THE COLONIZATION OF NORTH AMERICA
THE FOUNDING OF THE COLONIES
CHAPTER I
THE BACKGROUND AND THE DISCOVERY
The fifteenth century witnessed the culmination of the Renaissance, the rise of the Turkish Empire, the shifting of the commercial center from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, the discovery of America and the opening of the Cape route to India. Portugal and Spain started on their careers as great commercial and colonizing nations, the former destined for a time to control the commerce of the Far East, the other to possess more than half of the Americas and to dominate the Pacific.
GROWTH OF GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE
Classical ideas of the world.—The discoveries of the century completely transformed the conceptions of geography. Greek and Roman scholars had agreed that there were three continents, Europe, Asia, and Africa, encircled by the ocean. Aristotle, Strabo, and others accepted the theory that the earth was a sphere, but they usually underestimated its size. Ptolemy, the greatest of the ancient geographers, made two fundamental errors, which most of the Arab and Christian scholars accepted. He depicted the Indian Ocean as an inland sea, and greatly extended Africa until it filled the entire southern hemisphere, China and Africa being connected.
Arab theories and Christian scholars.—The Arabs believed that the earth was a disc or ball, which was the center of the universe. The center of the earth's surface they called Arim, meaning the cupola of the earth. At the eastern extremity stood the pillars of Alexander, at the western the pillars of Hercules, while the north and south poles were equally distant from Arim. The Ptolemaic idea of Africa was accepted by most of the Arabs, but many of their later map makers decreased its size, cutting it off in the neighborhood of Cape Bojador on the African coast, and calling the region beyond the "Green Sea of Darkness." Others sketched in a great southern continent below Africa. The "Green Sea of Darkness" was filled with terrors, whirlpools ready to destroy the adventurous mariner, a sea of mist, fog, and vapor, peopled by monsters. If he escaped these as he ventured southward, he would come to a zone of torrid heat where no man could survive. Roger Bacon, the great Christian scientist, accepted the Arabian theories but supplemented them by a study of the classics. He believed that the habitable world was more than half of the whole circuit, an idea which was repeated in the Imago Mundi of Pierre d'Ailly, a work which may have influenced Columbus.