At this point it will be convenient to glance for a moment at the existing state of geographical knowledge, which had become considerably augmented during the fifteenth century. With one vast deduction-namely, the northern and north-eastern coasts of Europe and Asia from the North Cape of Norway eastward as far as Northern China, including Northern Russia and Siberia-the Old World had now been completely revealed. To Europeans, indeed, the contour of Southeastern Africa remained unascertained. Its true shape, nevertheless, must have been known to the Arab seamen who navigated the Indian ocean: many of these were also well acquainted with the Eastern Archipelago, known to Europeans only as passengers or overland travellers, as far as a point near the western end of New Guinea. Greenland was known, and in Northern and Western Europe the discovery of “Vineland1” by Norse adventurers five hundred years previously was still a familiar tradition. From the point of view of scientific geography all this amounted to little. Not more than one-fourth of the earth’s surface had been laid down on the map. Colombo’s first expedition did no more than determine the breadth of the Atlantic in the latitude of the northern tropic, and prove that a numerous group of islands, from which the proximity of a continental shore or Terra Firma might fairly be inferred, existed on the other side. His subsequent voyages changed this inference into certainty: but the fact that the Terra Firma here encountered was a continent hitherto unknown, though its northern parts had been reached by the Northmen five centuries before, was never ascertained by him, and to the day of his death, fourteen years later, he believed himself to have merely reached the eastern parts of Asia. In fact, he was nearly at the opposite meridian, and a hemisphere raised its immense dome between. Colombo’s five weeks’ voyage, nevertheless, proved the great turning-point in man’s slowly-progressing knowledge of the globe. Eighteen years after his death the general figure of the New World had been ascertained, its southernmost point rounded, the Pacific crossed, and the first furrow ploughed by a ship’s keel around the sphere. Small as was his own actual contribution to geographical knowledge, it was his energy and enterprise, and his alone, which rapidly forced on a conception of geography sufficiently accurate to last with little improvement to the time of Cook, nearly three centuries later.
The consequences of this voyage must ever render all its details and circumstances matters of exceptional interest; but it is impossible here to enter into them. On October 12, 1492, Colombo landed on one of the Bahama Islands from his ship’s boat, wearing the costume of Admiral of Castile, and holding aloft the Castilian banner; and in the course of a three months’ cruise he visited Cuba and Hayti, and gained a general notion of the West Indian archipelago. The tidings of his voyage were joyfully received both in Spain and at Rome; and a petition was preferred to Pope Alexander VI for a confirmation to the Spanish Crown of the district comprising the newly-found islands, subject only to the rights of any Christian communities which might happen to be included in it. In answer to this two separate bulls were issued. One simply contained the confirmation desired; the other was framed in similar terms, but limited the area of Spanish enterprise to a meridian line to be drawn one hundred leagues west of the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands. The last, often singled out as a prominent illustration of Romish arrogance, was in fact only a suggestion intended to prevent disputes, probably due to some official of the papal chancery. It was never acted on by the parties, and was withdrawn in the same year by the Pope himself. For by a third bull, dated September 25, 1493, and superseding previous ones, the entire field of oceanic enterprise was expressly declared to be open to both nations, on the understanding that Spain should approach it by the westward passage only, and not infringe Portugal’s monopoly of the African coast. The parties, thus remitted to their original rights, fixed as the boundary of their areas of enterprise a meridian of their own selection, 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, and intended to mark a midway line between the Azores, the westernmost of Portugal’s possessions, and the new islands in the West Indies, supposed to be the easternmost parts of the Spanish acquisitions. The action of the Holy See in assuming to partition the globe between the sovereigns of Spain and Portugal has often been ridiculed. Such ridicule, it will be seen, is misplaced; and the papal claim to universal dominion, in its practical bearings, represented nothing more than a simple counterclaim against the more ancient and equally extravagant pretensions of the successors of Mohammad.
A second voyage made by Colombo in 1493, a third in 1498, and a fourth in 1502, added something, but not much, to the sum of his discoveries; and his administration as governor of the new Spanish acquisitions was only remarkable for demonstrating his utter incapacity for the post. Naturally enough, his conception of his duties and of the purpose which the new possessions of Spain were destined to serve, was based on the policy of the Portuguese on the coast of Guinea. Gold, and slaves as a means to gold, and as the only product immediately procurable and readily exchangeable for gold, were the only commodities worth carrying to Europe; and the scantier the supply of the former, the greater was the necessity for pushing the quest of the latter. The true riches of the Indies, Colombo wrote, are the Indians. The wretched natives, unable to procure the small quantity of gold demanded of them as a poll-tax, were provoked to resistance, and then captured and shipped by him in great numbers to Europe to be sold in the market of Seville. But the feeble and intractable Indians proved of little value as labourers; and it was at length ordered that this revolting traffic must cease. The Spanish adventurers who accompanied him frustrated his plans and procured his recall; and at his death in 1506, fourteen years after his unique nautical achievement, the first seaman in Europe, who might in half that time have revealed the whole American coast, had only added to the map the West Indian archipelago and the coasts of Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Darien, and Paria in Venezuela. In a few years his name was almost forgotten; and, by a strange freak of fortune, one Americo Vespucci, a man of mercantile pursuits who happened more than once to visit the New World and wrote accounts of his adventures, was credited by an ignorant public with Colombo’s discovery, and from him the new continent received its name.
Meanwhile, the success of Colombo’s first and second voyages urged on the Portuguese the necessity of prosecuting to its conclusion their own national enterprise. Dom Manoel the Fortunate now succeeded to the throne (1495); and Vasco da Gama, a young seaman who had been selected by Joao II, after the return of Diaz, to command the expedition which was to complete the work of sixty years by carrying the Portuguese flag round the newly-discovered southern cape to the shores of India, was commissioned to undertake the task. A voyage from Lisbon to India was by far the greatest feat of seamanship ever attempted; even its first portion, the voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, which it was proposed to make as directly as possible from the Cape Verde Islands across the open ocean, avoiding the circuitous route by the Guinea coast and the mouth of the Congo, was a far greater undertaking than the voyage of Colombo. The discoverer of America had but to sail 86 days, with a fair wind, to traverse the 2,600 miles between Gomera and the Bahamas. The distance from the Cape Verde Islands to the Cape was 3,770 miles. It was impossible to make the voyage by great-circle sailing. Contrary winds and currents made it necessary to shape a course curving to the extent of almost half a circle, the direct line forming the chord of the arc; and 93 days elapsed after Da Gama had left the Cape Verde Islands before he reached the coast of South Africa. Leaving Lisbon on July 8, 1497, and the Island of Santiago, the southernmost of the Cape Verde group, on August 3, he first sighted land on November 4>, and on the 8th anchored in the bay of St Helena, in the land of the Hottentots, where he remained eight days, careening his ships and taking in wood. Quitting his anchorage on the 16th, he doubled the Cape on the 22nd, and three days later reached Mossel Bay, where he remained thirteen days. Resuming his course on December 8, he eight days afterwards