A fine victory, well won, and at little cost!
THE MEN WHO DISCOVERED THE WORLD
Stories of the Early Voyagers
IT is difficult for us who live in these days of swift travel, wireless telegraphy, palatial ships, and so forth, to realise what it meant to go a-voyaging in the Middle Ages and thereabouts. Then men set out chartless, at one time compassless, in ships which were mere cockle-boats, to traverse unknown seas (there are no unknown seas to-day!) in quest of new lands, not knowing really whether there were any new lands to discover. They went, as it were, into the darkness of the unknown, with all its terrors and dangers; and going, discovered the world.
Tradition had it that out in the Atlantic were some islands called by the ancients the Fortunate Islands; and the thirst for wider geographical knowledge came with the discovery of these, and the discovery of Madeira, in the fifteenth century; and out of the mists of the legends there shone elusive islands which, though men sought, they could not find. Then, as men grew bolder, and travelled overland to Cathay, or China, to bring back wonderful stories, with all the glamour of the East about them, Europeans cried for more and more light upon the world beyond Europe.
And the age of discovery began.
In the mind of every voyager was the one great objective—Cathay. But the way there? One school said westwards; the other said that only by circumnavigating the coasts of Africa could Cathay be reached. We know now, as they discovered after many, many years, that both routes led to the East, but that in between Europe and Asia, via the West, lay a mighty continent of whose existence they had never dreamed; and which, when they did discover it, they thought was Asia.
We cannot go into details of the many voyages which were undertaken both to the south and the west; we must content ourselves with the first voyage round the Cape of Good Hope, the first sea trip to China, and the first voyage of the great Columbus.
“A mighty gale caught Diaz and carried his frail craft before it”