HOW AMERICA CAME TO BE DISCOVERED.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume 4, Issue 1245, 2 December 1882, Page 1 (Supplement)

HOW AMERICA CAME TO BE DISCOVERED.

Of all the blaqk chapters in the history of , mankind, there is none more hideous than ■ ;that which records the horrors of Moorish piraoy, It was in attempting to put down • this intolerable nuisance that the Portuguese became accustomed to sail down tho west ooast of Africa; and these voyages, begun {or military purposes, were kept up in the interest of commerce, and served as a mighty stimulus to geographical, curiosity, In 1394 was bora Prince Henry of Portugal, afterwards known as Henry the Navigator, . He was first cousin to King Henry Wof .England, and equalled his kinsman in genius, while tho laurels whioh he obtained ■ wore far more glorious than those of Agincourt. He was one of the greatest astronomers and mathematicians of his age, and his services to geography wero more important than those of any other modern before Columbus. He maintained, in defiance of Ptolemseiis, that Afrioa was circumnavigable, ■ and it was one of the ohief ends of his.life to prove this point, At his instigation, one • Portuguese captain after another crept along ■ doivn the Guinea coast, and after his death, in 1463, the search was kept up, until finally, in 1847, Bartholomew Dias reaohedthe Cape of Good Hope,: and looked out with wistful triumph upon tho broad Indian ocean, but did not venture to oross its untravelled waters.., Before ■ this great: enterprise was oarried.sny farther an entirely new solution of the prob'em had been carried into opera- '■ tion by. Christopher Columbus. Instead of confining his attention to some especially promising coast-line, Ms powerful imagination sought to grasp , the space relations pf the entire earth. The conception of the • earth's spherical form was in no way original to him, It had been maintained by, Aristotle, and adopted by Hipparchus and Ptolemretts, and among the ancient philosophers Strabo and Seneca had suggested the theoretical possibility of a watery passage from Spain to , India. These views had been reiterated in the thirteenth century by Roger Bacon, and , again in the fifteenth by Pierre d' Ailly, whose great book, " ImagoMundi," had in those days a similar reputation, as a description of natural phenomena, to that whioh Humboldt's "Cosmos"has onjoyed in our • own time, Columbus was porfeotly familiar . with these views, and the work of Pierre d' Ailly was his constant companion. His ■ originality oonsisted in reducing the theoretical suggestion to a practical problem. It was one thing to suggest as a theoretical possibility that India might be reached by mailing westward; it was quite another thing to estimate the length of voyage requisite ■ for the attainment of this object, and to show that the attempt was feasible with the ships and instruments then at command. In dealing with this problem Columbus fell far short < of a correct eolution, The problem was too - great for his scientific resources, But the solution which he reached was, at any rate, ' sufficiently definite to put to a trial, and the result of the trial was the discovery of a New World, And now we come to one of the most curious points connected with the discovery of America, I refer to tho singular mistake of Columbus in his estimate of th< size of the earth, In the thirteeuth century Marco Polo had described an island of Gipango, lying beyond China. This was no ■ doubt one of the islands of Japan, Now in aiming at the eastern coast of Asia—known i at that time only through the descriptions of Marco Polo—Columbus estimated thedis- ' tance from Spain to Japan at about the figure which actually expresses the distance from Spain to the West Indies. This, I think, was an extremoly fortunate mistake. When we consider how very difficult Columbus found it to .obtain men and ships for a three ■ months' voyage in such a new and untried ' direction, we must admit that his chances would have been poor indeed if he had proposed to sail for a year or two upon the " sea of darkness" before coming to the promised - land, Indeed, the great commercial value of Columbus's proposal to the sovereigns lay in this, that he advocated the new westerly route to India as a shorter route than that ■ which men were seeking to discover by circumnavigating Africa. As the Portuguese adventurers kept .on revealing newer and newer stretches of the West African coast, even beyond the equator, it became apparent that the voyage to India in this direction was going to be a very long one even if it should ever prove practicable at all, It was ■ while men's minds were occupied with this phage of the question that Columbus oame forward with his plausible argument that India might be reached much more speedily by steering direotly aoross the Atlantic. The proposals of Columbus were not handsomely reovived by the King of Portugal, His term* were thought to be unreasonably high, And after muoh oiroumlooution the king unwisely deoidV.<l that honesty was not the best policy, He obtained Columbus's plans, 1 and sent out a sh.'o secretly to carry some i goods to the Cape Veru' M»nds, and then to ' try the experiment of the westward voyage, ] i But the pilots, having no grand idea to urge i ' them forward, lost heart before tfa vast expanse of waters which confronted thom, and beat an ignominious retreat to Lisbon; and ; the trick being discovered, Columbus departed in high dudgeon, and carried his proposals to the sovereigns of Spain, This was in 1484, and after eight years of weary solicitation, the great business of conquering Granada having been disposed of, Queen Isabella decided to furnish the necessary means for trying the bold experiment,. Into the details of the wonderful voyage, from 3rd August to 11th Ootoher, 1492, it is not necessary for us now to enter, as doubtless every reader has been familiar with them from ohildhood, It was a prosperous voyage over a calm sea, quite devoid of such hard- . ships as Da Gama and Magellan had afterwards to encounter,-, It was an auspicious voyage, in which even false prognostications and errors of reckoning worked happily together toward the successful issue,. Yet so great is the dread of the unknown in unculti- , vated men that during these short ten weeks the sailors were with difficulty restrained from mutiny. The heroism with which Columbus at last carried out his purpose was great, but no greater than has been mani- . fested by many'other explorers on land and sea. The successful expedition of Columbus in 1492 awakened fierce heart-burnings' botween Spain and Portugal, insomuch that in the following year Pope Alexander IV, nndertook to pacify these two most Catholic and most chivalrous nations by summarily dividing between them all the heathen pre- ' cincts of the earth, After more or less diplomatic wrangling, an imaginary line was drawn from pole to pole 250 leagues west of the Azores, All newly discovered lands to the east of this line were for evermore to be- . long to the King of Portugal, while anything to the west was to be the undisputed property of the Spanish crown, In 1497, within four years after the promulgation of this extraordinary decree, Vasco da Gama accomplished his arduous voyage of thirteen months' duration around the Cape of Good Hope,to Calicut.in : lndia; and now the commercial rivalry between the two most Catholic kingdoms began in earnest: The bull of Pope - Alexander had indeed set matters at'rest on the: Atlantic, but on the opposite side of the globe everything was really left in dispute, for the line antipodal I

to' tlie papal line of demarcation was by no means determined. The Molucca Islands Were commercially of great importance, and it was by showing that these islands belonged properly to Spain and not Portugal that the glorious Magellan set sail in 1519 on his westward voyage round the world, Mowiug the path marked out by Vespucci, Magellan searched along the coast of South Amerioa for a western passage, and at last entered the treacherous strait which bears his name, Nearly a century was still to elapse before tho Dutohman Van Horn gave a name to the Cape whioh terminates the continent, For fifteen months Magellan had persevered, and his sailors were already mutinous, when he entered the Pacitio Ocean, and stood for the northwest, with the view of regaining the equator, Terrible was the four months' struggle whioh now ensued, Ilie huge size of our planet began at last to reveal itself; no one had ever dreamed of so vast an oceau ao the Paoifio. The ships hid not been victualled for such a voyage, and bosides their agonies of doubt and fear, the crews had soon to contend with tho torments of starvation, They eat pieces of leather tron from the rigging and soaked in the sea; they appeased their raging, thirst with bilge-water, Loud were thoir curses of the infatuated captain—the bold heretic who, in defiance. of the C/hurck, insisted that tho world was round; and was now loading them off into the everlasting sea, which extended into the fathomless abyss of space—a sea with no welcoming shore beyond, yet from which it was now too late to hope to retraoe their course, But. in spite of hunger and perplexity and mutiny the indomitable hero kept on his way unflinching, The immensity of the ooean was a punle to him, too, who, like *ll geographers of the time, had greatly underestimated the size our globe, The doubt whether the earth might not be flat, after all, sometimes came up; but against such unseemly scepticism "he comforted himself when he considered that in the eclipses of the moon the shadow cast of the earth is round, and as is the shadow such in like manner, is the substance." The very depth of their despair, too, no doubt worked in his favour, for while it seemed fatal to advance, it seemed no less fatal to retreat, so far away had they come from tho known world, At lait, after incrodible hardships, they made the Ladrone Islands, and met with trders from Sumatra, In the hour of victory the heorio conqureror perished—slain in a skirmish with some worthless savages, But his lieutenant, JSlcano, took possession of the Moluccas in tho namo of Charles V,, and making south-westerly for the Cape of Good dope, came finally into a port of Spain in the autumn of 1522. Of the five gallant ships whioh had set out three years before on this unparalleled voyage, but one remained afloat to tell tho proud story of the drat circumnavigation of the earth, It was this voyage of Magellan's which first made it clear that the calculations of Columbus were wrong, and that tho continont of America was something else than a portion of India befond tho Ganges. Geographers were slow, however, in outgrowing the.old conceptions, and the belief in a connection between America and Asia was long in disappearing, •laps made at the close of the sixteenth century give a large space to the Pacific Ocean, but show very little knowledge of the configuration of North America. It was not until 1725 that Bohring discovered the strait which bears his name; and it was not until 1778—the year of Washington's encampment at Valley Forge—that Captain Cook, the most illustrions of navigators since Magellan, explored our western coasts from tho Columbia Kiver northward. The voyages of Cook may be regarded as concluding the era of maritime discovery, which began with Prince Henry of Portugal—the era of discovery in the grand style, when new worlds awaited the patient explorer, and vast areas of the earth's surface were laid open for colonisation at a single blow. The surface of our globe is now so well known that no room is left for mystery, and most of the savage portions of it have been appropriated, although not precisely in the manner decreed by Alexander VI. And howover admirable the endurance, howover valuable the achievements, of arctic voyagers and African path-finders, we can never again expect to ice anything like the wonders of that heoric age of adventure of which the discovery of America was the crowning glory.— Harper's Monthly Magaiint,