soon as the coast had been left behind. Water was carried in

small barrels. It soon became stale and then tasted of rotten



wood and iron rust and was full of slimy growing things. As

the people of the Middle Ages knew nothing about microbes



(Roger Bacon, the learned monk of the thirteenth century

seems to have suspected their existence, but he wisely kept



his discovery to himself) they often drank unclean water and

sometimes the whole crew died of typhoid fever. Indeed the



mortality on board the ships of the earliest navigators was

terrible. Of the two hundred sailors who in the year 1519 left



Seville to accompany Magellan on his famous voyage around

the world, only eighteen returned. As late as the seventeenth



century when there was a brisk trade between western Europe

and the Indies, a mortality of 40 percent was nothing unusual



for a trip from Amsterdam to Batavia and back. The greater

part of these victims died of scurvy, a disease which is caused



by lack of fresh vegetables and which affects the gums and

poisons the blood until the patient dies of sheer exhaustion.



Under those circumstances you will understand that the sea

did not attract the best elements of the population. Famous



discoverers like Magellan and Columbus and Vasco da Gama

travelled at the head of crews that were almost entirely composed



of ex-jailbirds, future murderers and pickpockets out

of a Job.



These navigators certainly deserve our admiration for the

courage and the pluck with which they accomplished their



hopeless tasks in the face of difficulties of which the people of

our own comfortable world can have no conception. Their



ships were leaky. The rigging was clumsy. Since the middle

of the thirteenth century they had possessed some sort of a



compass (which had come to Europe from China by way of

Arabia and the Crusades) but they had very bad and incorrect



maps. They set their course by God and by guess. If luck

was with them they returned after one or two or three years.



In the other case, their bleeched bones remained behind on

some lonely beach. But they were true pioneers. They gambled



with luck. Life to them was a glorious adventure. And

all the suffering, the thirst and the hunger and the pain were



forgotten when their eyes beheld the dim outlines of a new coast

or the placid waters of an ocean that had lain forgotten since



the beginning of time.

Again I wish that I could make this book a thousand pages



long. The subject of the early discoveries is so fascinating.

But history, to give you a true idea of past times, should be



like those etchings which Rembrandt used to make. It should

cast a vivid light on certain important causes, on those which



are best and greatest. All the rest should be left in the shadow

or should be indicated by a few lines. And in this chapter I



can only give you a short list of the most important discoveries.

Keep in mind that all during the fourteenth and fifteenth



centuries the navigators were trying to accomplish just ONE

THING--they wanted to find a comfortable and safe road to the



empire of Cathay (China), to the island of Zipangu (Japan)

and to those mysterious islands, where grew the spices which



the mediaeval world had come to like since the days of the

Crusades, and which people needed in those days before the



introduction of cold storage, when meat and fish spoiled very

quickly and could only be eaten after a liberal sprinkling of



pepper or nutmeg.

The Venetians and the Genoese had been the great navigators



of the Mediterranean, but the honour for exploring the

coast of the Atlantic goes to the Portuguese. Spain and Portugal



were full of that patrioticenergy which their age-old

struggle against the Moorish invaders had developed. Such



energy, once it exists, can easily be forced into new channels.

In the thirteenth century, King Alphonso III had conquered



the kingdom of Algarve in the southwestern corner of the

Spanish peninsula and had added it to his dominions. In the



next century, the Portuguese had turned the tables on the

Mohammedans, had crossed the straits of Gibraltar and had



taken possession of Ceuta, opposite the Arabic city of Ta'Rifa

(a word which in Arabic means ``inventory'' and which by way



of the Spanish language has come down to us as ``tariff,'') and

Tangiers, which became the capital of an African addition to



Algarve.

They were ready to begin their career as explorers.



In the year 1415, Prince Henry, known as Henry the

Navigator, the son of John I of Portugal and Philippa, the



daughter of John of Gaunt (about whom you can read in

Richard II, a play by William Shakespeare) began to make



preparations for the systematic exploration of northwestern

Africa. Before this, that hot and sandy coast had been visited



by the Phoenicians and by the Norsemen, who remembered it

as the home of the hairy ``wild man'' whom we have come to



know as the gorilla. One after another, Prince Henry

and his captains discovered the Canary Islands--re-discovered



the island of Madeira which a century before had been visited

by a Genoese ship, carefully charted the Azores which had



been vaguely known to both the Portuguese and the Spaniards,

and caught a glimpse of the mouth of the Senegal River on



the west coast of Africa, which they supposed to be the western

mouth of the Nile. At last, by the middle of the Fifteenth



Century, they saw Cape Verde, or the Green Cape, and the

Cape Verde Islands, which lie almost halfway between the



coast of Africa and Brazil.

But Henry did not restrict himself in his investigations to



the waters of the Ocean. He was Grand Master of the Order

of Christ. This was a Portuguese continuation of the crusading



order of the Templars which had been abolished by

Pope Clement V in the year 1312 at the request of King



Philip the Fair of France, who had improved the occasion by

burning his own Templars at the stake and stealing all their



possessions. Prince Henry used the revenues of the domains

of his religious order to equip several expeditions which explored



the hinterland of the Sahara and of the coast of Guinea.

But he was still very much a son of the Middle Ages and



spent a great deal of time and wasted a lot of money upon a

search for the mysterious ``Presser John,'' the mythical Christian



Priest who was said to be the Emperor of a vast empire

``situated somewhere in the east.'' The story of this strange



potentate had first been told in Europe in the middle of the

twelfth century. For three hundred years people had tried



to find ``Presser John'' and his descendants Henry took part

in the search. Thirty years after his death, the riddle was



solved.

In the year 1486 Bartholomew Diaz, trying to find the land



of Prester John by sea, had reached the southernmost point

of Africa. At first he called it the Storm Cape, on account of



the strong winds which had prevented him from continuing his

voyage toward the east, but the Lisbon pilots who understood



the importance of this discovery in their quest for the India

water route, changed the name into that of the Cape of Good



Hope.

One year later, Pedro de Covilham, provided with letters



of credit on the house of Medici, started upon a similar mission

by land. He crossed the Mediterranean and after leaving



Egypt, he travelled southward. He reached Aden, and from

there, travelling through the waters of the Persian Gulf which



few white men had seen since the days of Alexander the Great,

eighteen centuries before, he visited Goa and Calicut on the



coast of India where he got a great deal of news about the

island of the Moon (Madagascar) which was supposed to lie



halfway between Africa and India. Then he returned, paid

a secret visit to Mecca and to Medina, crossed the Red Sea



once more and in the year 1490 he discovered the realm of

Prester John, who was no one less than the Black Negus (or



King) of Abyssinia, whose ancestors had adopted Christianity

in the fourth century, seven hundred years before the Christian



missionaries had found their way to Scandinavia.

These many voyages had convinced the Portuguese geographers



and cartographers that while the voyage to the Indies

by an eastern sea-route was possible, it was by no means easy.



Then there arose a great debate. Some people wanted to continue

the explorations east of the Cape of Good Hope. Others



said, ``No, we must sail west across the Atlantic and then we

shall reach Cathay.''



Let us state right here that most intelligent people of that

day were firmly convinced that the earth was not as flat as a



pancake but was round. The Ptolemean system of the universe,

invented and duly described by Claudius Ptolemy, the great



Egyptian geographer, who had lived in the second century of

our era, which had served the simple needs of the men of the



Middle Ages, had long been discarded by the scientists of the

Renaissance. They had accepted the doctrine of the Polish



mathematician, Nicolaus Copernicus, whose studies had con-

vinced him that the earth was one of a number of round planets



which turned around the sun, a discovery which he did not venture

to publish for thirty-six years (it was printed in 1548,



the year of his death) from fear of the Holy Inquisition, a

Papal court which had been established in the thirteenth century



when the heresies of the Albigenses and the Waldenses

in France and in Italy (very mild heresies of devoutly pious



people who did not believe in private property and preferred

to live in Christ-like poverty) had for a moment threatened the



absolute power of the bishops of Rome. But the belief in the

roundness of the earth was common among the nautical experts