CHAPTER I.
THE GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE OF THE ANCIENTS CONSIDERED IN RELATION TO THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA.
BY WILLIAM H. TILLINGHAST,
Assistant Librarian of Harvard University.
AS Columbus, in August, 1498, ran into the mouth of the Orinoco, he little thought that before him lay, silent but irrefutable, the proof of the futility of his long-cherished hopes. His gratification at the completeness of his success, in that God had permitted the accomplishment of all his predictions, to the confusion of those who had opposed and derided him, never left him; even in the fever which overtook him on the last voyage his strong faith cried to him, “Why dost thou falter in thy trust in God? He gave thee India!” In this belief he died. The conviction that Hayti was Cipangu, that Cuba was Cathay, did not long outlive its author; the discovery of the Pacific soon made it clear that a new world and another sea lay between the landfall of Columbus and the goal of his endeavors.
The truth, when revealed and accepted, was a surprise more profound to the learned than even the error it displaced. The possibility of a short passage westward to Cathay was important to merchants and adventurers, startling to courtiers and ecclesiastics, but to men of classical learning it was only a corroboration of the teaching of the ancients. That a barrier to such passage should be detected in the very spot where the outskirts of Asia had been imagined, was unexpected and unwelcome. The treasures of Mexico and Peru could not satisfy the demand for the products of the East; Cortes gave himself, in his later years, to the search for a strait which might yet make good the anticipations of the earlier discoverers. The new interpretation, if economically disappointing, had yet an interest of its own. Whence came the human population of the unveiled continent? How had its existence escaped the wisdom of Greece and Rome? Had it done so? Clearly, since the whole human race had been renewed through Noah, the red men of America must have descended from the patriarch; in some way, at some time, the New World had been discovered and populated from the Old. Had knowledge of this event lapsed from the minds of men before their memories were committed to writing, or did reminiscences exist in ancient literatures, overlooked, or misunderstood by modern ignorance? Scholars were not wanting, nor has their line since wholly failed, who freely devoted their ingenuity to the solution of these questions, but with a success so diverse in its results, that the inquiry is still pertinent, especially since the pursuit, even though on the main point it end in reservation of judgment, enables us to understand from what source and by what channels the inspiration came which held Columbus so steadily to his westward course.
Although the elder civilizations of Assyria and Egypt boasted a cultivation of astronomy long anterior to the heroic age of Greece, their cosmographical ideas appear to have been rude and undeveloped, so that whatever the Greeks borrowed thence was of small importance compared with what they themselves ascertained. While it may be doubted if decisive testimony can be extorted from the earliest Grecian literature, represented chiefly by the Homeric and Hesiodic poems, it is probable that the people among whom that literature grew up had not gone, in their conception of the universe, beyond simple acceptance of the direct evidence of their senses. The earth they looked upon as a plane, stretching away from the Ægean Sea, the focus of their knowledge, and ever less distinctly known, until it ended in an horizon of pure ignorance, girdled by the deep-flowing current of the river Oceanus. Beyond Oceanus even fancy began to fail: there was the realm of dust and darkness, the home of the powerless spirits of the dead; there, too, the hemisphere of heaven joined its brother hemisphere of Tartarus.[259] This conception of the earth was not confined to Homeric times, but remained the common belief throughout the course of Grecian history, underlying and outlasting many of the speculations of the philosophers.
That growing intellectual activity which was signalized by a notable development of trade and colonization in the eighth century, in the seventh awoke to consciousness in a series of attempts to formulate the conditions of existence. The philosophy of nature thus originated, wherein the testimony of nature in her own behalf was little sought or understood, began with the assumption of a flat earth, variously shaped, and as variously supported. To whom belongs the honor of first propounding the theory of the spherical form of the earth cannot be known. It was taught by the Italian Pythagoreans of the sixth century, and was probably one of the doctrines of Pythagoras himself, as it was, a little later, of Parmenides, the founder of the Eleatics.[260]
In neither case can there be a claim for scientific discovery. The earth was a sphere because the sphere was the most perfect form; it was at the centre of the universe because that was the place of honor; it was motionless because motion was less dignified than rest.