But to return. We must trace more definitely the preparation which has been generally described for the work of Prince Henry first in the pilgrim-warriors, and the travellers of the New Age, merchants or preachers or sight-seers, who follow out the Eastern land-routes; next in the seamen who begin to break the spell of the Western Ocean and to open up the high seas, the true high-roads of the world; lastly in the students who most of all, in their maps and globes and instruments and theories, are the trainers and masters and spiritual ancestors of the Hero of Discovery.
The first of these classes supplied the matter, the attractions and rewards of the exploring movement; the others may be said to provide the form by which success was reached, genius in seamanship.
And the one was as much needed as the other.
Human reason did its work so well because of a reasonable hope; men crept round Africa in face of the Atlantic storms because of the golden East beyond.
It was as we have seen the land travellers of the twelfth and thirteenth and fourteenth centuries who laid open that golden East to Europe, and added inspiring knowledge to a dream and a tradition. And of these land travellers the first worth notice are Sæwulf of Worcester, Adelard of Bath, and Daniel of Kiev, three of that host of peaceful pilgrims who followed the conquerors of the First Crusade (1096-9). All of these left their recollections and all of them are of the new time, in sharp contrast with the hordes of earlier pilgrims, even the most recent, like Bishop Ealdred of Worcester and York, who crowned William the Conqueror, or Sweyn Godwineson or Thorer Hund, whose visits are all mere visits of penitence. Every fresh conversion of the Northern nations brought a fresh stream of devotees to Italy and to Syria, a fresh revival of the fourth century habit of pilgrimage; but when mediæval Christendom had been formed, and religious passion was more steady and less unworldly, the discoverer and observer blends with the pilgrim in all the records left to us.
Sæwulf was a layman and a trader, who went on a pilgrimage (1102), and became a monk at the instance of his confessor, Wulfstan, Bishop of Worcester. But though his narrative has been called an immense advance on all earlier guide-books, it ends with the Holy Land and does not touch even the outlying pilgrim sites, in Mesopotamia or Egypt, visited and described by Silvia or Fidelis.
Starting some three years after the Latin capture of Jerusalem in 1099, the English traveller takes us up six different routes from Italy to Syria, evidence of the vast development of Mediterranean intercourse and of practical security against pirates, gained very largely since the second millennium began.
His own way, by Monopoli, Corfu, Corinth, and Athens, took him to Rhodes "which once had the Idol called Colossus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, but destroyed by the Persians, with nearly all the land of Roumania, on their way to Spain. These were the Colossians to whom St. Paul wrote."
Thence to Myra in Lycia, "the port of the Adriatic as Constantinople is of the Ægean."
Landing at Jaffa, after a sail of thirteen weeks, Sæwulf was soon among the wonders of Jerusalem, that had not grown less since Arculf's day. At the head of the Sepulchre Church was the famous Navel of the Earth, "now called Compas, which Christ measured with his own hands, working salvation in the midst, as say the Psalms." For the same legends were backed by the same texts as in the sixth or seventh century.