The greatest story in the world, period 3 (of 3)

by Horace G. Hutchinson

Portuguese adventurers

And there can be no doubt about the adventurous spirit of the Portuguese sailors of that day. They were inspired by the spirit of adventure, but also—for human motives are generally mixed—the adventure attracted them by the profits to be gained in it, the gold and the slaves. Further, we have to credit them with a more noble and spiritual motive, for they were inspired with a fervent conviction that it was a work most pleasing to God to induce the natives of new-found lands to become Christians. The means employed to this end were often cruel, but we ought to realise that it was a very real motive, both with the Spaniard and the Portugee. It is a motive which gives dignity to their conquests. They were not undertaken solely for material gain. Even if the means were cruel by which they converted a savage, whether of Africa or of America, they believed that it was in the truest sense a kindness to be thus cruel, if by so dealing with his body his soul might be saved.

Such motives as the above had their influence not only with the adventurers themselves, but also with the Governments of their countries. A member of the Royal family of Portugal, known in story as Prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460), especially favoured and helped to equip these expeditions. He was grandson of our own John of Gaunt. Perhaps his title of "Navigator" was cheaply earned, for there is no evidence that he ventured far oversea himself, but the distant voyages owed very much of their success to his assistance.

Thus the Portuguese crept farther and farther down the African coast until at length they rounded it, and in the last years of the fifteenth century da Gama achieved the great adventure. He must have deemed himself uncommonly fortunate to come home, with those three "caravels," to his native land, and that he was considered to have been favoured by fortune we may gather from Portugal's later conduct. Her rulers were far from trusting that it would be always so—that her trading ships might always go safely voyaging in those seas which the Moslems had hitherto deemed to be their own. One fleet, more powerful and more numerous than da Gama's poor three ships, was sent out, and again another, greater still, until the Portuguese had taken all the chief ports—Mozambique, on the eastern shore of Africa itself, the ports commanding the entries of the Red Sea and of the Persian Gulf—had penetrated farther east and captured the great trading port of Malacca, had even landed in China, and had established their headquarters at Goa, in the Indian peninsula.

It is not the least wonderful part of the whole surprising story that they should have made this conquest so completely and so easily. We must attribute it to the superiority of their ships in comparison with those of the Arabs and other Moslems in that sea, to their better armament and to their greater skill in using these ships for naval battle. Had the Mahommedans of that ocean possessed anything like the ships and the experience of marine warfare that sailors of the same religion in the Mediterranean had acquired by perpetual sea-fighting, it is not possible that Portugal could have dominated them so decisively and at such slight cost to herself. Besides that the Portuguese could manœuvre far more skilfully with their ships, and knew how to combine them for attack, the guns which their ships carried seem to have been far more powerful than any that the Moslems had, whether ashore or afloat; for not only do we find them gaining the victory in all the naval battles, but they employed their ships' guns in bombarding the ports and combining the bombardment from the sea with attacks by their landing forces.

The result of it all was that within a dozen or so years of da Gama's reaching India the Portuguese were the masters of those seas, and had the whole of that trade in their hands. And while Portugal thus worked her way to the dominance of the eastern sea, Spain was confirming the conquests for which Columbus had pointed her the way in the West.

Atlantis

For some years there had been vague rumours in Europe of an island far out in the western sea, and a still more confident idea that if men could sail westward far enough they would come to the eastern side of Asia. That was the goal at which they aimed, in the westward sailing. Columbus' special genius and courage inspired him to go bravely on this western cruise, not troubling himself, as others had done before him, with the search for that fabulous island, of Atlantis, supposed to be somewhere in the mid-ocean, but holding his way continuously towards the sunset until he did at length touch a land which he thought to be that eastern Asia which he had set out to look for.

We know how that it was something very different. During the next few years Spain kept sending out expedition after expedition, to find out what sort of new world it was that this bold sailor had thus reached. To Spain fell the enterprise and the conquest first, but not by any natural sequence of events, for it was truly due to the genius of Columbus, who was a man of Genoa, and no son of Spain at all, that the first enterprise of discovery was undertaken. He could not attempt it at his own cost. His native state would not furnish him with the means. For four years he was trying to get his voyage "financed," as we should say now—that is, get its expenses paid—by the Governments either of Spain or of England. He had a brother working to this end at the English Court, while he was pleading his own cause at the Court of Spain. Our Henry VII. was just beginning to listen favourably to the prayer of the brother, when Isabella, joint ruler, with Ferdinand, of Spain, was won by the eloquence of Christopher Columbus. Spain equipped the ships, and England, whether for her good or her ill it is interesting to speculate, but impossible surely to know, lost her chance of achieving the astonishingly rich conquest which thus came to Spain.

For what the repeated Spanish expeditions established ever more conclusively was the amazing richness of the new world, or, at least, of that part of it which she was first to conquer. And yet, at the beginning, there was some disappointment. We have seen how one of the great needs of these countries of the old world was men to cultivate their war-wasted lands. This man-power they were constantly hoping to increase by acquiring slaves. Portugal did acquire slaves, who proved excellent workers, from Africa. The slaves which the first conquerors of the West brought to Spain were nearly useless. The Red Indian, as it became the fashion to call him later, has never been of any value, as the African negro and the East Indian "coolie" have been valuable, in the service of the white man.