A History of Sea Power

by William Oliver Stevens; Allan F. Westcott

With the revival of classical learning in the Renaissance, geographical theories also became less wildly imaginative than in the medieval period, the charts of which, though beautifully colored and highly decorated with fauna and flora, show no such accurate knowledge even of the old world as do those of the great geographer Ptolemy, who lived a thousand years before. Ptolemy (200 A.D.), in company with the majority of learned men since Aristotle, had declared the earth to be round and had even estimated its circumference with substantial accuracy, though he had misled later students by picturing the Indian Ocean as completely surrounded by Africa, which he conceived to extend indefinitely southward and join Asia on the southeast, leaving no sea-route open from the Atlantic. There was another body of opinion of long standing, however, which outlined Africa much as it actually is. Friar Roger Bacon, whose interest in the compass has already been mentioned, collected statements of classical authorities and other evidence to show that Asia could be reached by sailing directly westward, and that the distance was not great; and this material was published in Paris in a popular Imago Mundi of 1410. In general, the best geographical knowledge of the period, though it underestimated the distance from Europe westward to Asia and was completely ignorant of the vast continents lying between, gave support to the theories which the voyages of Diaz, Vasco da Gama, and Columbus magnificently proved true.

When the best sailors of the time were Italians, and when astronomical and other scientific knowledge of use in navigation was largely monopolized by Arabs and Jews, it seems strange that the isolated and hitherto insignificant country of Portugal should have taken, and for a century or more maintained primacy in the great epoch of geographical discovery. The fact is explained, not so much by her proximity to the African coast and the outlying islands in the Atlantic, as by the energetic and well-directed patronage which Prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460) extended to voyages of exploration and to the development of every branch of nautical art. The third son of John the Great of Portugal, and a nephew on his mother's side of Henry IV of England, the prince in 1415 led an armada to the capture of Ceuta from the Moors, and thereafter, as governor of the conquered territory and of the southern province of Portugal, settled at Saigres near Cape St. Vincent. On this promontory, almost at the western verge of the known world, Henry founded a city, Villa do Iffante, erected an observatory on the cliff, and gathered round him the best sailors, geographers and astronomers of his age.

PORTUGUESE VOYAGES AND POSSESSIONS

Under this intelligent stimulus, Portuguese navigators within a century rounded the Cape of Good Hope, opened the sea route to the Indies, discovered Brazil, circumnavigated the globe, and made Portugal the richest nation in Europe, with a great colonial empire and claims to dominion over half the seas of the world. Portuguese ships carried her flag from Labrador (which reveals its discoverers in its name) and Nova Zembla to the Malay Archipelago and Japan.

It is characteristic of the crusading spirit of the age that Prince Henry's first ventures down the African coast were in pursuance of a vague plan to ascend one of the African rivers and unite with the legendary Christian monarch Prester John (Presbyter or Bishop John, whose realm was then supposed to be located in Abyssinia) in a campaign against the Turk. But crusading zeal changed to dreams of wealth when his ships returned from the Senegal coast between 1440 and 1445 with elephants' tusks, gold, and negro slaves. The Gold Coast was already reached; the fabled dangers of equatorial waters—serpent rocks, whirlpools, liquid sun's rays and boiling rivers—were soon proved unreal; and before 1480 the coast well beyond the Congo was known.

The continental limits of Africa to southward, long clearly surmised, were verified by the voyage of Bartolomeo Diaz, in 1487. Diaz rounded the cape, sailed northward some 200 miles, and then, troubled by food shortage and heavy weather, turned backward. But he had blazed the trail. The cape he called Tormentoso (tempestuous) was renamed by his sovereign, João II, Cape Bon Esperanto—the Cape of Goad Hope. The Florentine professor Politian wrote to congratulate the king upon opening to Christianity "new lands, new seas, new worlds, dragged from secular darkness into the light of day."

It was not until ten years later that Vasco da Gama set out to complete the work of Diaz and establish contact between east and west. The contour of the African coast was now so well understood and the art of navigation so advanced that Vasco could steer a direct course across the open sea from the Cape Verde Islands to the southern extremity of Africa, a distance of 3770 miles (more than a thousand miles greater than that of Columbus' voyage from the Canaries to the Bahamas), which he covered in one hundred days. After touching at Mozambique, he caught the steady monsoon winds for Calicut, on the western coast of the peninsula of India, then a great entrepôt where Mohammedan and Chinese fleets met each year to exchange wares. Thwarted here by the intrigues of Mohammedan traders, who were quick to realize the danger threatening their commercial monopoly, he moved on to Cannanore, a port further north along the coast, took cargo, and set sail for home, reaching the Azores in August of 1499, with 55 of his original complement of 148 men. They came back, in the picturesque words of the Admiral, "With the pumps in their hands and the Virgin Mary in their mouths," completing a total voyage of 13,000 miles. The profits are said to have been sixty-fold.

The ease with which in the next two decades Portugal extended and consolidated her conquest of eastern trade is readily accounted for. She was dependent indeed solely upon sea communications, over a distance so great as to make the task seem almost impossible. But the craft of the east were frail in construction and built for commerce rather than for warfare. The Chinese junks that came to India are described as immense in size, with large cabins for the officers and their families, vegetable gardens growing on board, and crews of as many as a thousand men; but they had sails of matted reed that could not be lowered, and their timbers were loosely fastened together with pegs and withes. The Arab ships, according to Marco Polo, were also built without the use of nails. Like the Portuguese themselves, the Arab or Mohammedan merchants belonged to a race of alien invaders, little liked by the native princes who retained petty sovereignties along the coast. But the real secret of Portuguese success lay in the fact that their rivals were traders rather than fighters, who had enjoyed a peaceful monopoly for centuries, and who could expect little aid from their own countries harassed by the Turk. The Portuguese on the other hand inherited the traditions of Mediterranean seamanship and warfare, and, above all, were engaged in a great national enterprise, led by the best men in the land, with enthusiastic government support.

After Vasco's return, fleets were sent out each year, to open the Indian ports by either force or diplomacy, destroy Moslem merchant vessels, and establish factories and garrisons. In 1505 Francisco de Almeida set sail with the largest fleet as yet fitted out (sixteen ships and sixteen caravels), an appointment as Viceroy of Cochin, Cannanore, and Quilon, and supreme authority from the Cape to the Malay Peninsula. Almeida in the next four years defeated the Mohammedan traders, who with the aid of Egypt had by this time organized to protect themselves, in a series of naval engagements, culminating on February 3, 1509, in the decisive battle of Diu.

Mir Hussain, Admiral of the Gran Soldan of Egypt and commander in chief of the Mohammedan fleet in this battle, anchored his main force of more than a hundred ships in the mouth of the channel between the island of Diu and the mainland, designing to fall back before the Portuguese attack towards the island, where he could secure the aid of shore batteries and a swarm of 300 or more foists and other small craft in the harbor. Almeida had only 19 ships and 1300 men, but against his vigorous attack the flimsy vessels of the east were of little value. The battle was fought at close quarters in the old Mediterranean style, with saber, cutlass, and culverin; ramming, grappling, and boarding. Before nightfall Almeida had won. This victory ensured Portugal's commercial control in the eastern seas.