time the travels of Marco Polo had added
to the knowledge of Europe the vast extent of Cathay and the distant
islands of Zipangu (Japan), which would again reduce the distance
by another 1500 miles. As the Greek geographers had somewhat
under-estimated the whole circuit of the globe, it would thus seem
that Zipangu was not more than 4000 miles to the west of Portugal.
As the Azores were considered to be much farther off from the coast
than they really were, it might easily seem, to an enthusiastic
mind, that Farther India might be reached when 3000 miles of the
ocean had been traversed.
[Illustration: TOSCANELLI'S MAP (_restored_)]
This was the notion that seized the mind of Christopher Columbus,
born at Genoa in 1446, of humble parentage, his father being a
weaver. He seems to have obtained sufficient knowledge to enable
him to study the works of the learned, and of the ancients in Latin
translations. But in his early years he devoted his attention to
obtaining a practical acquaintance with seamanship. In his day, as
we have seen, Portugal was the centre of geographical knowledge,
and he and his brother Bartolomeo, after many voyages north and
south, settled at last in Lisbon--his brother as a map-maker, and
himself as a practical seaman. This was about the year 1473, and
shortly afterwards he married Felipa Moñiz, daughter of Bartolomeo
Perestrello, an Italian in the service of the King of Portugal,
and for some time Governor of Madeira.
Now it chanced just at this time that there was a rumour in Portugal
that a certain Italian philosopher, named Toscanelli, had put forth
views as to the possibility of a westward voyage to Cathay, or
China, and the Portuguese king had, through a monk named Martinez,
applied to Toscanelli to know his views, which were given in a letter
dated 25th June 1474. It would appear that, quite independently,
Columbus had heard the rumour, and applied to Toscanelli, for in
the latter's reply he, like a good business man, shortened his
answer by giving a copy of the letter he had recently written to
Martinez. What was more important and more useful, Toscanelli sent
a map showing in hours (or degrees) the probable distance between
Spain and Cathay westward. By adding the information given by Marco
Polo to the incorrect views of Ptolemy about the breadth of the
inhabited world, Toscanelli reduced the distance from the Azores
to 52°, or 3120 miles. Columbus always expressed his indebtedness
to Toscanelli's map for his guidance, and, as we shall see, depended
upon it very closely, both in steering, and in estimating the distance
to be traversed. Unfortunately this map has been lost, but from
a list of geographical positions, with latitude and longitude,
founded upon it, modern geographers have been able to restore it
in some detail, and a simplified sketch of it may be here inserted,
as perhaps the most important document in Columbus's career.
Certainly, whether he had the idea of reaching the Indies by a
westward voyage before or not, he adopted Toscanelli's views with
enthusiasm, and devoted his whole life henceforth to trying to
carry them into operation.
He gathered together all the information he could get about the
fabled islands of the Atlantic--the Island of St. Brandan, where
that Irish saint found happy mortals; and the Island of Antilla,
imagined by others, with its seven cities. He gathered together
all the gossip he could hear--of mysterious corpses cast ashore
on the Canaries, and resembling no race of men known to Europe;
of huge canes, found on the shores of the same islands, evidently
carved by man's skill. Curiously enough, these pieces of evidence
were logically rather against the existence of a westward route to
the Indies than not, since they indicated an unknown race, but,
to an enthusiastic mind like Columbus's, anything helped to confirm
him in his fixed idea, and besides, he could always reply that
these material signs were from the unknown island of Zipangu, which
Marco Polo had described as at some distance from the shores of
Cathay.
He first approached, as was natural, the King of Portugal, in whose
land he was living, and whose traditional policy was directed to
maritime exploration. But the Portuguese had for half a century been
pursuing another method of reaching India, and were not inclined
to take up the novel idea of a stranger, which would traverse their
long-continued policy of coasting down Africa. A hearing, however,
was given to him, but the report was unfavourable, and Columbus had
to turn his eyes elsewhere. There is a tradition that the Portuguese
monarch and his advisers thought rather more of Columbus's ideas
at first; and attempted secretly to put them into execution; but
the pilot to whom they entrusted the proposed voyage lost heart
as soon as he lost sight of land, and returned with an adverse
verdict on the scheme. It is not known whether Columbus heard of
this mean attempt to forestall him, but we find him in 1487 being
assisted by the Spanish Court, and from that time for the next
five years he was occupied in attempting to induce the Catholic
monarchs of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, to allow him to try his
novel plan of reaching the Indies. The final operations in expelling
the Moors from Spain just then engrossed all their attention and
all their capital, and Columbus was reduced to despair, and was
about to give up all hopes of succeeding in Spain, when one of
the great financiers, a converted Jew named Luis de Santaguel,
offered to find means for the voyage, and Columbus was recalled.
[Illustration: BEHAIM'S GLOBE. 1492.]
On the 19th April 1492 articles were signed, by which Columbus
received from the Spanish monarchs the titles of Admiral and Viceroy
of all the lands he might discover, as well as one-tenth of all the
tribute to be derived from them; and on Friday the 3rd August, of
the same year, he set sail in three vessels, entitled the _Santa
Maria_ (the flagship), the _Pinta_, and the _Nina_. He started from
the port of Palos, first for the Canary Islands. These he left
on the 6th September, and steered due west. On the 13th of that
month, Columbus observed that the needle of the compass pointed due
north, and thus drew attention to the variability of the compass.
By the 21st September his men became mutinous and tried to force him
to return. He induced them to continue, and four days afterwards
the cry of "Land! land!" was heard, which kept up their spirits
for several days, till, on the 1st October, large numbers of birds
were seen. By that time Columbus had reckoned that he had gone
some 710 leagues from the Canaries, and if Zipangu were in the
position that Tostanelli's map gave it, he ought to have been in
its neighbourhood. It was reckoned in those days that a ship on
an average could make four knots an hour, dead reckoning, which
would give about 100 miles a day, so that Columbus might reckon
on passing over the 3100 miles which he thought intervened between
the Azores and Japan in about thirty-three days. All through the
early days of October his courage was kept up by various signs
of the nearness of land--birds and branches--while on the 11th
October, at sunset, they sounded, and found bottom; and at ten
o'clock, Columbus, sitting in the stern of his vessel, saw a light,
the first sure sign of land after thirty-five days, and in near
enough approximation to Columbus's reckoning to confirm him in the
impression that he was approaching the mysterious land of Zipangu.
Next morning they landed on an island, called by the natives Guanahain,
and by Columbus San Salvador. This has been identified as Watling
Island. His first inquiry was as to the origin of the little plates
of gold which he saw in the ears of the natives. They replied that
they came from the West--another confirmation of his impression.
Steering westward, they arrived at Cuba, and afterwards at Hayti
(St. Domingo). Here, however, the _Santa Maria_ sank, and Columbus
determined to return, to bring the good news, after leaving some
of his men in a fort at Hayti. The return journey was made in the
_Nina_ in even shorter time to the Azores, but afterwards severe
storms arose, and it was not till the 15th March 1493 that he reached
Palos, after an absence of seven and a half months, during which
everybody thought that he and his ships had disappeared.
He was naturally received with great enthusiasm by the Spaniards,
and after a solemn entry at Barcelona he presented to Ferdinand
and Isabella the store of gold and curiosities carried by some
of the natives of the islands he had visited. They immediately
set about fitting out a much larger fleet of seven vessels, which
started from Cadiz, 25th September 1493. He took a more southerly
course, but again reached the islands now known as the West Indies.
On visiting Hayti he found the fort destroyed, and no traces of
the men he had left there. It is needless for our purposes to go
through the miserable squabbles which occurred on this and his
subsequent voyages, which resulted in Columbus's return to Spain
in chains and disgrace. It is only necessary for us to say that
in his third voyage, in 1498, he touched on Trinidad, and saw the
coast of South America, which he supposed to be the region of the
Terrestrial Paradise. This was placed by the mediæval maps at the
extreme east of the Old World. Only on his fourth voyage, in 1502,
did he actually touch the mainland, coasting along the shores of
Central America in the neighbourhood of Panama. After many
disappointments, he died, 20th May 1506, at Valladolid, believing,
as far as we can judge, to the day of his death, that what he had
discovered was what he set out to seek--a westward route to the
Indies, though his proud epitaph indicates the contrary:--
A Castilla y á Leon | To Castille and to Leon
Nuevo mondo dió Colon. | A NEW WORLD gave Colon.[1]
[Footnote 1: Columbus's Spanish name was Cristoval Colon.]
To this day his error is enshrined in the name we give to the Windward
and Antilles Islands--West Indies: in other words, the Indies reached
by the westward route. If they had been the Indies at all, they
would have been the most easterly of them.
Even if Columbus had discovered a new route to Farther India, he
could not, as we have seen, claim the merit of having originated
the idea, which, even in detail, he had taken from Toscanelli.
But his claim is even a greater one. He it was who first dared
to traverse unknown seas without coasting along the land, and his
example was the immediate cause of all the remarkable discoveries
that followed his earlier voyages. As we have seen, both Vasco da
Gama and Cabral immediately after departed from the slow coasting
route, and were by that means enabled to carry out to the full
the ideas of Prince Henry; but whereas, by the Portuguese method
of coasting, it had taken nearly a century to reach the Cape of
Good Hope, within thirty years of Columbus's first venture the
whole globe had been circumnavigated.
The first aim of his successors was to ascertain more clearly what it
was that Columbus had discovered. Immediately after Columbus's third,
voyage, in 1498, and after the news of Vasco da Gama's successful
passage to the Indies had made it necessary to discover some strait
leading from the "West Indies" to India itself, a Spanish gentleman,
named Hojeda, fitted out an expedition at his own expense, with
an Italian pilot on board, named Amerigo Vespucci, and tried once
more to find a strait to India near Trinidad. They were, of course,
unsuccessful, but they coasted along and landed on the north coast
of South America, which, from certain resemblances, they termed
Little Venice (Venezuela). Next year, as we have seen, Cabral,
in following Vasco da Gama, hit upon Brazil, which turned out to
be within the Portuguese "sphere of influence," as determined by
the line of demarcation.
But, three months previous to Cabral's touching upon Brazil, one of
Columbus's companions on his first voyage, Vincenta Yanez Pinzon,
had touched on the coast of Brazil, eight degrees south of the
line, and from there had worked northward, seeking for a passage
which would lead west to the Indies. He discovered the mouth of
the Amazon, but, losing two of his vessels, returned to Palos,
which he reached in September 1500.
This discovery of an unknown and unsuspected continent so far south
of the line created great interest, and shortly after Cabral's
return Amerigo Vespucci was sent out in 1501 by the King of Portugal
as pilot of a fleet which should explore the new land discovered
by Cabral and claim it for the Crown of Portugal. His instructions
were to ascertain how much of it was within the line of demarcation.
Vespucci reached the Brazilian coast at Cape St. Roque, and then
explored it very thoroughly right down to the river La Plata, which
was too far west to come within the Portuguese sphere. Amerigo
and his companions struck out south-eastward till they reached
the island of St. Georgia, 1200 miles east of Cape Horn, where
the cold and the floating ice drove them back, and they returned
to Lisbon, after having gone farthest south up to their time.
[Illustration: AMERIGO VESPUCCI.]
This voyage of Amerigo threw a new light upon the nature of the
discovery made by Columbus. Whereas he had thought he had discovered
a route to India and had touched upon Farther India, Amerigo and
his companions had shown that there was a hitherto unsuspected land
intervening between Columbus's discoveries and the long-desired Spice
Islands of Farther India. Amerigo, in describing his discoveries,
ventured so far as to suggest that they constituted a New World;
and a German professor, named Martin Waldseemüller, who wrote an
introduction to Cosmography in 1506, which included an account
of Amerigo's discoveries, suggested that this New World should
be called after him, AMERICA, after the analogy of Asia, Africa,
and Europe. For a long time the continent which we now know as
South America was called simply the New World, and was supposed
to be joined on to the east coast of Asia. The name America was
sometimes applied to it--not altogether inappropriately, since
it was Amerigo's voyage which definitely settled that really new
lands had been discovered by the western route; and when it was
further ascertained that this new land was joined, not to Asia,
but to another continent as large as itself, the two new lands
were distinguished as North and South America.
It was, at any rate, clear from Amerigo's discovery that the westward
route to the Spice Islands would have to be through or round this
New World discovered by him, and a Portuguese noble, named Fernao
Magelhaens, was destined to discover the practicability of this
route. He had served his native country under Almeida and Albuquerque
in the East Indies, and was present at the capture of Malacca in
1511, and from that port was despatched by Albuquerque with three
ships to visit the far-famed Spice Islands. They visited Amboyna
and Banda, and learned enough of the abundance and cheapness of
the spices of the islands to recognise their importance; but under
the direction of Albuquerque, who only sent them out on an exploring
expedition, they returned to him, leaving behind them, however, one
of Magelhaens' greatest friends, Francisco Serrao, who settled in
Ternate and from time to time sent glowing accounts of the Moluccas
to his friend Magelhaens. He in the meantime returned to Portugal,
and was employed on an expedition to Morocco. He was not, however,
well treated by the Portuguese monarch, and determined to leave
his service for that of Charles V., though he made it a condition
of his entering his service that he should make no discoveries
within the boundaries of the King of Portugal, and do nothing
prejudicial to his interests.
[Illustration: FERDINAND MAGELLAN.]
This was in the year 1517, and two years elapsed before Magelhaens
started on his celebrated voyage. He had represented to the Emperor
that he was convinced that a strait existed which would lead into
the Indian Ocean, past the New World of Amerigo, and that the Spice
Islands were beyond the line of demarcation and within the Spanish
sphere of influence. There is some evidence that Spanish merchant
vessels, trading secretly to obtain Brazil wood, had already caught
sight of the strait afterwards named after Magelhaens, and certainly
such a strait is represented upon Schoner's globes dated 1515 and
1520--earlier than Magelhaens' discovery. The Portuguese were fully
aware of the dangers threatened to their monopoly of the spice
trade--which by this time had been firmly established--owing to the
presence of Serrao in Ternate, and did all in their power to dissuade
Charles from sending out the threatened expedition, pointing out
that they would consider it an unfriendly act if such an expedition
were permitted to start. Notwithstanding this the Emperor persisted
in the project, and on Tuesday, 20th September 1519, a fleet of five
vessels, the _Trinidad, St. Antonio, Concepcion, Victoria_, and _St.
Jago_, manned by a heterogeneous collection of Spaniards, Portuguese,
Basques, Genoese, Sicilians, French, Flemings, Germans, Greeks,
Neapolitans, Corfiotes, Negroes, Malays, and a single Englishman
(Master Andrew of Bristol), started from Seville upon perhaps the
most important voyage of discovery ever made. So great was the
antipathy between Spanish and Portuguese that disaffection broke
out almost from the start, and after the mouth of the La Plata
had been carefully explored, to ascertain whether this was not
really the beginning of a passage through the New World, a mutiny
broke out on the 2nd April 1520, in Port St. Julian, where it had
been determined to winter; for of course by this time the sailors
had become aware that the time of the seasons was reversed in the
Southern Hemisphere. Magelhaens showed great firmness and skill in
dealing with the mutiny; its chief leaders were either executed or
marooned, and on the 18th October he resumed his voyage. Meanwhile
the habits and customs of the natives had been observed--their
huge height and uncouth foot-coverings, for which Magelhaens gave
them the name of Patagonians. Within three days they had arrived
at the entrance of the passage which still bears Magelhaens' name.
By this time one of the ships, the _St Jago_, had been lost, and it
was with only four of his vessels--the _Trinidad_, the _Victoria_,
the _Concepcion_. and the _St. Antonio_--that, Magelhaens began
his passage. There are many twists and divisions in the strait,
and on arriving at one of the partings, Magelhaens despatched the
_St. Antonio_ to explore it, while he proceeded with the other
three ships along the more direct route. The pilot of the _St.
Antonio_ had been one of the mutineers, and persuaded the crew
to seize this opportunity to turn back altogether; so that when
Magelhaens arrived at the appointed place of junction, no news
could be ascertained of the missing vessel; it went straight back
to Portugal. Magelhaens determined to continue his search, even,
he said, if it came to eating the leather thongs of the sails.
It had taken him thirty-eight days to get through the Straits,
and for four months afterwards Magelhaens continued his course
through the ocean, which, from its calmness, he called Pacific;
taking a north-westerly course, and thus, by a curious chance,
only hitting upon a couple of small uninhabited islands throughout
their whole voyage, through a sea which we now know to be dotted
by innumerable inhabited islands. On the 6th March 1520 they had
sighted the Ladrones, and obtained much-needed provisions. Scurvy
had broken out in its severest form, and the only Englishman on
the ships died at the Ladrones. From there they went on to the
islands now known as the Philippines, one of the kings of which
greeted them very favourably. As a reward Magelhaens undertook
one of his local quarrels, and fell in an unequal fight at Mactan,
27th April 1521. The three vessels continued their course for the
Moluccas, but the _Concepcion_ proved so unseaworthy that they had
to beach and burn her. They reached Borneo, and here Juan Sebastian
del Cano was appointed captain of the _Victoria_.
At last, on the 6th November 1521, they reached the goal of their
journey, and anchored at Tidor, one of the Moluccas. They traded
on very advantageous terms with the natives, and filled their holds
with the spices and nutmegs for which they had journeyed so far;
but when they attempted to resume their journey homeward, it was
found that the _Trinidad_ was too unseaworthy to proceed at once,
and it was decided that the _Victoria_ should start so as to get
the east monsoon. This she did, and after the usual journey round
the Cape of Good Hope, arrived off the Mole of Seville on Monday
the 8th September 1522--three years all but twelve days from the
date of their departure from Spain. Of the two hundred and seventy
men who had started with the fleet, only eighteen returned in the
_Victoria_. According to the ship's reckoning they had arrived
on Sunday the 7th, and for some time it was a puzzle to account
for the day thus lost.
Meanwhile the _Trinidad_, which had been left behind at the Moluccas,
had attempted to sail back to Panama, and reached as far north as
43°, somewhere about longitude 175° W. Here provisions failed them,
and they had to return to the Moluccas, where they were seized,
practically as pirates, by a fleet of Portuguese vessels sent specially
to prevent interference by the Spaniards with the Portuguese monopoly
of the spice trade. The crew of the _Trinidad_ were seized and made
prisoners, and ultimately only four of them reached Spain again,
after many adventures. Thirteen others, who had landed at the Cape
de Verde Islands from the _Victoria_, may also be included among
the survivors of the fleet, so that a total number of thirty-five
out of two hundred and seventy sums up the number of the first
circumnavigators of the globe.
The importance of this voyage was unique when regarded from the
point of view of geographical discovery. It decisively clinched
the matter with regard to the existence of an entirely New World
independent from Asia. In particular, the backward voyage of the
_Trinidad_ (which has rarely been noticed) had shown that there
was a wide expanse of ocean north of the line and east of Asia,
whilst the previous voyage had shown the enormous extent of sea
south of the line. After the circumnavigation of the _Victoria_
it was clear to cosmographers that the world was much larger than
had been imagined by the ancients; or rather, perhaps one may say
that Asia was smaller than had been thought by the mediæval writers.
The dogged persistence shown by Magelhaens in carrying out his
idea, which turned out to be a perfectly justifiable one, raises
him from this point of view to a greater height than Columbus,
whose month's voyage brought him exactly where he thought he would
find land according to Toscanelli's map. After Magelhaens, as will
be seen, the whole coast lines of the world were roughly known,
except for the Arctic Circle and for Australia.
[Illustration: THE WORLD ACCORDING TO PTOLEMY OF 1548.]
The Emperor was naturally delighted with the result of the voyage.
He granted Del Cano a pension, and a coat of arms commemorating
his services. The terms of the grant are very significant: _or_,
two cinnamon sticks _saltire proper_, three nutmegs and twelve
cloves, a chief _gules_, a castle _or; crest_, a globe, bearing
the motto, "Primus circumdedisti me" (thou wert the first to go
round me); _supporters_, two Malay kings crowned, holding in the
exterior hand a spice branch proper. The castle, of course, refers
to Castile, but the rest of the blazon indicates the importance
attributed to the voyage as resting mainly upon the visit to the
Spice Islands. As we have already seen, however, the Portuguese
recovered their position in the Moluccas immediately after the
departure of the _Victoria_, and seven years later Charles V. gave
up any claims he might possess through Magelhaens' visit.
But for a long time afterwards the Spaniards still cast longing
eyes upon the Spice Islands, and the Fuggers, the great bankers
of Augsburg, who financed the Spanish monarch, for a long time
attempted to get possession of Peru, with the scarcely disguised
object of making it a "jumping-place" from which to make a fresh
attempt at obtaining possession of the Moluccas. A modern parallel
will doubtless occur to the reader.
There are thus three stages to be distinguished in the successive
discovery and delimitation of the New World:--
(i.) At first Columbus imagined that he had actually reached Zipangu
or Japan, and achieved the object of his voyage.
(ii.) Then Amerigo Vespucci, by coasting down South America, ascertained
that there was a huge unknown land intervening even between Columbus'
discoveries and the long-desired Spice Islands.
(iii.) Magelhaens clinches this view by traversing the Southern
Pacific for thousands of miles before reaching the Moluccas.
There is still a fourth stage by which it was gradually discovered
that the North-west of America was not joined on to Asia, but this
stage was only gradually reached and finally determined by the
voyages of Behring and Cook.
[_Authorities:_ Justin Winsor, _Christopher Columbus_, 1894; Guillemard,
_Ferdinand Magellan_, 1894.]
CHAPTER VIII
TO THE INDIES NORTHWARD--ENGLISH, FRENCH, DUTCH, AND RUSSIAN ROUTES
The discovery of the New World had the most important consequences
on the relative importance of the different nations of Europe.
Hitherto the chief centres for over two thousand years had been
round the shores of the Mediterranean, and, as we have seen, Venice,
by her central position and extensive trade to the East, had become
a world-centre during the latter Middle Ages. But after Columbus,
and still more after Magelhaens, the European nations on the Atlantic
were found to be closer to the New World, and, in a measure, closer
to the Spice Islands, which they could reach all the way by ship,
instead of having to pay expensive land freights. The trade routes
through Germany became at once neglected, and it is only in the
present century that she has at all recovered from the blow given
to her by the discovery of the new sea routes in which she could
not join. But to England, France, and the Low Countries the new
outlook promised a share in the world's trade and affairs generally,
which they had never hitherto possessed while the Mediterranean
was the centre of commerce. If the Indies could be reached by sea,
they were almost in as fortunate a position as Portugal or Spain.
Almost as soon as the new routes were discovered the Northern nations
attempted to utilise them, notwithstanding the Bull of Partition,
which the French king laughed at, and the Protestant English and
Dutch had no reason to respect. Within three years of the return
of Columbus from his first voyage, Henry VII. employed John Cabot,
a Venetian settled in Bristol, with his three sons, to attempt
the voyage to the Indies by the North-West Passage. He appears to
have re-discovered Newfoundland in 1497, and then in the following
year, failing to find a passage there, coasted down North America
nearly as far as Florida.
In 1534 Jacques Cartier examined the river St. Lawrence, and his
discoveries were later followed up by Samuel de Champlain, who
explored some of the great lakes near the St. Lawrence, and established
the French rule in Canada, or Acadie, as it was then called.
Meanwhile the English had made an attempt to reach the Indies,
still by a northern passage, but this time in an easterly direction.
Sebastian Cabot, who had been appointed Grand Pilot of England by
Edward VI., directed a voyage of exploration in 1553, under Sir
Hugh Willoughby. Only one of these ships, with the pilot (Richard
Chancellor) on board, survived the voyage, reaching Archangel, and
then going overland to Moscow, where he was favourably received
by the Czar of Russia, Ivan the Terrible. He was, however, drowned
on his return, and no further attempt to reach Cathay by sea was
attempted.
The North-West Passage seemed thus to promise better than that by
the North-East, and in 1576 Martin Frobisher started on an exploring
voyage, after having had the honour of a wave of Elizabeth's hand
as he passed Greenwich. He reached Greenland, and then Labrador,
and, in a subsequent voyage next year, discovered the strait named
after him. His project was taken up by Sir Humphrey Gilbert, on
whom, with his brother Adrian, Elizabeth conferred the privilege of
making the passage to China and the Moluccas by the north-westward,
north-eastward, or northward route. At the same time a patent was
granted him for discovering any lands unsettled by Christian princes.
A settlement was made in St. John's, Newfoundland, but on the return
voyage, near the Azores, Sir Humphrey's "frigate" (a small boat
of ten men), disappeared, after he had been heard to call out,
"Courage, my lads; we are as near heaven by sea as by land!" This
happened in 1583.
Two years after, another expedition was sent out by the merchants
of London, under John Davis, who, on this and two subsequent voyages,
discovered several passages trending westward, which warranted
the hope of finding a northwest passage. Beside the strait named
after him, it is probable that on his third voyage, in 1587, he
passed through the passage now named after Hudson. His discoveries
were not followed up for some twenty years, when Henry Hudson was
despatched in 1607 with a crew of ten men and a boy. He reached
Spitzbergen, and reached 80° N., and in the following year reached
the North (Magnetic) Pole, which was then situated at 75.22° N. Two
of his men were also fortunate enough to see a mermaid--probably
an Eskimo woman in her _kayak_. In a third voyage, in 1609, he
discovered the strait and bay which now bear his name, but was
marooned by his crew, and never heard of further. He had previously,
for a time, passed into the service of the Dutch, and had guided
them to the river named after him, on which New York now stands. The
course of English discovery in the north was for a time concluded
by the voyage of William Baffin in 1615, which resulted in the
discovery of the land named after him, as well as many of the islands
to the north of America.
Meanwhile the Dutch had taken part in the work of discovery towards
the north. They had revolted against the despotism of Philip II., who
was now monarch of both Spain and Portugal. At first they attempted
to adopt a route which would not bring them into collision with
their old masters; and in three voyages, between 1594 and 1597,
William Barentz attempted the North-East Passage, under the auspices
of the States-General. He discovered Cherry Island, and touched
on Spitzbergen, but failed in the main object of his search; and
the attention of the Dutch was henceforth directed to seizing the
Portuguese route, rather than finding a new one for themselves.
The reason they were able to do this is a curious instance of Nemesis
in history. Owing to the careful series of intermarriages planned
out by Ferdinand of Arragon, the Portuguese Crown and all its
possessions became joined to Spain in 1580 under Philip II., just
a year after the northern provinces of the Netherlands had renounced
allegiance to Spain. Consequently they were free to attack not alone
Spanish vessels and colonies, but also those previously belonging
to Portugal. As early as 1596 Cornelius Houtman rounded the Cape
and visited Sumatra and Bantam, and within fifty, years the Dutch
had replaced the Portuguese in many of their Eastern possessions.
In 1614 they took Malacca, and with it the command of the Spice
Islands; by 1658 they had secured full possession of Ceylon. Much
earlier, in 1619, they had founded Batavia in Java, which they made
the centre of their East Indian possessions, as it still remains.
The English at first attempted to imitate the Dutch in their East
Indian policy. The English East India Company was founded by Elizabeth
in 1600, and as early as 1619 had forced the Dutch to allow them to
take a third share of the profits of the Spice Islands. In order
to do this several English planters settled at Amboyna, but within
four years trade rivalries had reached such a pitch that the Dutch
murdered some of these merchants and drove the rest from the islands.
As a consequence the English Company devoted its attention to the
mainland of India itself, where they soon obtained possession of
Madras and Bombay, and left the islands of the Indian Ocean mainly
in possession of the Dutch. We shall see later the effect of this
upon the history of geography, for it was owing to their possession
of the East India Islands that the Dutch were practically the
discoverers of Australia. One result of the Dutch East India policy
has left its traces even to the present day. In 1651 they established
a colony at the Cape of Good Hope, which only fell into English
hands during the Napoleonic wars, when Napoleon held Holland.
Meanwhile the English had not lost sight of the possibilities of
the North-East Passage, if not for reaching the Spice Islands,
at any rate as a means of tapping the overland route to China,
hitherto monopolised by the Genoese. In 1558 an English gentleman,
named Anthony Jenkinson, was sent as ambassador to the Czar of
Muscovy, and travelled from Moscow as far as Bokhara; but he was
not very fortunate in his venture, and England had to be content
for some time to receive her Indian and Chinese goods from the
Venetian argosies as before. But at last they saw no reason why
they should not attempt direct relations with the East. A company of
Levant merchants was formed in 1583 to open out direct communications
with Aleppo, Bagdad, Ormuz, and Goa. They were unsuccessful at the
two latter places owing to the jealousy of the Portuguese, but
they made arrangements for cheaper transit of Eastern goods to
England, and in 1587 the last of the Venetian argosies, a great
vessel of eleven hundred tons, was wrecked off the Isle of Wight.
Henceforth the English conducted their own business with the East,
and Venetian and Portuguese monopoly was at an end.
[Illustration: RUSSIAN MAP OF ASIA, 1737.]
But the journeys of Chancellor and Jenkinson to the Court of Moscow
had more far-reaching effects; the Russians themselves were thereby
led to contemplate utilising their proximity to one of the best
known routes to the Far East. Shortly after Jenkinson's visit, the
Czar, Ivan the Terrible, began extending his dominions eastward,
sending at first a number of troops to accompany the Russian merchant
Strogonof as far as the Obi in search of sables. Among the troops
were a corps of six thousand Cossacks commanded by one named Vassili
Yermak, who, finding the Tartars an easy prey, determined at first
to set up a new kingdom for himself. In 1579 he was successful in
overcoming the Tartars and their chief town Sibir, near Tobolsk;
but, finding it difficult to retain his position, determined to
return to his allegiance to the Czar on condition of being supported.
This was readily granted, and from that time onward the Russians
steadily pushed on through to the unknown country of the north
of Asia, since named after the little town conquered by Yermak,
of which scarcely any traces now remain. As early as 1639 they
had reached the Pacific under Kupilof. A force was sent out from
Yakutz, on the Lena, in 1643, which reached the Amur, and thus
Russians came for the first time in contact with the Chinese, and
a new method of reaching Cathay was thus obtained, while geography
gained the knowledge of the extent of Northern Asia. For, about
the same time (in 1648), the Arctic Ocean was reached on the north
shores of Siberia, and a fleet under the Cossack Dishinef sailed
from Kolyma and reached as far as the straits known by the name
of Behring. It was not, however, till fifty years afterwards, in
1696, that the Russians reached Kamtschatka.
Notwithstanding the access of knowledge which had been gained by
these successive bold pushes towards north and east, it still remained
uncertain whether Siberia did not join on to the northern part of
the New World discovered by Columbus and Amerigo, and in 1728 Peter
the Great sent out an expedition under VITUS BEHRING, a Dane in the
Russian service, with the express aim of ascertaining this point.
He reached Kamtschatka, and there built two vessels as directed by
the Czar, and started on his voyage northward, coasting along the
land. When he reached a little beyond 67° N., he found no land
to the north or east, and conceived he had reached the end of the
continent. As a matter of fact, he was within thirty miles of the
west coast of America; but of this he does not seem to have been
aware, being content with solving the special problem put before
him by the Czar. The strait thus discovered by Behring, though not
known by him to be a strait, has ever since been known by his name.
In 1741, however, Behring again set out on a voyage of discovery to
ascertain how far to the east America was, and within a fortnight
had come within sight of the lofty mountain named by him Mount
St. Elias. Behring himself died upon this voyage, on an island
also named after him; he had at last solved the relation between
the Old and the New Worlds.
These voyages of Behring, however, belong to a much later stage
of discovery than those we have hitherto been treating for the
last three chapters. His explorations were undertaken mainly for
scientific purposes, and to solve a scientific problem, whereas
all the other researches of Spanish, Portuguese, English, and Dutch
were directed to one end, that of reaching the Spice Islands and
Cathay. The Portuguese at first started out on the search by the
slow method of creeping down the coast of Africa; the Spanish, by
adopting Columbus's bold idea, had attempted it by the western
route, and under Magellan's still bolder conception had equally
succeeded in reaching it in that way; the English and French sought
for a north-west passage to the Moluccas; while the English and
Dutch attempted a northeasterly route. In both directions the icy
barrier of the north prevented success. It was reserved, as we shall
see, for the present century to complete the North-West Passage
under Maclure, and the North-East by Nordenskiold, sailing with
quite different motives to those which first brought the mariners
of England, France, and Holland within the Arctic Circle.
The net result of all these attempts by the nations of Europe to
wrest from the Venetians the monopoly of the Eastern trade was to
add to geography the knowledge of the existence of a New World
intervening between the western shores of Europe and the eastern
shores of Asia. We have yet to learn the means by which the New
World thus discovered became explored and possessed by the European
nations.
[_Authorities:_ Cooley and Beazeley, _John and Sebastian Cabot_,
1898.]
CHAPTER IX
THE PARTITION OF AMERICA
We have hitherto been dealing with the discoveries made by Spanish
and Portuguese along the coast of the New World, but early in the
sixteenth century they began to put foot on _terra firma_ and explore
the interior. As early as 1513 Vasco Nunez de Balboa ascended the
highest peak in the range running from the Isthmus of Panama, and
saw for the first time by European eyes the great ocean afterwards
to be named by Magellan the Pacific. He there heard that the country
to the south extended without end, and was inhabited by great nations,
with an abundance of gold. Among his companions who heard of this
golden country, or El Dorado, was one Francisco Pizarro, who was
destined to test the report. But a similar report had reached the ears
of Diego Velasquez, governor of Cuba, as to a great nation possessed
of much gold to the north of Darien. He accordingly despatched
his lieutenant Hernando Cortes in 1519 to investigate, with ten
ships, six hundred and fifty men, and some eighteen horses. When
he landed at the port named by him Vera Cruz, the appearance of
his men, and more especially of his horses, astonished and alarmed
the natives of Mexico, then a large and semi-civilised state under
the rule of Montezuma, the last representative of the Aztecs, who
in the twelfth century had succeeded the Toltecs, a people that had
settled on the Mexican tableland as early probably as the seventh
century, introducing the use of metals and roads and many of the
elements of civilisation. Montezuma is reported to have been able
to range no less than two hundred thousand men under his banners,
but he showed his opinion of the Spaniards by sending them costly
presents, gold and silver and costly stuffs. This only aroused
the cupidity of Cortes, who determined to make a bold stroke for
the conquest of such a rich prize. He burnt his ships and advanced
into the interior of the country, conquering on his way the tribe
of the Tlascalans, who had been at war with the Mexicans, but,
when conquered, were ready to assist him against them. With their
aid he succeeded in seizing the Mexican king, who was forced to
yield a huge tribute. After many struggles Cortes found himself
master of the capital, and of all the resources of the Mexican
Empire (1521). These he hastened to place at the feet of the Emperor
Charles V., who appointed him Governor and Captain-General of Mexico.
It is characteristic throughout the history of the New World, that
none of the soldiers of fortune who found it such an easy prey ever
thought of setting up an empire for himself. This is a testimony
to the influence national feeling had upon the minds even of the
most lawless, and the result was that Europe and European ideas
were brought over into America, or rather the New World became
tributary to Europe.
As soon as Cortes had established himself he fitted out expeditions
to explore the country, and himself reached Honduras after a remarkable
journey for over 1000 miles, in which he was only guided by a map on
cotton cloth, on which the Cacique of Tabasco had painted all the
towns, rivers, and mountains of the country as far as Nicaragua. He
also despatched a small fleet under Alvarro de Saavedra to support
a Spanish expedition which had been sent to the Moluccas under
Sebastian del Cano, and which arrived at Tidor in 1527, to the
astonishment of Spanish and Portuguese alike when they heard he
had started from New Castile. In 1536, Cortes, who had been in
the meantime shorn of much of his power, conducted an expedition
by sea along the north-west coast of Mexico, and reached what he
considered to be a great island. He identified this with an imaginary
island in the Far East, near the terrestrial paradise to which
the name of California had been given in a contemporary romance.
Thus, owing to Cortes, almost the whole of Central America had
become known before his death in 1540. Similarly, at a much earlier
period, Ponce de Leon had thought he had discovered another great
island in Florida in 1512, whither he had gone in search of Bayuca,
a fabled island of the Indians, in which they stated was a fountain
of eternal youth. At the time of Cortes' first attempt on Mexico,
Pineda had coasted round Florida, and connected it with the rest
of the coast of Mexico, which he traversed as far as Vera Cruz.
The exploits of Cortes were all important in their effects. He had
proved with what ease a handful of men might overcome an empire and
gain unparalleled riches. Francisco Pizarro was encouraged by the
success of Cortes to attempt the discovery of the El Dorado he had
heard of when on Balboa's expedition. With a companion named Diego
de Almegro he made several coasting expeditions down the northwest
coast of South America, during which they heard of the empire of
the Incas on the plateau of Peru. They also obtained sufficient
gold and silver to raise their hopes of the riches of the country,
and returned to Spain to report to the Emperor. Pizarro obtained
permission from Charles V. to attempt the conquest of Peru, of which
he was named Governor and Captain-General, on condition of paying a
tribute of one-fifth of the treasure he might obtain. He started
in February 1531 with a small force of 180 men, of whom thirty-six
were horsemen. Adopting the policy of Cortes, he pushed directly
for the capital Cuzco, where they managed to seize Atahualpa, the
Inca of the time. He attempted to ransom himself by agreeing to
fill the room in which he was confined, twenty-two feet long by
sixteen wide, with bars of gold as high as the hand could reach.
He carried out this prodigious promise, and Pizarro's companions
found themselves in possession of booty equal to three millions
sterling.
Atahualpa was, however, not released, but condemned to death on
a frivolous pretext, while Pizarro dismissed his followers, fully
confident that the wealth they carried off would attract as many
men as he could desire to El Dorado. He settled himself at Lima,
near the coast, in 1534. Meanwhile Almegro had been despatched
south, and made himself master of Chili. Another expedition in
1539 was conducted by Pizarro's brother Gonzales across the Andes,
and reached the sources of the Amazon, which one of his companions,
Francisco de Orellana, traversed as far as the mouth. This he reached
in August 1541, after a voyage of one thousand leagues. The river
was named after Orellana, but, from reports he made of the existence
of a tribe of female warriors, was afterwards known as the river
of the Amazons. The author spread reports of another El Dorado to
the north, in which the roofs of the temples were covered with
gold. This report afterwards led to the disastrous expedition of
Sir Walter Raleigh to Guiana. By his voyage Orellana connected the
Spanish and Portuguese "spheres of influence" in the New World of
Amerigo. By the year 1540 the main outlines of Central and South
America and something of the interior had been made known by the
Spanish adventurers within half a century of Columbus' first voyage.
Owing to the papal bull Portugal possessed Brazil, but all the
rest of the huge stretch of country was claimed for Spain. The
Portuguese wisely treated Brazil as an outlet for their overflowing
population, which settled there in large numbers and established
plantations. The Spaniards, on the other hand, only regarded their
huge possessions as exclusive markets to be merely visited by them.
Rich mines of gold, silver, and mercury were discovered in Mexico
and Peru, especially in the far-famed mines of Potosi, and these
were exploited entirely in the interests of Spain, which acted as a
sieve by which the precious metals were poured into Europe, raising
prices throughout the Old World. In return European merchandise was
sent in the return voyages of the Spanish galleons to New Spain,
which could only buy Flemish cloth, for example, through Spanish
intermediaries, who raised its price to three times the original
cost. This short-sighted policy on the part of Spain naturally
encouraged smuggling, and attracted the ships of all nations towards
that pursuit.
We have already seen the first attempts of the French and English
in the exploration of the north-east coast of North America; but
during the sixteenth century very little was done to settle on
such inhospitable shores, which did not offer anything like the
rich prizes that Tropical America afforded. Neither the exploration
of Cartier in 1534, or that of the Cabots much earlier, was followed
by any attempt to possess the land. Breton fishermen visited the
fisheries off Newfoundland, and various explorers attempted to find
openings which would give them a north-west passage, but otherwise
the more northerly part of the continent was left unoccupied till
the beginning of the seventeenth century. The first town founded was
that of St. Augustine, in Florida, in 1565, but this was destroyed
three years later by a French expedition. Sir Walter Raleigh attempted
to found a colony in 1584 near where Virginia now stands, but it
failed after three years, and it was not till the reign of James
I. that an organised attempt was made by England to establish
plantations, as they were then called, on the North American coast.
Two Chartered Companies, the one to the north named the Plymouth
Company, and the one to the south named the London Company (both
founded in 1606), nominally divided between them all the coast
from Nova Scotia to Florida. These large tracts of country were
during the seventeenth century slowly parcelled out into smaller
states, mainly Puritan in the north (New England), High Church
and Catholic in the south (Virginia and Maryland). But between the
two, and on the banks of the Hudson and the Delaware, two other
European nations had also formed plantations--the Dutch along the
Hudson from 1609 forming the New Netherlands, and the Swedes from
1636 along the Delaware forming New Sweden. The latter, however,
lasted only a few years, and was absorbed by the Dutch in 1655.
The capital of New Netherlands was established on Manhattan Island,
to the south of the palisade still known as Wall Street, and the
city was named New Amsterdam. The Hudson is such an important artery
of commerce between the Atlantic and the great lakes, that this
wedge between the two sets of English colonies would have been a
bar to any future progress. This was recognised by Charles II.,
who in 1664 despatched an expedition to demand its surrender, even
though England and Holland were at that time at peace. New Amsterdam
was taken, and named New York, after the king's brother, the Duke
of York, afterwards James II. New Sweden, which at the same time
fell into the English hands, was sold as a proprietary plantation
to a Jersey man, Sir George Carteret, and to a Quaker, William
Penn. By this somewhat high-handed procedure the whole coast-line
down to Florida was in English hands.
Both the London and Plymouth Companies had started to form plantations
in 1607, and in that very year the French made their first effective
settlements in America, at Port Royal and at Nova Scotia, then
called Arcadie; while, the following year, Samuel de Champlain
made settlements at Quebec, and founded French Canada. He explored
the lake country, and established settlements down the banks of the
St. Lawrence, along which French activity for a long time confined
itself. Between the French and the English settlements roved the
warlike Five Nations of the Iroquois Indians, and Champlain, whose
settlements were in the country of the Algonquins, was obliged
to take their part and make the Iroquois the enemies of France,
which had important effects upon the final struggle between England
and France in the eighteenth century. The French continued their
exploration of the interior of the continent. In 1673 Marquette
discovered the Mississippi (Missi Sepe, "the great water"), and
descended it as far as the mouth of the Arkansas, but the work of
exploring the Mississippi valley was undertaken by Robert de la
Salle. He had already discovered the Ohio and Illinois rivers, and
in three expeditions, between 1680 and 1682, succeeded in working his
way right down to the mouth of the Mississippi, giving to the huge
tract of country which he had thus traversed the name of Louisiana,
after Louis XIV.
France thenceforth claimed the whole _hinterland_, as we should
now call it, of North America, the English being confined to the
comparatively narrow strip of country east of the Alleghanies. New
Orleans was founded at the mouth of the Mississippi in 1716, and
named after the Prince Regent; and French activity ranged between
Quebec and New Orleans, leaving many traces even to the present
day, in French names like Mobile, Detroit, and the like, through
the intervening country. The situation at the commencement of the
eighteenth century was remarkably similar to that of the Gold Coast
in Africa at the end of the nineteenth. The French persistently
attempted to encroach upon the English sphere of influence, and it
was in attempting to define the two spheres that George Washington
learned his first lesson in diplomacy and strategy. The French and
English American colonies were almost perpetually at war with one
another, the objective being the spot where Pittsburg now stands,
which was regarded as the gate of the west, overlooking as it did
the valley of the Ohio. Here Duquesne founded the fort named after
himself, and it was not till 1758 that this was finally wrested
from French hands; while, in the following year, Wolfe, by his
capture of Quebec, overthrew the whole French power in North America.
Throughout the long fight the English had been much assisted by
the guerilla warfare of the Iroquois against the French.
By the Treaty of Paris in 1763 the whole of French America was
ceded to England, which also obtained possession of Florida from
Spain, in exchange for the Philippines, captured during the war.
As a compensation all the country west of the Mississippi became
joined on to the Spanish possessions in Mexico. These of course
became, nominally French when Napoleon's brother Joseph was placed
on the Spanish throne, but Napoleon sold them to the United States
in 1803, so that no barrier existed to the westward spread of the
States. Long previously to this, a Chartered Company had been formed
in 1670, with Prince Rupert at its head, to trade with the Indians
for furs in Hudson's Bay, then and for some time afterwards called
Rupertsland. The Hudson Bay Company gradually extended its knowledge
of the northerly parts of America towards the Rocky Mountains,
but it was not till 1740 that Varenne de la Varanderye discovered
their extent. In 1769-71 a fur trader named Hearne traced the river
Coppermine to the sea, while it was not till 1793 that Mr. (after
Sir A.) Mackenzie discovered the river now named after him, and
crossed the continent of North America from Atlantic to Pacific.
One of the reasons for this late exploration of the north-west of
North America was a geographical myth started by a Spanish voyager
named Juan de Fuca as early as 1592. Coasting as far as Vancouver
Island, he entered the inlet to the south of it, and not being
able to see land to the north, brought back a report of a huge sea
spreading over all that part of the country, which most geographers
assumed to pass over into Hudson Bay or the neighbourhood. It was
this report as much as anything which encouraged hopes of finding
the north-west passage in a latitude low enough to be free from
ice.
As soon as the United States got possession of the land west of
the Mississippi they began to explore it, and between 1804 and
1807 Lewis and Clarke had explored the whole basin of the Missouri,
while Pike had investigated the country between the sources of the
Mississippi and the Red River. We have already seen that Behring
had carried over Russian investigation and dominion into Alaska,
and it was in order to avoid her encroachments down towards the
Californian coast that President Monroe put forth in 1823 the doctrine
that no further colonisation of the Americas would be permitted by
the United States. In this year Russia agreed to limit her claims
to the country north of 54.40°. The States subsequently acquired
California and other adjoining states during their war with Mexico
in 1848, just before gold was discovered in the Sacramento valley.
The land between California and Alaska was held in joint possession
between Great Britain and the States, and was known as the Oregon
Territory. Lewis and Clarke had explored the Columbia River, while
Vancouver had much earlier examined the island which now bears his
name, so that both countries appear to have some rights of discovery
to the district. At one time the inhabitants of the States were
inclined to claim all the country as far as the Russian boundary
54.40°, and a war-cry arose "54.40° or fight;" but in 1846 the
territory was divided by the 49th parallel, and at this date we may
say the partition of America was complete, and all that remained
to be known of it was the ice-bound northern coast, over which so
much heroic enterprise has been displayed.
The history of geographical discovery in America is thus in large
measure a history of conquest. Men got to know both coast-line and
interior while endeavouring either to trade or to settle where
nature was propitious, or the country afforded mineral or vegetable
wealth that could be easily transported. Of the coast early knowledge
was acquired for geography; but where the continent broadens out
either north or south, making the interior inaccessible for trade
purposes with the coasts, ignorance remained even down to the present
century. Even to the present day the country south of the valley
of the Amazon is perhaps as little known as any portion of the
earth's surface, while, as we have seen, it was not till the early
years of this century that any knowledge was acquired of the huge
tract of country between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains.
It was the natural expansion of the United States, rendered possible
by the cession of this tract to the States by Napoleon in 1803,
that brought it within the knowledge of all. That expansion was
chiefly due to the improved methods of communication which steam
has given to mankind only within this century. But for this the
region east of the Rocky Mountains would possibly be as little
known to Europeans, even at the present day, as the Soudan or
Somaliland. It is owing to this natural expansion of the States,
and in minor measure of Canada, that few great names of geographical
explorers are connected with our knowledge of the interior of North
America. Unknown settlers have been the pioneers of geography,
and not as elsewhere has the reverse been the case. In the two
other continents whose geographical history we have still to trace,
Australia and Africa, explorers have preceded settlers or conquerors,
and we can generally follow the course of geographical discovery
in their case without the necessity of discussing their political
history.
[_Authorities:_ Winsor, _From Cartier to Frontenac_; Gelcich, in
_Mittheilungen_ of Geographical Society of Vienna, 1892.]
CHAPTER X
AUSTRALIA AND THE SOUTH SEAS--TASMAN AND COOK
If one looks at the west coast of Australia one is struck by the
large number of Dutch names which are jotted down the coast. There
is Hoog Island, Diemen's Bay, Houtman's Abrolhos, De Wit land, and
the Archipelago of Nuyts, besides Dirk Hartog's Island and Cape
Leeuwin. To the extreme north we find the Gulf of Carpentaria,
and to the extreme south the island which used to be called Van
Diemen's Land. It is not altogether to be wondered at that almost
to the middle of this century the land we now call Australia was
tolerably well known as New Holland. If the Dutch had struck the
more fertile eastern shores of the Australian continent, it might
have been called with reason New Holland to the present day; but
there is scarcely any long coast-line of the world so inhospitable
and so little promising as that of Western Australia, and one can
easily understand how the Dutch, though they explored it, did not
care to take possession of it.
[Illustration: TERRES AUSTRALES. d'après d'Anville. 1746.]
But though the Dutch were the first to explore any considerable
stretch of Australian coast, they were by no means the first to
sight it. As early as 1542 a Spanish expedition under Luis Lopez de
Villalobos, was despatched to follow up the discoveries of Magellan
in the Pacific Ocean within the Spanish sphere of influence. He
discovered several of the islands of Polynesia, and attempted to
seize the Philippines, but his fleet had to return to New Spain.
One of the ships coasted along an island to which was given the
name of New Guinea, and was thought to be part of the great unknown
southern land which Ptolemy had imagined to exist in the south
of the Indian Ocean, and to be connected in some way with Tierra
del Fuego. Curiosity was thus aroused, and in 1606 Pedro de Quiros
was despatched on a voyage to the South Seas with three ships.
He discovered the New Hebrides, and believed it formed part of
the southern continent, and he therefore named it Australia del
Espiritu Santo, and hastened home to obtain the viceroyalty of
this new possession. One of his ships got separated from him, and
the commander, Luys Vaz de Torres, sailed farther to the south-west,
and thereby learned that the New Australia was not a continent but
an island. He proceeded farther till he came to New Guinea, which
he coasted along the south coast, and seeing land to the south of
him, he thus passed through the straits since named after him, and
was probably the first European to see the continent of Australia.
In the very same year (1606) the Dutch yacht named the _Duyfken_ is
said to have coasted along the south and west coasts of New Guinea
nearly a thousand miles, till they reached Cape Keerweer, or "turn
again." This was probably the north-west coast of Australia. In the
first thirty years of the seventeenth century the Dutch followed
the west coast of Australia with as much industry as the Portuguese
had done with the west coast of Africa, leaving up to the present
day signs of their explorations in the names of islands, bays,
and capes. Dirk Hartog, in the _Endraaght_, discovered that Land
which is named after his ship, and the cape and roadstead named
after himself, in 1616. Jan Edels left his name upon the western
coast in 1619; while, three years later, a ship named the _Lioness_
or _Leeuwin_ reached the most western point of the continent, to
which its name is still attached. Five years later, in 1627, De
Nuyts coasted round the south coast of Australia; while in the
same year a Dutch commander named Carpenter discovered and gave
his name to the immense indentation still known as the Gulf of
Carpentaria.
But still more important discoveries were made in 1642 by an expedition
sent out from Batavia under ABEL JANSSEN TASMAN to investigate
the real extent of the southern land. After the voyages of the
_Leeuwin_ and De Nuyts it was seen that the southern coast of the
new land trended to the east, instead of working round to the west,
as would have been the case if Ptolemy's views had been correct.
Tasman's problem was to discover whether it was connected with the
great southern land assumed to lie to the south of South America.
Tasman first sailed from Mauritius, and then directing his course
to the south-east, going much more south than Cape Leeuwin, at
last reached land in latitude 43.30° and longitude 163.50°. This
he called Van Diemen's Land, after the name of the Governor-General
of Batavia, and it was assumed that this joined on to the land
already discovered by De Nuyts. Sailing farther to the eastward,
Tasman came out into the open sea again, and thus appeared to prove
that the newly discovered land was not connected with the great
unknown continent round the south pole.
But he soon came across land which might possibly answer to that
description, and he called it Staaten Land, in honour of the
States-General of the Netherlands. This was undoubtedly some part
of New Zealand. Still steering eastward, but with a more northerly
trend, Tasman discovered several islands in the Pacific, and ultimately
reached Batavia after touching on New Guinea. His discoveries were
a great advance on previous knowledge; he had at any rate reduced
the possible dimensions of the unknown continent of the south within
narrow limits, and his discoveries were justly inscribed upon the map
of the world cut in stone upon the new Staathaus in Amsterdam, in
which the name New Holland was given by order of the States-General
to the western part of the "terra Australis." When England for a
time became joined on to Holland under the rule of William III.,
William Dampier was despatched to New Holland to make further
discoveries. He retraced the explorations of the Dutch from Dirk
Hartog's Bay to New Guinea, and appears to have been the first
European to have noticed the habits of the kangaroo; otherwise
his voyage did not add much to geographical knowledge, though when
he left the coasts of New Guinea he steered between New England
and New Ireland.
As a result of these Dutch voyages the existence of a great land
somewhere to the south-east of Asia became common property to all
civilised men. As an instance of this familiarity many years before
Cook's epoch-making voyages, it may be mentioned that in 1699 Captain
Lemuel Gulliver (in Swift's celebrated romance) arrived at the kingdom
of Lilliput by steering north-west from Van Diemen's Land, which he
mentions by name. Lilliput, it would thus appear, was situated
somewhere in the neighbourhood of the great Bight of Australia. This
curious mixture of definite knowledge and vague ignorance on the
part of Swift exactly corresponds to the state of geographical
knowledge about Australia in his days, as is shown in the preceding
map of those parts of the world, as given by the great French
cartographer D'Anville in 1745 (p. 157).
These discoveries of the Spanish and Dutch were direct results
and corollaries of the great search for the Spice Islands, which
has formed the main subject of our inquiries. The discoveries were
mostly made by ships fitted out in the Malay archipelago, if not
from the Spice Islands themselves. But at the beginning of the
eighteenth century new motives came into play in the search for
new lands; by that time almost the whole coast-line of the world
was roughly known. The Portuguese had coasted Africa, the Spanish
South America, the English most of the east of North America, while
Central America was known through the Spaniards. Many of the islands
of the Pacific Ocean had been touched upon, though not accurately
surveyed, and there remained only the north-west coast of America
and the north-east coast of Asia to be explored, while the great
remaining problem of geography was to discover if the great southern
continent assumed by Ptolemy existed, and, if so, what were its
dimensions. It happened that all these problems of coastline geography,
if we may so call it, were destined to be solved by one man, an
Englishman named JAMES COOK, who, with Prince Henry, Magellan, and
Tasman, may be said to have determined the limits of the habitable
land.
His voyages were made in the interests, not of trade or conquest,
but of scientific curiosity; and they were, appropriately enough,
begun in the interests of quite a different science than that of
geography. The English astronomer Halley had left as a sort of legacy
the task of examining the transit of Venus, which he predicted for
the year 1769, pointing out its paramount importance for determining
the distance of the sun from the earth. This transit could only
be observed in the southern hemisphere, and it was in order to
observe it that Cook made his first voyage of exploration.
There was a double suitability in the motive of Cook's first voyage.
The work of his life could only have been carried out owing to the
improvement in nautical instruments which had been made during
the early part of the eighteenth century. Hadley had invented the
sextant, by which the sun's elevation could be taken with much
more ease and accuracy than with the old cross-staff, the very
rough gnomon which the earlier navigators had to use. Still more
important for scientific geography was the improvement that had
taken place in accurate chronometry. To find the latitude of a
place is not so difficult--the length of the day at different times
of the year will by itself be almost enough to determine this, as
we have seen in the very earliest history of Greek geography--but
to determine the longitude was a much more difficult task, which
in the earlier stages could only be formed by guesswork and dead
reckonings.
But when clocks had been brought to such a pitch of accuracy that
they would not lose but a few seconds or minutes during the whole
voyage, they could be used to determine the difference of local
time between any spot on the earth's surface and that of the port
from which the ship sailed, or from some fixed place where the clock
could be timed. The English government, seeing the importance of
this, proposed the very large reward of £10,000 for the invention
of a chronometer which would not lose more than a stated number of
minutes during a year. This prize was won by John Harrison, and
from this time onward a sea-captain with a minimum of astronomical
knowledge was enabled to know his longitude within a few minutes.
Hadley's sextant and Harrison's chronometer were the necessary
implements to enable James Cook to do his work, which was thus,
both in aim and method, in every way English.
James Cook was a practical sailor, who had shown considerable
intelligence in sounding the St. Lawrence on Wolfe's expedition,
and had afterwards been appointed marine surveyor of Newfoundland.
When the Royal Society determined to send out an expedition to
observe the transit of Venus, according to Halley's prediction,
they were deterred from entrusting the expedition to a scientific
man by the example of Halley himself, who had failed to obtain
obedience from sailors on being entrusted with the command. Dalrymple,
the chief hydrographer of the Admiralty, who had chief claims to
the command, was also somewhat of a faddist, and Cook was selected
almost as a _dernier ressort_. The choice proved an excellent one.
He selected a coasting coaler named the _Endeavour_, of 360 tons,
because her breadth of beam would enable her to carry more stores
and to run near coasts. Just before they started Captain Wallis
returned from a voyage round the world upon which he had discovered
or re-discovered Tahiti, and he recommended this as a suitable
place for observing the transit.
Cook duly arrived there, and on the 3rd of June 1769 the main object
of the expedition was fulfilled by a successful observation. But
he then proceeded farther, and arrived soon at a land which he
saw reason to identify with the Staaten Land of Tasman; but on
coasting along this, Cook found that, so far from belonging to a
great southern continent, it was composed of two islands, between
which he sailed, giving his name to the strait separating them.
Leaving New Zealand on the 31st of March 1770, on the 20th of the
next month he came across another land to the westward, hitherto
unknown to mariners. Entering an inlet, he explored the neighbourhood
with the aid of Mr. Joseph Banks, the naturalist of the expedition.
He found so many plants new to him, that the bay was termed Botany
Bay.
He then coasted northward, and nearly lost his ship upon the great
reef running down the eastern coast; but by keeping within it he
managed to reach the extreme end of the land in this direction,
and proved that it was distinct from New Guinea. In other words,
he had reached the southern point of the strait named after Torres.
To this immense line of coast Cook gave the name of New South Wales,
from some resemblance that he saw to the coast about Swansea. By this
first voyage Cook had proved that neither New Holland nor Staaten
Land belonged to the great Antarctic continent, which remained
the sole myth bequeathed by the ancients which had not yet been
definitely removed from the maps. In his second voyage, starting
in 1772, he was directed to settle finally this problem. He went
at once to the Cape of Good Hope, and from there started out on
a zigzag journey round the Southern Pole, poking the nose of his
vessel in all directions as far south as he could reach, only pulling
up when he touched ice. In whatever direction he advanced he failed
to find any trace of extensive land corresponding to the supposed
Antarctic continent, which he thus definitely proved to be non-existent.
He spent the remainder of this voyage in rediscovering various
sets of archipelagos which preceding Spanish, Dutch, and English
navigators had touched, but had never accurately surveyed. Later
on Cook made a run across the Pacific from New Zealand to Cape
Horn without discovering any extensive land, thus clinching the
matter after three years' careful inquiry. It is worthy of remark
that during that long time he lost but four out of 118 men, and
only one of them by sickness.
Only one great problem to maritime geography still remained to be
solved, that of the north-west passage, which, as we have seen,
had so frequently been tried by English navigators, working from
the east through Hudson's Bay. In 1776 Cook was deputed by George
III. to attempt the solution of this problem by a new method. He
was directed to endeavour to find an opening on the north-west
coast of America which would lead into Hudson's Bay. The old legend
of Juan de Fuca's great bay still misled geographers as to this
coast. Cook not alone settled this problem, but, by advancing through
Behring Strait and examining both sides of it, determined that
the two continents of Asia and America approached one another as
near as thirty-six miles. On his return voyage he landed at Owhyee
(Hawaii), where he was slain in 1777, and his ships returned to
England without adding anything further to geographical knowledge.
Cook's voyages had aroused the generous emulation of the French,
who, to their eternal honour, had given directions to their fleet
to respect his vessels wherever found, though France was at that
time at war with England. In 1783 an expedition was sent, under
François de la Pérouse, to complete Cook's work. He explored the
north-east coast of Asia, examined the island of Saghalien, and
passed through the strait between it and Japan, often called by
his name. In Kamtschatka La Pérouse landed Monsieur Lesseps, who
had accompanied the expedition as Russian interpreter, and sent home
by him his journals and surveys. Lesseps made a careful examination
of Kamtschatka himself, and succeeded in passing overland thence
to Paris, being the first European to journey completely across
the Old World from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. La Pérouse
then proceeded to follow Cook by examining the coast of New South
Wales, and to his surprise, when entering a fine harbour in the
middle of the coast, found there English ships engaged in settling
the first Australian colony in 1787. After again delivering his
surveys to be forwarded by the Englishmen, he started to survey
the coast of New Holland, but his expedition was never heard of
afterwards. As late as 1826 it was discovered that they had been
wrecked on Vanikoro, an island near the Fijis.
We have seen that Cook's exploration of the eastern coast of Australia
was soon followed up by a settlement. A number of convicts were
sent out under Captain Philips to Botany Bay, and from that time
onward English explorers gradually determined with accuracy both
the coast-line and the interior of the huge stretch of land known
to us as Australia. One of the ships that had accompanied Cook on
his second voyage had made a rough survey of Van Diemen's Land,
and had come to the conclusion that it joined on to the mainland.
But in 1797, Bass, a surgeon in the navy, coasted down from Port
Jackson to the south in a fine whale boat with a crew of six men,
and discovered open sea running between the southernmost point and
Van Diemen's Land; this is still known as Bass' Strait. A companion
of his, named Flinders, coasted, in 1799, along the south coast from
Cape Leeuwin eastward, and on this voyage met a French ship at
Encounter Bay, so named from the _rencontre_. Proceeding farther,
he discovered Port Philip; and the coast-line of Australia was
approximately settled after Captain P. P. King in four voyages,
between 1817 and 1822, had investigated the river mouths.
[Illustration: THE EXPLORATION OF AUSTRALIA.]
The interior now remained to be investigated. On the east coast
this was rendered difficult by the range of the Blue Mountains,
honeycombed throughout with huge gullies, which led investigators
time after time into a cul-de-sac; but in 1813 Philip Wentworth
managed to cross them, and found a fertile plateau to the westward.
Next year Evans discovered the Lachlan and Macquarie rivers, and
penetrated farther into the Bathurst plains. In 1828-29 Captain
Sturt increased the knowledge of the interior by tracing the course
of the two great rivers Darling and Murray. In 1848 the German
explorer Leichhardt lost his life in an attempt to penetrate the
interior northward; but in 1860 two explorers, named Burke and Wills,
managed to pass from south to north along the east coast; while, in
the four years 1858 to 1862, John M'Dowall Stuart performed the
still more difficult feat of crossing the centre of the continent
from south to north, in order to trace a course for the telegraphic
line which was shortly afterwards erected. By this time settlements
had sprung up throughout the whole coast of Eastern Australia,
and there only remained the western desert to be explored. This
was effected in two journeys of John Forrest, between 1868 and
1874, who penetrated from Western Australia as far as the central
telegraphic line; while, between 1872 and 1876, Ernest Giles performed
the same feat to the north. Quite recently, in 1897, these two
routes were joined by the journey of the Honourable Daniel Carnegie
from the Coolgardie gold fields in the south to those of Kimberley
in the north. These explorations, while adding to our knowledge
of the interior of Australia, have only confirmed the impression
that it was not worth knowing.
[_Authorities:_ Rev. G. Grimm, _Discovsry and Exploration of Australia_
(Melbourne, 1888); A. F. Calvert, _Discovery of Australia_, 1893;
_Exploration of Australia_, 1895; _Early Voyages to Australia_,
Hakluyt Society.]
CHAPTER XI
EXPLORATION AND PARTITION OF AFRICA: PARK--LIVINGSTONE--STANLEY
We have seen how the Portuguese had slowly coasted along the shore
of Africa during the fifteeenth century in search of a way to the
Indies. By the end of the century mariners _portulanos_ gave a
rude yet effective account of the littoral of Africa, both on the
west and the eastern side. Not alone did they explore the coast, but
they settled upon it. At Amina on the Guinea coast, at Loando near
the Congo, and at Benguela on the western coast, they established
stations whence to despatch the gold and ivory, and, above all, the
slaves, which turned out to be the chief African products of use
to Europeans. On the east coast they settled at Sofala, a port of
Mozambique; and in Zanzibar they possessed no less than three ports,
those first visited by Vasco da Gama and afterwards celebrated by
Milton in the sonorous line contained in the gorgeous geographical
excursus in the Eleventh Book--
"Mombaza and Quiloa and Melind."
--_Paradise Lost_, xi. 339.
It is probable that, besides settling on the coast, the Portuguese
from time to time made explorations into the interior. At any rate,
in some maps of the sixteenth and seventeenth century there is
shown a remarkable knowledge of the course of the Nile. We get
it terminated in three large lakes, which can be scarcely other
than the Victoria and Albert Nyanza, and Tanganyika. The Mountains
of the Moon also figure prominently, and it was only almost the
other day that Mr. Stanley re-discovered them. It is difficult,
however, to determine how far these entries on the Portuguese maps
were due to actual knowledge or report, or to the traditions of a
still earlier knowledge of these lakes and mountains; for in the
maps accompanying the early editions of Ptolemy we likewise obtain
the same information, which is repeated by the Arabic geographers,
obviously from Ptolemy, and not from actual observation. When the
two great French cartographers Delisle and D'Anville determined
not to insert anything on their maps for which they had not some
evidence, these lakes and mountains disappeared, and thus it has
come about that maps of the seventeenth century often appear to
display more knowledge of the interior of Africa than those of the
beginning of the nineteenth, at least with regard to the sources
of the Nile.
[Illustration: DAPPER'S MAP OF AFRICA, 1676.]
African exploration of the interior begins with the search for
the sources of the Nile, and has been mainly concluded by the
determination of the course of the three other great rivers, the
Niger, the Zambesi, and the Congo. It is remarkable that all four
rivers have had their course determined by persons of British
nationality. The names of Bruce and Grant will always be associated
with the Nile, that of Mungo Park with the Niger, Dr. Livingstone with
the Zambesi, and Mr. Stanley with the Congo. It is not inappropriate
that, except in the case of the Congo, England should control the
course of the rivers which her sons first made accessible to
civilisation.
We have seen that there was an ancient tradition reported by Herodotus,
that the Nile trended off to the west and became there the river
Niger; while still earlier there was an impression that part of
it at any rate wandered eastward, and some way joined on to the
same source as the Tigris and Euphrates--at least that seems to be
the suggestion in the biblical account of Paradise. Whatever the
reason, the greatest uncertainty existed as to the actual course
of the river, and to discover the source of the Nile was for many
centuries the standing expression for performing the impossible. In
1768, James Bruce, a Scottish gentleman of position, set out with
the determination of solving this mystery--a determination which
he had made in early youth, and carried out with characteristic
pertinacity. He had acquired a certain amount of knowledge of Arabic
and acquaintance with African customs as Consul at Algiers. He went
up the Nile as far as Farsunt, and then crossed the desert to the Red
Sea, went over to Jedda, from which he took ship for Massowah, and
began his search for the sources of the Nile in Abyssinia. He visited
the ruins of Axum, the former capital, and in the neighbourhood of
that place saw the incident with which his travels have always
been associated, in which a couple of rump-steaks were extracted
from a cow while alive, the wound sewn up, and the animal driven
on farther.
Here, guided by some Gallas, he worked his way up the Blue Nile
to the three fountains, which he declared to be the true sources
of the Nile, and identified with the three mysterious lakes in
the old maps. From there he worked his way down the Nile, reaching
Cairo in 1773. Of course what he had discovered was merely the
source of the Blue Nile, and even this had been previously visited
by a Portuguese traveller named Payz. But the interesting adventures
which he experienced, and the interesting style in which he told
them, aroused universal attention, which was perhaps increased
by the fact that his journey was undertaken purely from love of
adventure and discovery. The year 1768 is distinguished by the
two journeys of James Cook and James Bruce, both of them expressly
for purposes of geographical discovery, and thus inaugurating the
era of what may be called scientific exploration. Ten years later
an association was formed named the African Association, expressly
intended to explore the unknown parts of Africa, and the first
geographical society called into existence. In 1795 MUNGO PARK was
despatched by the Association to the west coast. He started from
the Gambia, and after many adventures, in which he was captured
by the Moors, arrived at the banks of the Niger, which he traced
along its middle course, but failed to reach as far as Timbuctoo.
He made a second attempt in 1805, hoping by sailing down the Niger
to prove its identity with the river known at its mouth as the
Congo; but he was forced to return, and died at Boussa, without
having determined the remaining course of the Niger.
Attention was thus drawn to the existence of the mysterious city
of Timbuctoo, of which Mungo Park had brought back curious rumours
on his return from his first journey. This was visited in 1811 by
a British seaman named Adams, who had been wrecked on the Moorish
coast, and taken as a slave by the Moors across to Timbuctoo. He
was ultimately ransomed by the British consul at Mogador, and his
account revived interest in West African exploration. Attempts were
made to penetrate the secret of the Niger, both from Senegambia
and from the Congo, but both were failures, and a fresh method was
adopted, possibly owing to Adams' experience in the attempt to
reach the Niger by the caravan routes across the Sahara. In 1822
Major Denham and Lieutenant Clapperton left Murzouk, the capital
of Fezzan, and made their way to Lake Chad and thence to Bornu.
Clapperton, later on, again visited the Niger from Benin. Altogether
these two travellers added some two thousand miles of route to
our knowledge of, West Africa. In 1826-27 Timbuctoo was at last
visited by two Europeans--Major Laing in the former year, who was
murdered there; and a young Frenchman, Réné Caillié, in the latter.
His account aroused great interest, and Tennyson began his poetic
career by a prize-poem on the subject of the mysterious African
capital.
It was not till 1850 that the work of Denham and Clapperton was
again taken up by Barth, who for five years explored the whole
country to the west of Lake Chad, visiting Timbuctoo, and connecting
the lines of route of Clapperton and Caillié. What he did for the
west of Lake Chad was accomplished by Nachtigall east of that lake
in Darfur and Wadai, in a journey which likewise took five years
(1869-74). Of recent years political interests have caused numerous
expeditions, especially by the French to connect their possessions
in Algeria and Tunis with those on the Gold Coast and on the Senegal.
The next stage in African exploration is connected with the name
of the man to whom can be traced practically the whole of recent
discoveries. By his tact in dealing with the natives, by his calm
pertinacity and dauntless courage, DAVID LIVINGSTONE succeeded
in opening up the entirely unknown districts of Central Africa.
Starting from the Cape in 1849, he worked his way northward to the
Zambesi, and then to Lake Dilolo, and after five years' wandering
reached the western coast of Africa at Loanda. Then retracing his
steps to the Zambesi again, he followed its course to its mouth
on the east coast, thus for the first time crossing Africa from
west to east. In a second journey, on which he started in 1858, he
commenced tracing the course of the river Shiré, the most important
affluent of the Zambesi, and in so doing arrived on the shores of
Lake Nyassa in September 1859.
Meanwhile two explorers, Captain (afterwards Sir Richard) Burton
and Captain Speke, had started from Zanzibar to discover a lake of
which rumours had for a long time been heard, and in the following
year succeeded in reaching Lake Tanganyika. On their return Speke
parted from Burton and took a route more to the north, from which
he saw another great lake, which afterwards turned out to be the
Victoria Nyanza. In 1860, with another companion (Captain Grant),
Speke returned to the Victoria Nyanza, and traced out its course. On
the north of it they found a great river trending to the north, which
they followed as far as Gondokoro. Here they found Mr. (afterwards Sir
Samuel) Baker, who had travelled up the White Nile to investigate its
source, which they thus proved to be in the Lake Victoria Nyanza.
Baker continued his search, and succeeded in showing that another
source of the Nile was to be found in a smaller lake to the west,
which he named Albert Nyanza. Thus these three Englishmen had combined
to solve the long-sought problem of the sources of the Nile.
The discoveries of the Englishmen were soon followed up by important
political action by the Khedive of Egypt, Ismail Pasha, who claimed
the whole course of the Nile as part of his dominions, and established
stations all along it. This, of course, led to full information about
the basin of the Nile being acquired for geographical purposes, and,
under Sir Samuel Baker and Colonel Gordon, civilisation was for a
time in possession of the Nile from its source to its mouth.
Meanwhile Livingstone had set himself to solve the problem of the
great Lake Tanganyika, and started on his last journey in 1865
for that purpose. He discovered Lakes Moero and Bangweolo, and
the river Nyangoue, also known as Lualaba. So much interest had
been aroused by Livingstone's previous exploits of discovery, that
when nothing had been heard of him for some time, in 1869 Mr. H.
M. Stanley was sent by the proprietors of the _New York Herald_,
for whom he had previously acted as war-correspondent, to find
Livingstone. He started in 1871 from Zanzibar, and before the end
of the year had come across a white man in the heart of the Dark
Continent, and greeted him with the historic query, "Dr. Livingstone,
I presume?" Two years later Livingstone died, a martyr to geographical
and missionary enthusiasm. His work was taken up by Mr. Stanley,
who in 1876 was again despatched to continue Livingstone's work,
and succeeded in crossing the Dark Continent from Zanzibar to the
mouth of the Congo, the whole course of which he traced, proving
that the Lualaba or Nyangoue were merely different names or affluents
of this mighty stream. Stanley's remarkable journey completed the
rough outline of African geography by defining the course of the
fourth great river of the continent.
But Stanley's journey across the Dark Continent was destined to be
the starting-point of an entirely new development of the African
problem. Even while Stanley was on his journey a conference had been
assembled at Brussels by King Leopold, in which an international
committee was formed representing all the nations of Europe, nominally
for the exploration of Africa, but, as it turned out, really for
its partition among the European powers. Within fifteen years of
the assembly of the conference the interior of Africa had been
parcelled out, mainly among the five powers, England, France, Germany,
Portugal, and Belgium. As in the case of America, geographical
discovery was soon followed by political division.
[Illustration: EXPLORATION AND PARTITION OF AFRICA.]
The process began by the carving out of a state covering the whole
of the newly-discovered Congo, nominally independent, but really
forming a colony of Belgium, King Leopold supplying the funds for
that purpose. Mr. Stanley was despatched in 1879 to establish stations
along the lower course of the river, but, to his surprise, he found
that he had been anticipated by M. de Brazza, a Portuguese in the
service of France, who had been despatched on a secret mission to
anticipate the King of the Belgians in seizing the important river
mouth. At the same time Portugal put in claims for possession of
the Congo mouth, and it became clear that international rivalries
would interfere with the foundation of any state on the Congo unless
some definite international arrangement was arrived at. Almost
about the same time, in 1880, Germany began to enter the field
as a colonising power in Africa. In South-West Africa and in the
Cameroons, and somewhat later in Zanzibar, claims were set up on
behalf of Germany by Prince Bismarck which conflicted with English
interests in those districts, and under his presidency a Congress
was held at Berlin in the winter of 1884-85 to determine the rules
of the claims by which Africa could be partitioned. The old historic
claims of Portugal to the coast of Africa, on which she had established
stations both on the west and eastern side, were swept away by the
principle that only effective occupation could furnish a claim of
sovereignty. This great principle will rule henceforth the whole
course of African history; in other words, the good old Border
rule--
"That they should take who have the power.
And they should keep who can."
Almost immediately after the sitting of the Berlin Congress, and
indeed during it, arrangements were come to by which the respective
claims of England and Germany in South-West Africa were definitely
determined. Almost immediately afterwards a similar process had to
be gone through in order to determine the limits of the respective
"spheres of influence," as they began to be called, of Germany and
England in East Africa. A Chartered Company, called the British East
Africa Association, was to administer the land north of Victoria Nyanza
bounded on the west by the Congo Free State, while to the north it
extended till it touched the revolted provinces of Egypt, of which
we shall soon speak. In South Africa a similar Chartered Company,
under the influence of Mr. Cecil Rhodes, practically controlled the
whole country from Cape Colony up to German East Africa and the
Congo Free State.
The winter of 1890-91 was especially productive of agreements of
demarcation. After a considerable amount of friction owing to the
encroachments of Major Serpa Pinto, the limits of Portuguese Angola
on the west coast were then determined, being bounded on the east
by the Congo Free State and British Central Africa; and at the
same time Portuguese East Africa was settled in its relation both
to British Central Africa on the west and German East Africa on
the north. Meanwhile Italy had put in its claims for a share in
the spoil, and the eastern horn of Africa, together with Abyssinia,
fell to its share, though it soon had to drop it, owing to the
unexpected vitality shown by the Abyssinians. In the same year
(1890) agreements between Germany and England settled the line of
demarcation between the Cameroons and Togoland, with the adjoining
British territories; while in August of the same year an attempt
was made to limit the abnormal pretensions of the French along
the Niger, and as far as Lake Chad. Here the British interests
were represented by another Chartered Company, the Royal Niger
Company. Unfortunately the delimitation was not very definite,
not being by river courses or meridians as in other cases, but
merely by territories ruled over by native chiefs, whose boundaries
were not then particularly distinct. This has led to considerable
friction, lasting even up to the present day; and it is only with
reference to the demarcation between England and France in Africa
that any doubt still remains with regard to the western and central
portions of the continent.
Towards the north-east the problem of delimitation had been complicated
by political events, which ultimately led to another great exploring
expedition by Mr. Stanley. The extension of Egypt into the Equatorial
Provinces under Ismail Pasha, due in large measure to the geographical
discoveries of Grant, Speke, and Baker, led to an enormous accumulation
of debt, which caused the country to become bankrupt, Ismail Pasha
to be deposed, and Egypt to be administered jointly by France and
England on behalf of the European bondholders. This caused much
dissatisfaction on the part of the Egyptian officials and army
officers, who were displaced by French and English officials; and
a rebellion broke out under Arabi Pasha. This led to the armed
intervention of England, France having refused to co-operate, and
Egypt was occupied by British troops. The Soudan and Equatorial
Provinces had independently revolted under Mohammedan fanaticism,
and it was determined to relinquish those Egyptian possessions,
which had originally led to bankruptcy. General Gordon was despatched
to relieve the various Egyptian garrisons in the south, but being
without support, ultimately failed, and was killed in 1885. One
of Gordon's lieutenants, a German named Schnitzler, who appears
to have adopted Mohammedanism, and was known as Emin Pasha, was
thus isolated in the midst of Africa near the Albert Nyanza, and
Mr. Stanley was commissioned to attempt his rescue in 1887. He
started to march through the Congo State, and succeeded in traversing
a huge tract of forest country inhabited by diminutive savages,
who probably represented the Pigmies of the ancients. He succeeded
in reaching Emin Pasha, and after much persuasion induced him to
accompany him to Zanzibar, only, however, to return as a German
agent to the Albert Nyanza. Mr. Stanley's journey on this occasion
was not without its political aspects, since he made arrangements
during the eastern part of his journey for securing British influence
for the lands afterwards handed over to the British East Africa
Company.
All these political delimitations were naturally accompanied by
explorations, partly scientific, but mainly political. Major Serpa
Pinto twice crossed Africa in an attempt to connect the Portuguese
settlements on the two coasts. Similarly, Lieutenant Wissmann also
crossed Africa twice, between 1881 and 1887, in the interests of
the Congo State, though he ultimately became an official of his
native country, Germany. Captain Lugard had investigated the region
between the three Lakes Nyanza, and secured it for Great Britain.
In South Africa British claims were successfully and successively
advanced to Bechuana-land, Mashona-land, and Matabele-land, and,
under the leadership of Mr. Cecil Rhodes, a railway and telegraph
were rapidly pushed forward towards the north. Owing to the enterprise
of Mr. (now Sir H. H.) Johnstone, the British possessions were in
1891 pushed up as far as Nyassa-land. By that date, as we have
seen, various treaties with Germany and Portugal had definitely
fixed the contour lines of the different possessions of the three
countries in South Africa. By 1891 the interior of Africa, which
had up to 1880 been practically a blank, could be mapped out almost
with as much accuracy as, at any rate, South America. Europe had
taken possession of Africa.
One of the chief results of this, and formally one of its main
motives, was the abolition of the slave trade. North Africa has
been Mohammedan since the eighth century, and Islam has always
recognised slavery, consequently the Arabs of the north have continued
to make raids upon the negroes of Central Africa, to supply the
Mohammedan countries of West Asia and North Africa with slaves.
The Mahdist rebellion was in part at least a reaction against the
abolition of slavery by Egypt, and the interest of the next few
years will consist in the last stand of the slave merchants in
the Soudan, in Darfur, and in Wadai, east of Lake Chad, where the
only powerful independent Mohammedan Sultanate still exists. England
is closely pressing upon the revolted provinces, along the upper
course of the Nile; while France is attempting, by expeditions
from the French Congo and through Abyssinia, to take possession
of the Upper Nile before England conquers it. The race for the
Upper Nile is at present one of the sources of danger of European
war.
While exploration and conquest have either gone hand in hand, or
succeeded one another very closely, there has been a third motive
that has often led to interesting discoveries, to be followed by
annexation. The mighty hunters of Africa have often brought back,
not alone ivory and skins, but also interesting information of
the interior. The gorgeous narratives of Gordon Cumming in the
"fifties" were one of the causes which led to an interest in African
exploration. Many a lad has had his imagination fired and his career
determined by the exploits of Gordon Cumming, which are now, however,
almost forgotten. Mr. F. C. Selous has in our time surpassed even
Gordon Cumming's exploits, and has besides done excellent work
as guide for the successive expeditions into South Africa.
Thus, practically within our own time, the interior of Africa, where
once geographers, as the poet Butler puts it, "placed elephants instead
of towns," has become known, in its main outlines, by successive
series of intrepid explorers, who have often had to be warriors as
well as scientific men. Whatever the motives that have led the
white man into the centre of the Dark Continent--love of adventure,
scientific curiosity, big game, or patriotism--the result has been
that the continent has become known instead of merely its coast-line.
On the whole, English exploration has been the main means by which
our knowledge of the interior of Africa has been obtained, and
England has been richly rewarded by coming into possession of the
most promising parts of the continent--the Nile valley and temperate
South Africa. But France has also gained a huge extent of country
covering almost the whole of North-West Africa. While much of this
is merely desert, there are caravan routes which tap the basin of
the Niger and conduct its products to Algeria, conquered by France
early in the century, and to Tunis, more recently appropriated. The
West African provinces of France have, at any rate, this advantage,
that they are nearer to the mother-country than any other colony
of a European power; and the result may be that African soldiers
may one of these days fight for France on European soil, just as
the Indian soldiers were imported to Cyprus by Lord Beaconsfield
in 1876. Meanwhile, the result of all this international ambition
has been that Africa in its entirety is now known and accessible
to European civilisation.
[_Authorities:_ Kiepert, _Beiträge zur Entdeckungsgeschichte Afrikas_,
1873; Brown, _The Story of Africa_, 4 vols., 1894; Scott Keltie,
_The Partition of Africa_, 1896.]
CHAPTER XII
THE POLES--FRANKLIN--ROSS--NORDENSKIOLD--NANSEN
Almost the whole of the explorations which we have hitherto described
or referred to had for their motive some practical purpose, whether
to reach the Spice Islands or to hunt big game. Even the excursions
of Davis, Frobisher, Hudson, and Baffin in pursuit of the north-west
passage, and of Barentz and Chancellor in search of the north-east
passage, were really in pursuit of mercantile ends. It is only with
James Cook that the era of purely scientific exploration begins,
though it is fair to qualify this statement by observing that the
Russian expedition under Behring, already referred to, was ordered
by Peter the Great to determine a strictly geographical problem,
though doubtless it had its bearings on Russian ambitions. Behring
and Cook between them, as we have seen, settled the problem of the
relations existing between the ends of the two continents Asia
and America, but what remained still to the north of _terra firma_
within the Arctic Circle? That was the problem which the nineteenth
century set itself to solve, and has very nearly succeeded in the
solution. For the Arctic Circle we now possess maps that only show
blanks over a few thousand square miles.
This knowledge has been gained by slow degrees, and by the exercise
of the most heroic courage and endurance. It is a heroic tate, in
which love of adventure and zeal for science have combated with
and conquered the horrors of an Arctic winter, the six months'
darkness in silence and desolation, the excessive cold, and the
dangers of starvation. It is impossible here to go into any of
the details which rendered the tale of Arctic voyages one of the
most stirring in human history. All we are concerned with here is
the amount of new knowledge brought back by successive expeditions
within the Arctic Circle.
This region of the earth's surface is distinguished by a number
of large islands in the eastern hemisphere, most of which were
discovered at an early date. We have seen how the Norsemen landed
and settled upon Greenland as early as the tenth century. Burrough
sighted Nova Zembla in 1556; in one of the voyages in search of the
north-east passage, though the very name (Russian for Newfoundland)
implies that it had previously been sighted and named by Russian
seamen. Barentz is credited with having sighted Spitzbergen. The
numerous islands to the north of Siberia became known through the
Russian investigations of Discheneff, Behring, and their followers;
while the intricate network of islands to the north of the continent
of North America had been slowly worked out during the search for the
north-west passage. It was indeed in pursuit of this will-of-the-wisp
that most of the discoveries in the Arctic Circle were made, and
a general impetus given to Arctic exploration.
It is with a renewed attempt after this search that the modern history
of Arctic exploration begins. In 1818 two expeditions were sent under
the influence of Sir Joseph Banks to search the north-west passage,
and to attempt to reach the Pole. The former was the objective of
John Ross in the _Isabella_ and W. E. Parry in the _Alexander_,
while in the Polar exploration John Franklin sailed in the _Trent_.
Both expeditions were unsuccessful, though Ross and Parry confirmed
Baffin's discoveries. Notwithstanding this, two expeditions were
sent two years later to attempt the north-west passage, one by land
under Franklin, and the other by sea under Parry. Parry managed
to get half-way across the top of North America, discovered the
archipelago named after him, and reached 114° West longitude, thereby
gaining the prize of £5000 given by the British Parliament for
the first seaman that sailed west of the 110th meridian. He was
brought up, however, by Banks Land, while the strait which, if he
had known it, would have enabled him to complete the north-west
passage, was at that time closed by ice. In two successive voyages,
in 1822 and 1824, Parry increased the detailed knowledge of the
coasts he had already discovered, but failed to reach even as far
westward as he had done on his first voyage. This somewhat discouraged
Government attempts at exploration, and the next expedition, in
1829, was fitted out by Mr. Felix Booth, sheriff of London, who
despatched the paddle steamer _Victory_, commanded by John Ross.
He discovered the land known as Boothia Felix, and his nephew,
James C. Ross, proved that it belonged to the mainland of America,
which he coasted along by land to Cape Franklin, besides determining
the exact position of the North Magnetic Pole at Cape Adelaide, on
Boothia Felix. After passing five years within the Arctic Circle,
Ross and his companions, who had been compelled to abandon the
_Victory_, fell in with a whaler, which brought them home.
We must now revert to Franklin, who, as we have seen, had been
despatched by the Admiralty to outline the north coast of America,
only two points of which had been determined, the embouchures of
the Coppermine and the Mackenzie, discovered respectively by Hearne
and Mackenzie. It was not till 1821 that Franklin was able to start
out from the mouth of the Coppermine eastward in two canoes, by
which he coasted along till he came to the point named by him Point
Turn-again. By that time only three days' stores of pemmican remained,
and it was only with the greatest difficulty, and by subsisting
on lichens and scraps of roasted leather, that they managed to
return to their base of operations at Fort Enterprise. Four years
later, in 1825, Franklin set out on another exploring expedition
with the same object, starting this time from the mouth of the
Mackenzie river, and despatching one of his companions, Richardson,
to connect the coast between the Mackenzie and the Coppermine; while
he himself proceeded westward to meet the Blossom, which, under
Captain Beechey, had been despatched to Behring Strait to bring his
party back. Richardson was entirely successful in examining the
coast-line between the Mackenzie and the Coppermine; but Beechey,
though he succeeded in rounding Icy Cape and tracing the coast as
far as Point Barrow, did not come up to Franklin, who had only
got within 160 miles at Return Reef. These 160 miles, as well as
the 222 miles intervening between Cape Turn-again, Franklin's
easternmost point by land, and Cape Franklin, J. C. Ross's most
westerly point, were afterwards filled in by T. Simpson in 1837,
after a coasting voyage in boats of 1408 miles, which stands as a
record even to this day. Meanwhile the Great Fish River had been
discovered and followed to its mouth by C. J. Back in 1833. During
the voyage down the river, an oar broke while the boat was shooting
a rapid, and one of the party commenced praying in a loud voice;
whereupon the leader called out: "Is this a time for praying? Pull
your starboard oar!"
Meanwhile, interest had been excited rather more towards the South
Pole, and the land of which Cook had found traces in his search
for the fabled Australian continent surrounding it. He had reached
as far south as 71.10°, when he was brought up by the great ice
barrier. In 1820-23 Weddell visited the South Shetlands, south of
Cape Horn, and found an active volcano, even amidst the extreme
cold of that district. He reached as far south as 74°, but failed
to come across land in that district. In 1839 Bellany discovered
the islands named after him, with a volcano twelve thousand feet
high, and another still active on Buckle Island. In 1839 a French
expedition under Dumont d'Urville again visited and explored the
South Shetlands; while, in the following year, Captain Wilkes, of
the United States navy, discovered the land named after him. But
the most remarkable discovery made in Antarctica was that of Sir
J. C. Ross, who had been sent by the Admiralty in 1840 to identify
the South Magnetic Pole, as we have seen he had discovered that of
the north. With the two ships _Erebus_ and _Terror_ he discovered
Victoria Land and the two active volcanoes named after his ships,
and pouring forth flaming lava, amidst the snow. In January 1842
he reached farthest south, 76°. Since his time little has been
attempted in the south, though in the winter of 1894-95 C. E.
Borchgrevink again visited Victoria Land.
[Illustration: NORTH POLAR REGION--WESTERN HALF.]
On the return of the _Erebus_ and _Terror_ from the South Seas the
government placed these two vessels at the disposal of Franklin
(who had been knighted for his previous discoveries), and on the
26th of May 1845 he started with one hundred and twenty-nine souls
on board the two vessels, which were provisioned up to July 1848.
They were last seen by a whaler on the 26th July of the former
year waiting to pass into Lancaster Sound. After penetrating as
far north as 77°, through Wellington Channel, Franklin was obliged
to winter upon Beechey Island, and in the following year (September
1846) his two ships were beset in Victoria Strait, about twelve
miles from King William Land. Curiously enough, in the following
year (1847) J. Rae had been despatched by land from Cape Repulse
in Hudson's Bay, and had coasted along the east coast of Boothia,
thus connecting Ross's and Franklin's coast journeys with Hudson's
Bay. On 18th April 1847 Rae had reached a point on Boothia less
than 150 miles from Franklin on the other side of it. Less than
two months later, on the 11th June, Franklin died on the _Erebus_.
His ships were only provisioned to July 1848, and remained still
beset throughout the whole of 1847. Crozier, upon whom the command
devolved, left the ship with one hundred and five survivors to
try and reach Back's Fish River. They struggled along the west
coast of King William Land, but failed to reach their destination;
disease, and even starvation, gradually lessened their numbers.
An old Eskimo woman, who had watched the melancholy procession,
afterwards told M'Clintock they fell down and died as they walked.
By this time considerable anxiety had been roused by the absence of
any news from Franklin's party. Richardson and Rae were despatched
by land in 1848, while two ships were sent on the attempt to reach
Franklin through Behring Strait, and two others, the _Investigator_
and the _Enterprise_, under J. C. Ross, through Baffin Bay. Rae
reached the east coast of Victoria Land, and arrived within fifty
miles of the spot where Franklin's two ships had been abandoned;
but it was not till his second expedition by land, which started
in 1853, that he obtained any news. After wintering at Lady Pelly
Bay, on the 20th April 1854 Rae met a young Eskimo, who told him
that four years previously forty white men had been seen dragging
a boat to the south on the west shore of King William Land, and a
few months later the bodies of thirty of these men had been found
by the Eskimo, who produced silver with the Franklin crest to confirm
the truth of their statement. Further searches by land were continued
up to as late as 1879, when Lieutenant F. Schwatka, of the United
States army, discovered several of the graves and skeletons of
the Franklin expedition.
Neither of the two attempts by sea from the Atlantic or from the
Pacific base, in 1848, having succeeded in gaining any news, the
_Enterprise_ and the _Investigator_, which had previously attempted
to reach Franklin from the east, were despatched in 1850, under
Captain R. Collinson and Captain M'Clure; to attempt the search from
the west through Behring Strait. M'Clure, in the _Investigator_,
did not wait for Collinson, as he had been directed, but pushed on
and discovered Banks Land, and became beset in the ice in Prince of
Wales Strait. In the winter of 1850-51 he endeavoured unsuccessfully
to work his way from this strait into Parry Sound, but in August
and September 1851 managed to coast round Banks Land to its most
north-westerly point, and then succeeded in passing through the
strait named after M'Clure, and reached Barrow Strait, thus performing
for the first time the north-west passage, though it was not till
1853 that the _Investigator_ was abandoned. Collinson, in the
_Enterprise_, followed M'Clure closely, though never reaching him,
and attempting to round Prince Albert Land by the south through
Dolphin Strait, reached Cambridge Bay at the nearest point by ship
of all the Franklin expeditions. He had to return westward, and
only reached England in 1855, after an absence of five years and
four months.
From the east no less than ten vessels had attempted the Franklin
sea search in 1851, comprising two Admiralty expeditions, one private
English one, an American combined government and private party,
together with a ship put in commission by the wifely devotion of
Lady Franklin. These all attempted the search of Lancaster Sound,
where Franklin had last been seen, and they only succeeded in finding
three graves of men who had died at an early stage, and had been
buried on Beechey Island. Another set of four vessels were despatched
under Sir Edward Belcher in 1852, who were fortunate enough to
reach M'Clure in the _Investigator_ in the following year, and
enabled him to complete the north-west passage, for which he gained
the reward of £10,000 offered by Parliament in 1763. But Belcher was
obliged to abandon most of his vessels, one of which, the _Resolute_,
drifted over a thousand miles, and having been recovered by an
American whaler, was refitted by the United States and presented
to the queen and people of Great Britain.
Notwithstanding all these efforts, the Franklin remains have not
yet been discovered, though Dr. Rae, as we have seen, had practically
ascertained their terrible fate. Lady Franklin, however, was not
satisfied with this vague information. She was determined to fit
out still another expedition, though already over £35,000 had been
spent by private means, mostly from her own personal fortune; and
in 1857 the steam yacht _Fox_ was despatched under M'Clintock,
who had already shown himself the most capable master of sledge
work. He erected a monument to the Franklin expedition on Beechey
Island in 1858, and then following Peel Sound, he made inquiries
of the natives throughout the winter of 1858-59. This led him to
search King William Land, where, on the 25th May, he came across
a bleached human skeleton lying on its face, showing that the man
had died as he walked. Meanwhile, Hobson, one of his companions,
discovered a record of the Franklin expedition, stating briefly its
history between 1845 and 1848; and with this definite information
of the fate of the Franklin expedition M'Clintock returned to England
in 1859, having succeeded in solving the problem of Franklin's fate,
while exploring over 800 miles of coast-line in the neighbourhood
of King William Land.
The result of the various Franklin expeditions had thus been to
map out the intricate network of islands dotted over the north of
North America. None of these, however, reached much farther north
than 75°.
Only Smith Sound promised to lead north of the 80th parallel. This
had been discovered as early as 1616 by Baffin, whose farthest
north was only exceeded by forty miles, in 1852, by Inglefield in
the _Isabel_, one of the ships despatched in search of Franklin.
He was followed up by Kane in the _Advance_, fitted out in 1853 by
the munificence of two American citizens, Grinnell and Peabody. Kane
worked his way right through Smith Sound and Robeson Channel into
the sea named after him. For two years he continued investigating
Grinnell Land and the adjacent shores of Greenland. Subsequent
investigations by Hayes in 1860, and Hall ten years later, kept
alive the interest in Smith Sound and its neighbourhood; and in
1873 three ships were despatched under Captain (afterwards Sir
George) Nares, who nearly completed the survey of Grinnell Land,
and one of his lieutenants, Pelham Aldrich, succeeded in reaching
82.48° N. About the same time, an Austrian expedition under Payer
and Weyprecht explored the highest known land, much to the east,
named by them Franz Josef Land, after the Austrian Emperor.
[Illustration: NORTH POLAR REGION--EASTERN HALF.]
Simultaneously interest in the northern regions was aroused by
the successful exploit of the north-east passage by Professor
(afterwards Baron) Nordenskiold, who had made seven or eight voyages
in Arctic regions between 1858 and 1870. He first established the
possibility of passing from Norway to the mouth of the Yenesei
in the summer, making two journeys in 1875-76. These have since
been followed up for commercial purposes by Captain Wiggins, who
has frequently passed from England to the mouth of the Yenesei in
a merchant vessel. As Siberia develops there can be little doubt
that this route will become of increasing commercial importance.
Professor Nordenskiold, however, encouraged by his easy passage
to the Yenesei, determined to try to get round into Behring Strait
from that point, and in 1878 he started in the _Vega_, accompanied
by the _Lena_, and a collier to supply them with coal. On the 19th
August they passed Cape Chelyuskin, the most northerly point of the
Old World. From here the _Lena_ appropriately turned its course
to the mouth of its namesake, while the _Vega_ proceeded on her
course, reaching on the 12th September Cape North, within 120 miles
of Behring Strait; this cape Cook had reached from the east in 1778.
Unfortunately the ice became packed so closely that they could
not proceed farther, and they had to remain in this tantalising
condition for no less than ten months. On the 18th July 1879 the
ice broke up, and two days later the _Vega_ rounded East Cape with
flying colours, saluting the easternmost coast of Asia in honour
of the completion of the north-east passage. Baron Nordenskiold
has since enjoyed a well-earned leisure from his arduous labours
in the north by studying and publishing the history of early
cartography, on which he has issued two valuable atlases, containing
fac-similes of the maps and charts of the Middle Ages.
General interest thus re-aroused in Arctic exploration brought about
a united effort of all the civilised nations to investigate the
conditions of the Polar regions. An international Polar Conference
was held at Hamburg in 1879, at which it was determined to surround
the North Pole for the years 1882-83 by stations of scientific
observation, intended to study the conditions of the Polar Ocean. No
less than fifteen expeditions were sent forth; some to the Antarctic
regions, but most of them round the North Pole. Their object was
more to subserve the interest of physical geography than to promote
the interest of geographical discovery; but one of the expeditions,
that of the United States under Lieutenant A. W. Greely, again took
up the study of Smith Sound and its outlets, and one of his men,
Lieutenant Lockwood, succeeded in reaching 83.24° N., within 450
miles of the Pole, and up to that time the farthest north reached
by any human being. The Greely expedition also succeeded in showing
that Greenland was not so much ice-capped as ice-surrounded.
Hitherto the universal method by which discoveries had been made
in the Polar regions was to establish a base at which sufficient
food was cached, then to push in any required direction as far as
possible, leaving successive caches to be returned to when provisions
fell short on the forward journey. But in 1888, Dr. Fridjof Nansen
determined on a bolder method of investigating the interior of
Greenland. He was deposited upon the east coast, where there were
no inhabitants, and started to cross Greenland, his life depending
upon the success of his journey, since he left no reserves in the
rear and it would be useless to return. He succeeded brilliantly
in his attempt, and his exploit was followed up by two successive
attempts of Lieutenant Peary in 1892-95, who succeeded in crossing
Greenland at much higher latitude even than Nansen.
[Illustration: CLIMBING THE NORTH POLE]
The success of his bold plan encouraged Dr. Nansen to attempt an
even bolder one. He had become convinced, from the investigations
conducted by the international Polar observations of 1882-83, that
there was a continuous drift of the ice across the Arctic Ocean from
the north-east shore of Siberia. He was confirmed in this opinion, by
the fact that debris from the _Jeannette_, a ship abandoned in 1881
off the Siberian coast, drifted across to the east coast of Greenland
by 1884. He had a vessel built for him, the now-renowned _Fram_,
especially intended to resist the pressure of the ice. Hitherto it
had been the chief aim of Arctic explorations to avoid besetment,
and to try and creep round the land shores. Dr. Nansen was convinced
that he could best attain his ends by boldly disregarding these
canons and trusting to the drift of the ice to carry him near to
the Pole. He reckoned that the drift would take some three years,
and provisioned the _Fram_ for five. The results of his venturous
voyage confirmed in almost every particular his remarkable plan,
though it was much scouted in many quarters when first announced.
The drift of the ice carried him across the Polar Sea within the
three years he had fixed upon for the probable duration of his
journey; but finding that the drift would not carry him far enough
north, he left the _Fram_ with a companion, and advanced straight
towards the Pole, reaching in April 1895 farthest north, 86.14°,
within nearly 200 miles of the Pole. On his return journey he was
lucky enough to come across Mr. F. Jackson, who in the _Windward_
had established himself in 1894 in Franz Josef Land. The rencontre
of the two intrepid explorers forms an apt parallel of the celebrated
encounter of Stanley and Livingstone, amidst entirely opposite
conditions of climate.
Nansen's voyage is for the present the final achievement of Arctic
exploration, but his Greenland method of deserting his base has
been followed by Andrée, who in the autumn of 1897 started in a
balloon for the Pole, provisioned for a long stay in the Arctic
regions. Nothing has been heard of him for the last twelve months,
but after the example of Dr. Nansen there is no reason to fear
just at present for his safety, and the present year may possibly
see his return after a successful carrying out of one of the great
aims of geographical discovery. It is curious that the attention of
the world should be at the present moment directed to the Arctic
regions for the two most opposite motives that can be named, lust
for gold and the thirst for knowledge and honour.
[_Authorities:_ Greely, _Handbook of Arctic Discoveries_, 1896.]
ANNALS OF DISCOVERY
B.C.
_cir._ 600. Marseilles founded.
570. Anaximander of Miletus invents maps and the gnomon.
501. Hecatæus of Miletus writes the first geography.
450. Himilco the Carthaginian said to have visited Britain.
446. Herodotus describes Egypt and Scythia.
_cir._ 450. Hanno the Carthaginian sails down the west coast of
Africa as far as Sierra Leone.
_cir._ 333. Pytheas visits Britain and the Low Countries.
332. Alexander conquers Persia and visits India.
330. Nearchus sails from the Indus to the Arabian Gulf.
_cir._ 300. Megasthenes describes the Punjab.
_cir._ 200. Eratosthenes founds scientific geography.
100. Marinus of Tyre, founder of mathematical geography.
60-54. Cæsar conquers Gaul; visits Britain, Switzerland, and Germany.
20. Strabo describes the Roman Empire. First mention of Thule
and Ireland.
_bef._ 12. Agrippa compiles a _Mappa Mundi_, the foundation of
all succeeding ones.
A.D.
150. Ptolemy publishes his geography.
230. The Peutinger Table pictures the Roman roads.
400-14. Fa-hien travels through and describes Afghanistan and India.
499. Hoei-Sin said to have visited the kingdom of Fu-sang, 20,000
furlongs east of China (identified by some with California).
518-21. Hoei-Sing and Sung-Yun visit and describe the Pamirs and the
Punjab.
540. Cosmas Indicopleustes visits India, and combats the sphericity
of the globe.
629-46. Hiouen-Tshang travels through Turkestan, Afghanistan, India,
and the Pamirs.
671-95. I-tsing travels through and describes Java, Sumatra, and India.
776. The _Mappa Mundi_ of Beatus.
851-916. Suláimán and Abu Zaid visit China.
861. Naddod discovers Iceland.
884. Ibn Khordadbeh describes the trade routes between Europe and
Asia.
_cir._ 890. Wulfstan and athere sail to the Baltic and the North Cape.
_cir._ 900. Gunbiörn discovers Greenland.
912-30. The geographer Mas'udi describes the lands of Islam, from
Spain to Further India, in his "Meadows of Gold."
921. Ahmed Ibn Fozlan describes the Russians.
969. Ibn Haukal composes his book on Ways.
985. Eric the Red colonises Greenland.
_cir._1000. Lyef, son of Eric the Red, discovers Newfoundland
(Helluland), Nova Scotia (Markland), and the mainland of
North America (Vinland).
1111. Earliest use of the water-compass by Chinese.
1154. Edrisi, geographer to King Roger of Sicily, produces his
geography.
1159-73. Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela visited the Persian Gulf; reported
on India.
_cir._1180. The compass first mentioned by Alexander Neckam.
1255. William Ruysbroek (Rubruquis), a Fleming, visits Karakorum.
1260-71. The brothers Nicolo and Maffeo Polo, father and uncle of Marco
Polo, make their first trading venture through Central Asia.
1271-95. They make their second journey, accompanied by Marco Polo;
and about 1275 arrived at the Court of Kublai Khan in Shangfu,
whence Marco Polo was entrusted with several missions to
Cochin China, Khanbalig (Pekin), and the Indian Seas.
1280. Hereford map of Richard of Haldingham.
1284. The Ebstorf _Mappa Mundi_.
_bef._1290. The normal Portulano compiled in Barcelona.
1292. Friar John of Monte Corvino, travels in India, and
afterwards becomes Archbishop of Pekin.
1325-78. Ibn Batuta, an Arab of Tangier, after performing the Mecca
pilgrimage through N. Africa, visits Syria, Quiloa (E. Africa),
Ormuz, S. Russia, Bulgaria, Khiva, Candahar, and attached
himself to the Court of Delhi, 1334-42, whence he was
despatched on an embassy to China. After his return he visited
Timbuctoo.
1316-30. Odorico di Pordenone, a Minorite friar, travelled through
India, by way of Persia, Bombay, and Surat, to Malabar, the
Coromandel coast, and thence to China and Tibet.
1320. Flavio Gioja of Amalfi invents the compass box and card.
1312-31. Abulfeda composes his geography.
1327-72. Sir John Mandeville said to have written his travels in India.
1328. Friar Jordanus of Severac. Bishop of Quilon.
1328-49. John de Marignolli, a Franciscan friar, made a mission to
China, visited Quilon in 1347, and made a pilgrimage to the
shrine of St. Thomas in India in 1349.
1339. Angelico Dulcert of Majorca draws a Portulano.
1351. The Medicean Portulano compiled.
1375. Cresquez, the Jew, of Majorca, improves Dulcert's Portulano
(Catalan map).
_cir._1400. Jehan Bethencourt re-discovers the Canaries.
1419. Prince Henry the Navigator establishes a geographical seminary
at Sagres (died 1460).
1419-40. Nicolo Conti, a noble Venetian, travelled throughout Southern
India and along the Bombay coast.
1420. Zarco discovers Madeira.
1432. Gonsalo Cabral re-discovers the Azores.
1442. Nuño Tristão reaches Cape de Verde.
1442-44. Abd-ur-Razzak, during an embassy to India, visited Calicut,
Mangalore, and Vijayanagar.
1457. Fra Mauro's map.
1462. Pedro de Cintra reaches Sierra Leone.
1468-74. Athanasius Nikitin, a Russian, travelled from the Volga,
through Central Asia and Persia, to Gujerat, Cambay, and Chaul,
whence he proceeded inland to Bidar and Golconda.
1471. Fernando Poo discovers his island.
1471. Pedro d'Escobar crosses the line.
1474. Toscanelli's map (foundation of Behaim globe and Columbus'
guide).
1478. Second printed edition of Ptolemy, with twenty-seven
maps--practically the first atlas.
1484. Diego Cam discovers the Congo.
1486. Bartholomew Diaz rounds the Cape of Good Hope.
1487. Pedro de Covilham visits Ormuz, Goa, and Malabar, and
afterwards settled in Abyssinia.
1492. Martin Behaim makes his globe.
1492. 6th September. Columbus starts from the Canaries.
1492. 12th October. Columbus lands at San Salvador (Watling Island).
1493. 3rd May. Bull of partition between Spain and Portugal issued
by Pope Alexander VI.
1493. September. Columbus on his second voyage discovers Jamaica.
1494-99. Hieronimo di Santo Stefano, a Genoese, visited Malabar and
the Coromandel coast, Ceylon and Pegu.
1497. Vasco da Gama rounds the Cape, sees Natal (Christmas Day) and
Mozambique, lands at Zanzibar, and crosses to Calicut.
1497. John Cabot re-discovers Newfoundland.
1498. Columbus on his third voyage discovers Trinidad and the
Orinoco.
1499. Amerigo Vespucci discovers Venezuela.
1499. Pinzon discovers mouth of Amazon, and doubles Cape St. Roque.
1500. Pedro Cabral discovers Brazil on his way to Calicut.
1500. First map of the New World, by Juan de la Cosa.
1500. Corte Real lands at mouth of St. Lawrence, and re-discovers
Labrador.
1501. Vespucci coasts down S. America and proves that it is a New
World.
1501. Tristan d'Acunha discovers his island.
1501. Juan di Nova discovers the island of Ascension.
1502. Bermudez discovers his islands.
1502-4. Columbus on his fourth voyage explores Honduras.
1503-8. Travels of Ludovico di Varthema in Further India.
1505. Mascarenhas discovers the islands of Bourbon and Mauritius.
1507. Martin Waldseemüller proposes to call the New World America
in his _Cosmographia_.
1509. Malacca visited by Lopes di Sequira.
1512. Molucca, or Spice Islands, visited by Francisco Serrão.
1513. Strasburg Ptolemy contains twenty new maps by Waldseemüller,
forming the first modern atlas.
1513. Ponce de Leon discovers Florida.
1513. Vasco Nuñez de Balbao crosses the Isthmus of Panama, and sees
the Pacific.
1517. Sebastian Cabot said to have discovered Hudson's Bay.
1517. Juan Diaz de Solis discovers the Rio de la Plata, and is
murdered on the island of Martin Garcia.
1518. Grijalva discovers Mexico.
1519. Fernando Cortez conquers Mexico.
1519. Fernando Magellan starts on the circumnavigation of the globe.
1519. Guray explores north coast of Gulf of Mexico.
1520. Schoner's second globe.
1520. Magellan sees Monte Video, discovers Patagonia and Tierra del
Fuego, and traverses the Pacific.
1520-26. Alvarez explores the Soudan.
1521. Magellan discovers the Ladrones (Marianas), and is killed on
the Philippines.
1522. Magellan's ship _Victoria_, under Sebastian del Cano,
reaches Spain, having circumnavigated the globe in three years.
1524. Verazzano, on behalf of the French King, coasts from Cape Fear
to New Hampshire.
1527. Saavedra sails from west coast of Mexico to the Moluccas.
1529. Line of demarcation between Spanish and Portuguese fixed at
17° east of Moluccas.
1531. Francisco Pizarro conquers Peru.
1532. Cortez visits California.
1534. Jacques Cartier explores the gull and river of St. Lawrence.
1535. Diego d'Almagro conquers Chili.
1536. Gonsalo Pizarro passes the Andes.
1537-58. Ferdinand Mendez Pinto travels to Abyssinia, India, the Malay
Archipelago, China, and Japan.
1538. Gerhardt Mercator begins his career as geographer. (Globe,
1541; projection, 1569; died 1594; atlas, 1595).
1539. Francesco de Ulloa explores the Gulf of California.
1541. Orellana sails down the Amazon.
1542. Ruy Lopez de Villalobos discovers New Philippines, Garden
Islands, and Pelew Islands, and takes possession of the
Philippines for Spain.
1542. Cabrillo advances as far as Cape Mendocino.
1542. Japan first visited by Antonio de Mota.
1542. Gaetano sees the Sandwich Islands.
1543. Ortez de Retis discovers New Guinea.
1544. Sebastian Munster's _Cosmographia_.
1549. Bareto and Homera explore the lower Zambesi.
1553. Sir Hugh Willoughby attempts the North-East Passage past North
Cape, and sights Novaya Zemlya.
1554. Richard Chancellor, Willoughby's pilot, reaches Archangel, and
travels overland to Moscow.
1556-72. Antonio Laperis' atlas published at Rome.
1558. Anthony Jenkinson travels from Moscow to Bokhara.
1567. Alvaro Mendaña discovers Solomon Islands.
1572. Juan Fernandez discovers his island, and St. Felix and St.
Ambrose Islands.
1573. Abraham Ortelius' _Teatrum Orbis Terrarum_.
1576. Martin Frobisher discovers his bay.
1577-79. Francis Drake circumnavigates the globe, and explores the west
coast of North America.
1579. Yermak Timovief seizes Sibir on the Irtish.
1580. Dutch settle in Guiana.
1586. John Davis sails through his strait, and reaches lat. 72° N.
1590. Battel visits the lower Congo.
1592. The Molyneux globe.
1592. Juan de Fuca imagines he has discovered an immense sea in the
north-west of North America.
1596. William Barentz discovers Spitzbergen, and reaches lat. 80° N.
1596. Payz traverses the Horn of Africa, and visits the source of
the Blue Nile.
1598. Mendaña discovers Marquesas Islands.
1598. Hakluyt publishes his _Principal Navigations_.
1599. Houtman reaches Achin, in Sumatra.
1603. Stephen Bennett re-discovers Cherry Island, 74.13° N.
1605. Louis Vaes de Torres discovers his strait.
1606. Quiros discovers Tahiti and north-east coast of Australia.
1608. Champlain discovers Lake Ontario.
1609. Henry Hudson discovers his river.
1610. Hudson passes through his strait into his bay.
1611. Jan Mayen discovers his island.
1615. Lemaire rounds Cape Horn (Hoorn), and sees New Britain.
1616. Dirk Hartog coasts West Australia to 27° S.
1616. Baffin discovers his bay.
1618. George Thompson, a Barbary merchant, sails up the Gambia.
1619. Edel and Houtman coast Western Australia to 32-1/2° S.
(Edel's Land).
1622. Dutch ship _Leeuwin_ reaches south-west cape of Australia.
1623. Lobo explores Abyssinia.
1627. Peter Nuyts discovers his archipelago.
1630. First meridian of longitude fixed at Ferro, in the Canary
Islands.
1631. Fox explores Hudson's Bay.
1638. W. J. Blaeu's _Atlas_.
1639. Kupiloff crosses Siberia to the east coast.
1642. Abel Jansen Tasman discovers Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) and
Staaten Land (New Zealand).
1642. Wasilei Pojarkof traces the course of the Amur.
1643. Hendrik Brouwer identifies New Zealand.
1643. Tasman discovers Fiji.
1645. Michael Staduchin reaches the Kolima.
1645. Nicolas Sanson's atlas.
1645. Italian Capuchin Mission explores the lower Congo.
1648. The Cossack Dishinef sails between Asia and America.
1650. Staduchin reaches the Anadir, and meets Dishinef.
1682. La Salle descends the Mississippi.
1696. Russians reach Kamtschatka.
1699. Dampier discovers his strait.
1700. Delisle's maps.
1701. Sinpopoff describes the land of the Tschutkis.
1718. Jesuit map of China and East Asia published by the Emperor
Kang-hi.
1721. Hans Egédé re-settles Greenland.
1731. Hadley invented the sextant.
1731. Krupishef sails round Kamtschatka.
1731. Paulutski travels round the north-east corner of Siberia.
1735-37. Maupertuis measures an arc of the meridian.
1739-44. Lord George Anson circumnavigates the globe.
1740. Varenne de la Véranderye discovers the Rocky Mountains.
1741. Behring discovers his strait.
1742. Chelyuskin discovers his cape.
1743-44. La Condamine explores the Amazon.
1745-61. Bourguignon d'Anville produces his maps.
1761-67. Carsten Niebuhr surveys Arabia.
1764. John Byron surveys the Falkland Islands.
1765. Harrison perfects the chronometer.
1767. First appearance of the _Nautical Almanac_.
1768. Carteret discovers Pitcairn Island, and sails through St.
George's Channel, between New Britain and New Ireland.
1768-71. Cook's first voyage; discovers New Zealand and east coast
of Australia; passes through Torres Strait.
1769-71. Hearne traces river Coppermine.
1769-71. James Bruce re-discovers the source of the Blue Nile in
Abyssinia.
1770. Liakhoff discovers the New Siberian Islands.
1771-72. Pallas surveys West and South Siberia.
1776-79. Cook's third voyage; surveys North-West Passage; discovers
Owhyhee (Hawaii), where he was killed.
1785-88. La Pérouse surveys north-east coast of Asia and Japan,
discovers Saghalien, and completes delimitation of the ocean.
1785-94. Billings surveys East Siberia.
1787-88. Lesseps surveys Kamtschatka and crosses the Old World from
east to west.
1788. The African Association founded.
1789-93. Mackenzie discovers his river, and first crosses North America.
1792. Vancouver explores his island.
1793. Browne reaches Darfur, and reports the existence of the White
Nile.
1796. Mungo Park reaches the Niger.
1796. Lacerda explores Mozambique.
1797. Bass discovers his strait.
1799-1804. Alexander von Humboldt explores South America.
1800-4. Lewis and Clarke explore the basin of the Missouri.
1801-4. Flinders coasts south coast of Australia.
1805-7. Pike explores the country between the sources of the
Mississippi and the Red River.
1810-29. Malte-Brun publishes his _Géographic Universelle_.
1814. Evans discovers Lachlan and Macquarie rivers.
1816. Captain Smith discovers South Shetland Isles.
1817-20. Spix and Martius explore Brazil.
1817. First edition of Stieler's atlas.
1817-22. Captain King maps the coast-line of Australia.
1819-22. Franklin, Back, and Richardson attempt the North-West Passage
by land.
1819. Parry discovers Lancaster Strait and reaches 114° W.
1820-23. Wrangel discovers his land.
1821. Bellinghausen discovers Peter Island, the most southerly land
then known.
1822. Denham and Clapperton discover Lake Tchad, and visit Sokoto.
1822-23. Scoresby explores the coast of East Greenland.
1823. Weddell reaches 74.15° S.
1826. Major Laing is murdered at Timbuctoo.
1827. Parry reaches 82.45° N.
1827. Réné Caillié visits Timbuctoo.
1828-31. Captain Sturt traces the Darling and the Murray.
1829-33. Ross attempts the North-West Passage; discovers Boothia Felix.
1830. Royal Geographical Society founded, and next year united with
the African Association.
1831-35. Schomburgk explores Guiana.
1831. Captain Biscoe discovers Enderby Land.
1833. Back discovers Great Fish River.
1835-49. Junghuhn explores Java.
1837. T. Simpson coasts along the north mainland of North America
1277 miles.
1838-40. Wood explores the sources of the Oxus.
1838-40. Dumont d'Urvilie discovers Louis-Philippe Land and Adélie Land.
1839. Balleny discovers his island.
1839. Count Strzelecki discovers Gipps' Land.
1840. Captain Sturt travels in Central Australia.
1840-42. James Ross reaches 78.10° S.; discovers Victoria Land, and
the volcanoes Erebus and Terror.
1841. Eyre traverses south of Western Australia.
1842-62. E. F. Jomard's _Monuments de la Géographie_ published.
1843-47. Count Castelnau traces the source of the Paraguay.
1844. Leichhardt explores Southern Australia.
1845. Huc explores Tibet.
1845. Petermann's _Mittheilungen_ first published.
1845-47. Franklin's last voyage.
1846. First edition of K. v. Spruner's _Historische Handatlas_.
1847. J. Rae connects Hudson's Bay with east coast of Boothia.
1848. Leichhardt attempts to traverse Australia, and disappears.
1849-56. Livingstone traces the Zambesi and crosses South Africa.
1850-54. M'Clure succeeds in the North-West Passage.
1850-55. Barth explores the Soudan.
1853. Dr. Kane explores Smith's Sound.
1854. Rae hears news of the Franklin expedition from the Eskimo.
1854-65. Faidherbe explores Senegambia.
1856-57. The brothers Schlagintweit cross the Himalayas, Tibet, and
Kuen Lun.
1856-59. Du Chaillu travels in Central Africa.
1857-59. M'Clintock discovers remains of the Franklin expedition, and
explores King William Land.
1858. Burton and Speke discover Lake Tanganyika, and Speke sees
Lake Victoria Nyanza.
1858-64. Livingstone traces Lake Nyassa.
1859. Valikhanoft reaches Kashgar.
1860. Burke travels from Victoria to Carpentaria.
1860. Grant and Speke, returning from Lake Victoria Nyanza, meet
Baker coming up the Nile.
1861-62. M'Douall Stuart traverses Australia from south to north.
1863. W. G. Palgrave explores Central and Eastern Arabia.
1864. Baker discovers Lake Albert Nyanza.
1868. Nordenskiold reaches his highest point in Greenland, 81.42°.
1868-71. Ney Elias traverses Mid-China.
1868-74. John Forrest penetrates from Western to Central Australia.
1869-71. Schweinfurth explores the Southern Soudan.
1869-74. Nachtigall explores east of Tchad.
1870. Fedchenko discovers Transalai, north of Pamir.
1870. Douglas Forsyth reaches Yarkand.
1871-88. The four explorations of Western China by Prjevalsky.
1872-73. Payer and Weiprecht discover Franz Josef Land.
1872-76. H.M.S. _Challenger_ examines the bed of the ocean.
1872-76. Ernest Giles traverses North-West Australia.
1873. Colonel Warburton traverses Australia from east to west.
1873. Livingstone discovers Lake Moero.
1874-75. Lieut. Cameron crosses equatorial Africa.
1875-94. Élisée Reclus publishes his _Géographie Universelle._
1876. Albert Markham reaches 83.20° N. on the Nares expedition.
1876-77. Stanley traces the course of the Congo.
1878-82. The Pundit Krishna traces the course of the Yangtse, Pekong,
and Brahmaputra.
1878-79. Nordenskiold solves the North-East Passage along the north
coast of Siberia.
1878-84. Joseph Thomson explores East-Central Africa.
1878-85. Serpa Pinto twice crosses Africa.
1879-82. The _Jeannette_ passes through Behring Strait to the
mouth of the Lena.
1880. Leigh Smith surveys south coast of Franz Josef Land.
1880-82. Bonvalot traverses the Pamirs.
1881-87. Wissmann twice crosses Africa, and discovers the left affluents
of the Congo.
1883. Lockwood, on the Greely Mission, reaches 83.23° N., north cape
of Greenland.
1886. Francis Garnier explores the course of the Mekong.
1887. Younghusband travels from Pekin to Kashmir.
1887-89. Stanley conducts the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition across
Africa, and discovers the Pigmies, and the Mountains of the
Moon.
1888. F. Nansen crosses Greenland from east to west.
1888-89. Captain Binger traces the bend of the Niger.
1889. The brothers Grjmailo explore Chinese Turkestan.
1889-90. Bonvalot and Prince Henri d'Orléans traverse Tibet.
1890. Selous and Jameson explore Mashonaland.
1890. Sir W. Macgregor crosses New Guinea.
1891-92. Monteil crosses from Senegal to Tripoli.
1892. Peary proves Greenland an island.
1893. Mr. and Mrs. Littledale travel across Central Asia.
1893-97. Dr. Sven Hedin explores Chinese Turkestan, Tibet, and Mongolia.
1893-97. Dr. Nansen is carried across the Arctic Ocean in the
_Fram_, and advances farthest north (86.14° N.).
1894-95. C. E. Borchgrevink visits Antarctica.
1894-96. Jackson-Harmsworth expedition in Arctic lands.
1896. Captain Bottego explores Somaliland.
1896. Donaldson Smith traces Lake Rudolph.
1896. Prince Henri D'Orleans travels from Tonkin to Moru.
1897. Captain Foa traverses South Africa from S. to N.
1897. D. Carnegie crosses W. Australia from S. to N.
EUROPE.
GREAT BRITAIN.--B.C. 450. Himilco. _Circa_ 333. Pytheas. 60-54.
Cæsar.
FRANCE.--B.C. _circa_ 600. Marseilles founded. 57. Cæsar.
RUSSIA.--A.D. 1554. Richard Chancellor.
BALTIC.--A.D. 890. Wulfstan and Othere.
ICELAND.--A.D. 861. Naddod.
ASIA.
INDIA.--B.C. 332. Alexander. 330. Nearchus. _Circa_ 300. Megasthenes.
A.D. 400-14. Fa-hien. 518-21. Hoei-Sing and Sung-Yun. 540. Cosmas
Indicopleustes. 629-46. Hiouen-Tshang. 671-95. I-tsing. 1159-73.
Benjamin of Tudela. 1304-78. Ibn Batuta. 1327-72. Mandeville. 1328.
Jordanus of Severac. 1328-49. John de Marignolli. 1419-40. Nicolo
Conti. 1442-44. Abd-ur-Razzak. 1468-74. Athanasius Nikitin. 1487.
Pedro de Covilham. 1494-99. Hieronimo di Santo Stefano. 1503-8.
Ludovico di Varthema.
FARTHER INDIA.--A.D. 1503. Ludovico di Varthema. 1509. Lopes di
Sequira. 1886. Francis Garnier.
CHINA.--A.D. 851-916. Suláimán and Abu Zaid. 1292. John of Monte
Corvino. 1316-30. Odorico di Pordenone. 1328-49. John de Marignolli.
1537-58. Ferdinand Mendez Pinto. 1868-71. Ney Elias. 1871-88.
Prjevalsky. 1878-82. Pundit Krishna. 1889. Grjmailo brothers. 1896.
Prince Henri d'Orléans.
JAPAN.--A.D. 1542. Antonio de Mota. 1785-88. La Pérouse.
ARABIA.--A.D. 1761-67. Carsten Niebuhr. 1863. Palgrave.
PERSIA.--B.C. 332. Alexander. A.D. 1468-74. Athanasius Nikitin.
MONGOLIA.--A.D. 1255. Ruysbroek (Rubruquis). 1260-71. Nicolo and
Maffeo Polo. 1271. Marco Polo. 1893-97. Dr. Sven Hedin.
TIBET.--A.D. 1845. Huc. 1856-7. Schlagintweit. 1878. Pundit Krishna.
1887. Younghusband. 1889-90. Bonvalot and Prince Henri d'Orléans.
1893-97. Dr. Sven Hedin.
CENTRAL ASIA.--A.D. 1558. Anthony Jenkinson. 1642. Wasilei Pojarkof.
1838-40. Wood. 1859. Valikhanoff. 1870. Douglas Forsyth. 1870.
Fedchenko. 1880. Bonvalot. 1893. Littledale.
SIBERIA.--A.D. 1579. Timovief. 1639. Kupiloff. 1644-50. Staduchin.
1648. Dshineif. 1701. Sinpopoff. 1731. Paulutski. 1742. Chelyuskin.
1771-72. Pallas. 1785-94. Billings.
KAMTSCHATKA.--A.D. 1696. Russians. 1731. Kru pishef. 1787-88. Lesseps.
AFRICA.
A.D. _circa_ 450. Hanno. 1420. Zarco. 1462. Pedro de Cintra. 1484.
Diego Cam. 1486. Bartholomew Diaz. 1497. Vasco da Gama. 1520. Alvarez.
1549. Bareto and Homera. 1590. Battel. 1596. Payz. 1618. Thompson.
1623. Lobo. 1645. Italian Capuchins. 1769-71. Bruce. 1793. Browne.
1796. Mungo Park. 1796. Lacerda. 1822. Denham and Clapperton. 1826.
Laing. 1827. Réné Caillié. 1849-73. Livingstone. 1850-55. Barth.
1854-65. Faidherbe. 1856-59. Du Chaillu. 1858. Burton and Speke.
1860. Grant and Speke. 1864. Baker. 1869-71. Schweinfurth. 1869-74.
Nachtigall. 1874-75. Cameron. 1876-89. Stanley. 1878-84. Thomson.
1878-85. Serpa Pinto. 1881-87. Wissmann. 1888-89. Binger. 1890.
Selous and Jameson. 1891-92. Monteil. 1896. Bottego. 1896. Donaldson
Smith. 1897. Foa.
NORTH AMERICA.
A.D. 499. Hoei-Sin. _Circa_ 1000. Lyef. 1497, 1517. John and Sebastian
Cabot. 1500. Corte Real. 1513. Ponce de Leon. 1524. Verazzano.
1532. Cortez. 1534. Cartier. 1539. Ulloa. 1542. Cabrillo. 1516.
Frobisher. 1586. Davis. 1592. Juan de Fuca. 1608. Champlain. 1609,
10. Hudson. 1631. Fox. 1682. La Salle. 1740. Varenne de la Véranderye
1741. Behring. 1789-93. Mackenzie. 1792. Vancouver. 1800-4. Lewis
and Clarke. 1805-7. Pike. 1837. Simpson.
SOUTH AMERICA.
A.D. 1498. Columbus. 1499-1501. Amerigo Vespucci. 1499. Pinzon.
1500. Pedro Cabral. 1517. Juan Diaz de Solis. 1519-20. Magellan.
1531. Francisco Pizarro. 1535. D'Almagro. 1536. Gonsalo Pizarro.
1541. Orellana. 1572. Juan Fernandez. 1580. Dutch in Guiana. 1615.
Lemaire. 1743-44. La Condamine. 1764. John Byron. 1799-1804. Humboldt.
1817-20. Spix and Martius. 1831-35. Schomburgk. 1843-47. Castelnau.
CENTRAL AMERICA.
A.D. 1502. Columbus. 1513. Vasco Nuñez de Balbao. 1518. Grijalva.
1519. Fernando Cortez. 1519. Guray.
AUSTRALIA.
A.D. 1605. Torres. 1606. Quiros. 1616. Hartog. 1619. Edel and Houtman.
1622. The _Leeuwin_. 1627. Nuyts. 1699. Dampier. 1770. Cook. 1797.
Bass. 1801-4. Flinders. 1814. Evans. 1817-22. King. 1828-40. Sturt.
1839. Strzelecki. 1841. Eyre. 1844-48. Leichhardt. 1860. Burke.
1861-62. MacDouall Stuart. 1868-74. Forrest. 1872-76. Giles. 1873.
Warburton. 1897. Carnegie.
NEW ZEALAND.
A.D. 1642. Tasman. 1643. Brouwer. 1768-79. Cook.
POLYNESIA.
A.D. 1512. Francisco Serrão. 1520, 21. Magellan. 1527. Saavedra.
1542. Gaetano 1542. Ruy Lopez de Villalobos. 1543. Ortez de Retis.
1567-98. Alvaro Mendaña. 1599. Houtman. 1643. Tasman. 1768. Carteret.
1776-79. Cook. 1835-49. Junghuhn. 1890. Macgregor.
NORTH POLE.
A.D. _circa_ 900. Gunbiörn. 985. Eric the Red. 1553. Willoughby.
1596. Barentz. 1603. Bennett. 1611. Jan Mayen. 1616. Baffin. 1721.
Egédé. 1769-71. Hearne. 1819-22. Franklin, Back, and Richardson.
1819-27. Parry. 1820-23. Wrangel. 1822-23. Scoresby. 1829-33. Ross.
1833. Back. 1845-47. Franklin. 1847-54. Rae. 1850-54. M'Clure.
1853. Kane. 1857-59. M'Clintock. 1868-79. Nordenskiöld. 1872-73.
Payer and Weiprecht. 1876. Markham. 1879-82. The _Jeannette_. 1880.
Leigh Smith. 1883. Lockwood. 1888-97. Nansen. 1892. Peary. 1894-96.
Jackson-Harmsworth expedition.
SOUTH POLE.
A.D. 1816. Capt. Smith. 1821. Bellinghausen. 1823. Weddell. 1831.
Biscoe. 1838-40. Dumont d'Urville. 1839. Balleny. 1840-42. James
Ross. 1894-95. Borchgrevink.
CIRCUMNAVIGATORS.
A.D. 1522. Sebastian del Cano. 1577-79. Drake. 1739-44. Lord George
Anson.
ATLANTIC OCEAN.
A.D. 1400. Jehan Bethencourt. 1432. Cabral. 1442. Nuño Tristão.
1471. Pedro d'Escobar. 1471. Fernando Po. 1492-93. Columbus. 1501.
Juan di Nova. 1501. Tristan d'Acunha. 1502. Bermudez.
INDIAN OCEAN.
A.D. 1505. Mascarenhas.
PROGRESS OF GEOGRAPHICAL SCIENCE.
B.C. 570. Anaximander of Miletus. 501. Hecatæus of Miletus. 446.
Herodotus. _Circa_ 200. Eratosthenes. 100. Marinus of Tyre. 20.
Strabo. Before 12. Agrippa. A.D. 150. Ptolemy. 230. Peutinger Table.
776. Beatus. 884. Ibn Khordadbeh. 912-30. Mas'udi. 921. Ahmed Ibn
Fozlan. 969. Ibn Haukal. 1111. Water-compass. 1154. Edrisi. _Circa_
1180. Alexander Neckam. 1280. Hereford map. 1284. Ebstorf map.
1290. The normal Portulano. 1320. Flavio Gioja. 1339. Dulcert.
1351. Medicean Portulano. 1375. Cresquez. 1419. Prince Henry the
Navigator. 1457. Fra Mauro. 1474. Toscanelli. 1478. 2nd ed. Ptolemy.
1492. Behaim. 1500. Juan de la Cosa. 1507-13. Waldseemüller. 1520.
Schoner. 1538. Mercator. 1544. Munster. 1556-72. Laperis. 1573.
Ortelius. 1592. Molyneux globe. 1598. Hakluyt. 1630. Ferro meridian
fixed. 1638. Blaeu. 1645. Sanson. 1700. Delisle. 1718. Jesuit map
of China. 1731. Hadley. 1735-37. Maupertuis. 1745-61. Bourguiguon
d'Anville. 1765. Harrison. 1767. Nautical Almanac. 1788. African
Association. 1810-29. Malte-Brun. 1817. Stieler. 1830. Royal
Geographical Society founded. 1842. Jomard 1845. Petermann. 1846.
Spruner. 1875-94. Élisée Reclus. 1872-76. The _Challenger_.
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