J. H. Parry, The European Reconnaissance: Selected Documents, Walker and Co., New York, 1968. pp. 1-2 Introduction; The field of Reconnaissance ...The voyages [of the Europeans] were incidents in a persistent, determined, and ultimately successful European endeavor to establish direct contact, first with West Africa, subsequently with Asia; more specifically, to link individual centers in western Europe with places in India, the Indonesian islands, China, and Japan; places known or believed to exist, and reputed to be of high civilization and great commercial importance. The main purpose of the voyages was to discover, not new lands, but new routes to old lands. They reflected not only a keen commer- cial demand in Europe for goods of Oriental origin, but an intense curiosity among Europeans about the East itself. The interest was not reciprocated. The only Asians who had any serious concern with Europe in the later Middle Ages were Ottoman rulers and soldiers engaged in the conquest and plunder of the ancient Byzantine Empire; and the Levantine Arab merchants who sold Oriental goods at great profit to Italian traders in Alexandria or Aleppo. Elsewhere in Asia there was no demand for European goods and no interest in Europe itself. Throughout the Reconnaissance, therefore, the initiative was European. Europe sought out Asia, not Asia Europe. When Reconnaissance achieved its purpose, when contact was established, this active-passive relation persisted. Europeans eagerly absorbed all they could of the East--goods, information, ideas. Most Asiatics--except where their livelihood, safety, or sovereignty seemed directly threatened--reacted to the presence of Europeans in small numbers off their coasts or in their harbors merely with indifference or distaste. This generalization remained true for more than two hundred years after Vasco da Gama's landing in Calicut. Pugna- cious and formidable though Europeans could be, it was not until the eighteenth century that Asiatics came to take them seriously. p. 2 The voyages [of the Reconnaissance] were nearly all made within the span of about a hundred years, roughly the second half of the fifteenth century and the first half of the sixteenth. In the history of maritime discovery, this is a fairly well-defined span. European shipping, in the middle of the fifteenth century, was almost confined to European waters: the Baltic, the coasts of the northeast Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Black Sea. The only maritime powers whose ships covered the whole stretch of European waters, or most of it, were Italian--Venice, Genoa, Florence. Shipping of the Atlantic seaboard passed the Straits of Gibraltar comparatively seldom. Western Europe pot its supplies of Oriental imports, in small quantity at high prices, from Italian intermediaries, who had them from Arab inter- mediaries on terms negotiated with powerful and sometimes hostile Muslim rulers. In the middle of the fifteenth century even that long-established trade seemed likely to be interrupted. pp. 2-3 A hundred years later, a sea route to India had been found by western Europeans--by men of the Atlantic seaboard--and was in regular commercial use. An alternative, but longer and more dangerous route had been explored, into the south Atlantic and westward to southeast Asia. Trade had been opened with Malaya and some of the Indonesian islands. South China and Japan had been visited. Some of the ancient myths had been exploded. "Prester John" had turned out to be not a major Asian potentate, but a hard-pressed African one...a Christian of sorts, to be sure, but otherwise disappointing. Of all the major reported kingdoms of the East, only Marco Polo's "Cathay"--not yet iden- tified with northern China--still eluded the European search. This is not to say, or course, that the whole of southern Asia was open to the trade of all Europe; far from it. In the East, except in the few harbors where Portuguese had settled and were entrenched, trade was limited to what Asian rulers would permit. In the Atlantic, the two Iberian sovereigns each jealously guarded his monopoly of the ocean route which his subjects had discovered. Further exploration had already indicated that these were the only sea routes; no others existed; none, at least, through warm or temperate latitudes. Other Europeans; it appeared, could trade by sea to the East only by defying Portuguese and Spanish naval power, which none of them was yet to do; or else by finding a passage to "Cathay," east or west, through the Arctic ice. In the second half of the sixteenth century many northern Europeans turned their attention to the "northern passages," risking men, money, and ships in a hazardous and--as it proved--fruitless search. Others, again, turned back to the Levant and came to terms with the Turk, as the Venetians had done a hundred years before. In this sense too, the middle of the sixteenth century marked the end of a chapter in the story of maritime discovery. pp. 3-4 Although the establishment of direct contact with the East was the main purpose and principal achievement of voyages of discovery in our period, it was not necessarily the only purpose and certainly not the only outcome. In the course of their search the explorers found an ocean bigger than the Atlantic, a continent as big as Europe and Africa combined. Within that continent Spaniards quickly established a territorial empire whose vast riches, in the middle of the sixteenth century, were just beginning to appear. More generally, the explorers dis- covered that the world as a whole was larger by far than any then accepted authority, ancient or medieval, had taught. They proved that the salt seas of the world, with few insignificant excep- tions, were all connected, so that a seaman, with courage, adequate provisions, and a "sufficient" ship, could in time reach any country in the world which possessed a sea coast. They encountered curious animals, unfamiliar plants, strange natural phenomena, in such variety that the purveyors of fabulous tales were almost put out of business, unable to compete with the truthful narrative of sober explorers. The human inhabitants of this vast and varied world similarly displayed an infinite variety, ranging from naked cannibals to the urbane officials of great and civilized empires, compared with which the kingdoms of Europe were disorderly petty states. Pious Europeans learned, with a sense of incredulous shock, that the peoples of the world, far from being divided (with a few trivial exceptions) between two great religions, on divinely, the other diabolically in- spired, followed many faiths, and that some of these faiths contained elements worthy of a limited respect, so that their adherents were more to be pitied than blamed for their pagan ignorance. p. 4 The knowledge brought home by the discoverers, and spread about by the new device of printing, affected every aspect of European life and thought. Geographical exploration is the most empirical of all forms of inquiry, depending as it does on eye- witness experience. Practical navigators put the theories of revered authorities in cosmography to the test, and often proved them wrong. Inevitably, men of inquiring mind were encouraged to question, by observation and experiment, accepted authority in other branches of knowledge. Again, appreciation of the number and diversity of human societies led Europeans to look with new and critical eyes at their own society and institutions. Unknown lands caught the imagination of philosophers, poets, and painters. On a more immediate and practical plane, discovery made Europe richer. Exotic goods, some rare and little known, other totally new, gradually became common in European markets; while the metals of the New World helped to finance the exten- sion, eventually the predominance, of European commerce in the Old. pp. 4-5 ...These far-reaching changed did not occur overnight. Europeans took a long time to absorb the implications and exploit the opportunities revealed by an immense widening of their geographical horizon. Oceanic trade was speculative and danger- ous, though tempting. Sailors knew this all too well, but it was some years before businessmen saw that new forms of organization, new methods of mobilizing capital and spreading risks, above all a new conception of long-term investment, would be needed to make it lucrative and safe. In the realm of science and philosophy, similarly, with evidence before their eyes that seamen were discovering lands formerly unknown and unsuspected, learned men hesitated at first to draw analogies in other fields or inquiry. The idea that there might be an America of learning and under- standing beyond the horizon of the classics, ancient philosophy, and the teachings of religion was in those days new and strange, the vision of comparatively few men. Even in the filed of geography itself, book-learning and sea-going experience drew together but slowly. Learned men were willing enough to place their cosmographical theories at the disposal of inquiring explorers, and to revise those theories in the light of the explorers' discoveries; but often the explorers failed to tell them what they really wanted to know. The great discoverers, like the rulers and investors who sent them out, were practical men. They were not primarily concerned with the enlargement of knowledge. Distant, unknown continents and islands, unless obviously productive of gold or other precious things, were of little interest to them. The cartographical techniques available for recording their discoveries were limited and laborious, and naturally they concentrated their labor and skill upon the places and routes of known wealth. The knowledge which they accumu- lated, vast in extent, was sketchy, rough, and uneven. For the most part it concerned only hastily explored coastlines and commercially useful harbors. It lacked precision; it left many gaps; and while it discredited some long-lived myths, it per- petuated others. In the story of discovery in the broadest sense, therefore, our period was a time of tentative, though splendid, beginnings. "Reconnaissance" seems the most appropriate term by which to describe it. When all these qualifications have been stated, the bare facts remain: in the hundred years or so of Reconnaissance, European seamen achieved an enlargement of geographical knowledge astounding both in its extent and in its speed. In this respect no other century in the history of the world, before or since, is remotely comparable. For the first time, Europeans were enable, with the confidence of experience and firsthand report, to think of the world as a whole and all seas as one... p. 6 Western Europeans in the early fifteenth century were not wholly ignorant of the non-European, non-Christian world. In the Near East, Venetian and Genoese merchants occupied permanent factory compounds in most of the major trading centers, and current prices at Kaffa or Cairo or Damascus were commonplace talk on the Rialto. Numbers of other Europeans also regularly visited the area, at considerable expense it is true, but without great hazard. They went not as armed crusaders in the manner of their ancestors, but as pilgrims, impelled by a powerful mixture of piety, curiosity, and social emulation. The pilgrim traffic was highly organized, by the standards of the time, and was highly profitable both to the Christians who provided the trans- port and the Muslims who controlled access to the shrines. There existed a considerable volume of writing describing the Holy Land and neighboring countries, from which intending travelers could learn the routes they should follow, the authorities they should propitiate, and the tolls they would have to pay.... pp. 8-9 The lack of up-to-date reports based on firsthand knowledge, the absence of any firm criteria for judging the veracity of such reports as there were, no less than the intel- lectual habits of their time, drove students of geography in the early fifteenth century to a heavy reliance on "authorities." Academic treatises on cosmography and geography existed in profusion. Some, in the strait scholastic tradition, concerned themselves with symmetry and orthodoxy rather than with scientific verisimilitude, and drew their information chiefly from scriptural and patristic sources and from the handful of ancient writers long accepted as respectable. Others made extensive use of more recently recovered works of ancient science, coming to Europe chiefly through Arabic translations. Roger Bacon, to name an outstanding example, had a wide acquaint- ance with Arab writers. In the geographical section of his Opus majus of 1264, he maintained, on literary evidence, that Asia and Africa extended southward across the Equator, and that (contrary to Masudi and his followers) the torrid zone was habitable. Bacon exerted a powerful influence on the last great scholastic geographer, Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly, whose Imago Mundi was completed about 1410. This is a vast mine of scriptural and Aristotelian erudition, bearing little relation to travelers' experience--its author knew nothing, for instance, of Marco Polo. It had a widespread influence throughout the fifteenth century. It was printed ...about 1483. Columbus' copy, with his marginal annotations survives in the Colombina at Seville. Like all theorists of whom Columbus approved, d'Ailly, following Bacon, exaggerated the east-west extent of Asia and the proportion of land to sea in the area of the globe. Apart from his influence on Columbus, d'Ailly's work is of interest to us because of his acquaintance, wider even than Bacon's, with Arab authors and with little-known classical writers. D'Ailly not only summarize the best medieval academic thought on geographical questions; he was also the herald of a new and exciting series of classical reco- veries and of geographical writings based on their inspiration. p. 9 Any fifteenth-century scholar--in the absence of firsthand experience, and outside the realm of revealed religion--would have preferred the testimony of a classical author to that of one of his own contemporaries, where the two conflicted. More influential even than Imago Mundi was the Geography of Claudius Ptolemaeus, which appeared in Latin translation at about the same time. Ptolemy was a Hellenized Egyptian who wrote about the middle of the second century A.D., at the time of the greatest territorial extension of the Roman Empire. He endeavored to summarize in his writings the entire geographical and cosmographical knowledge of his day...The appearance of his translation was one of the most important events in the growth of European geographical knowledge. pp. 9-10 [Although his Geography provided a wealth of information on places in the world, and that he used parallels and meridians for maps]...the positions which he gives for many places outside the well-known area of the Mediterranean are wildly inaccurate. Moreover, Ptolemy's general calculations embody two basic errors. From the many Greek estimates of the circumference of the earth-- some of which were remarkable accurate--Ptolemy selected that of Posidonius, which was too small by about one sixth. Further, he assumed that the "known" world of his day--the land mass--covered exactly 180 degrees of longitude...arriving at their conclusions independently and by very different routes, Ptolemy, Marco Polo, and Pierre d'Ailly all concurred... p. 11 Ptolemy's theories were both stimulating and potentially enslaving; the advancement of geographical knowledge requited that they should first be mastered and then superseded. It was a principal task of the Reconnaissance to challenge belief in the necessary superiority of ancient wisdom. In every branch of science there came a moment when western Europe, so to speak, at last caught up with the ancient world, and a few bold men, understanding and revering what the ancients had taught, were nevertheless ready to dispute their conclusions. Doubt and disputation are the business of scholars. Ptolemy was for more than a hundred years the leading academic source of geographical knowledge in Europe. Such an authority could not be lightly challenged; yet throughout the fifteenth century there were some scholars who kept open minds, who were willing to consider the possibility that Ptolemy--who, after all, had never been to India or China--might in some particulars be mistaken. Much more remarkable, in the last quarter of the century there were some hard-headed investors and practical seamen who were willing to gamble on the possibility; so urgent was the desire to make contact with the East, and so strong the will to achieve it. pp. 11-12. The European Reconnaissance has often been described as a continuation or adaptation of the Crusades. This is to oversimplify. The traditional pattern of crusade--a direct campaign against Muslim rulers in the eastern Mediterranean lands, with the object of capturing the Holy Places and establishing Christian principalities on the shores of the Levant--had by the fifteenth century long been abandoned as hopeless. The infidel was too strong to be dislodged, too clever and too irretrievably the Devil's to be converted. For the rulers of eastern Europe, with Ottoman power expanding and the Byzantine Empire slowly foundering before their eyes, crusading had become a stark matter of self-defense, a desperate suave-qui- peut. In divided western Europe it was politically outmoded, driven from the minds of most rulers by other, more pressing concerns. It survived, however, in religious, literary, and social convention. The idea of smiting the infidels still had power to fire the imagination of men of gentle birth and adven- turous impulses. This was true especially among the nobilities of Castile and Portugal, who were generally both belligerent and pious in the old-fashioned way, and who had close at hand the last remaining areas where the infidel might still be smitten effectively. These areas were Granada, a civilized but decayed remnant of a once-great Muslim empire, and Morocco. Here, minor and limited crusades could still be mounted with good hope of glory, profit, and lasting success. The Portuguese capture of Ceuta in 1415 was an example of such a crusade. Azurara, the chronicler, states that it was undertaken because Prince Pedro and Prince Henry wished to win their spurs in battle with the infidel; and this explanation accords entirely with the conven- tion of the time and with what we know of the characters of the Princes. There were to be many subsequent assaults by Spanish and Portuguese expeditions on North African harbors, all under- taken in the same spirit of pious aggression. pp. 13-14 If the search for India had been only a matter of balancing possible profit against financial and maritime risk, the decision to attempt it might have been still longer delayed; but the pull which India exerted on the European imagination was not commercial only. The bull Romanus pontifex of 1455, which granted exclusive rights on the Guinea coast to Prince Henry's Order of Christ, stated that the Prince "...would best perform his duty to God in this matter [of exploration] if by his effort and industry that sea [to the south and east] might become navigable as far as the Indians who are said to worship the name of Christ..." European Christendom in the fifteenth century was isolated and confined. Its bastions against Islam were falling, its territory was shrinking, and in the face of danger the Church was divided within itself. The leaders in the great Councils, who planned and negotiated to heal the schisms, looked longingly for reunion, not only within the Roman communion, but with all the communities of Christians throughout the world. They knew, or had heard, of such communities: the Orthodox Greeks, fighting their losing battle against the Turk, Armenians, Syrians, and Copts, living within the boundaries of Muslim power; Chaleans on the eastern flank of Islam; Ethiopian, Indian, even Cathayan Christians; and some Christian lands whose very existence was matter of hearsay--St Brendan's Isle, and Antilla of the Seven Cities...When Vasco da Gama actually reached India, he explained to his reluctant hosts that he had come in search of Christians and spices--not spices and unbelievers, as a conventional cru- sader might have put it, or spices alone, as a mere merchant would have said. pp. 14-15 Merchants, of course, had their part to play, and without their participation the Reconnaissance could not have taken place. Voyages of discovery were expensive and hazardous. Ships had to be hired, men recruited--for this was before the age of professional navies--and cargoes of trade goods provided. Rulers, whose income from taxation and feudal incidents barely sufficed for their ordinary needs, expected merchants to sub- scribe the necessary capital. Merchants would risk large sums in speculative undertakings only if they were assured of high returns in the event of success. An oceanic expedition could be an attractive investment, in fifteenth-century terms, only if it seemed likely to open up new and relatively cheap supplies of goods in high demand in Europe. Two classes of luxury goods were of particular interest: silks and spices. pp. 18 The men who sought the sea route to India, in the middle and later fifteenth century, were probably no bolder and no luckier than oceangoing seamen of preceding centuries. Nor, in geographical matters, were they significantly better informed; the knowledge available to them of the world outside Europe was largely derived from accounts of thirteenth- and early four- teenth-century travel, and much of it was misleading and out of date. Fifteenth-century ocean navigators, however, possessed some important advantages over their predecessors of earlier times. They had more powerful backing, more consistent encouragement and support; and they were much better equipped. These advantages were, indeed, crucial to the success of the Reconnaissance. pp 23-24 Portugal and Castile had the ships and the sailors, the instruments and the weapons, the motives and the opportunity for oceanic exploration. The major voyages of discovery mostly started from Iberian harbors and the ships were manned mostly by Spaniards and Portuguese. Iberian seamen of the middle fifteenth century already possessed a great store of experience in oceanic work, accumulated not only in trading, fishing, sealing, and slaving all the way from Iceland to Cape Verde, but also in settling and fighting in the Atlantic islands--Madeira, the Canaries, the Azores--which were soon to become essential way- stations for the longer oceanic voyages. In addition, Iberian seamen--the Portuguese especially--enjoyed in the fifteenth century the advantage of consistent royal backing, which for the first time made possible a systematic, step-by-step approach to the whole business of exploration. The Spanish and Portuguese governments, however, lacked the capital, the commercial experience, and the financial organization to mount frequent large expeditions and to exploit the discoveries which their subjects made. It was the rapid growth of the international money market in the later fifteenth century which made adequate financial backing possible. Italian and German commercial and banking houses maintained networks of agencies in all the prin- cipal trading and financial centers of western Europe. The example of their business methods and their great resources of capital for investment were available, at a price, to the Spaniards and the Portuguese in the development of the dis- coveries. Among the leading Italian traders, only the Venetians held aloof--naturally, since their precious monopoly was threatened, they even egged on the Mamluk rulers of Egypt to attack Portuguese fleets in the Indian Ocean. Other Italians were very ready to support the Portuguese and Spanish enterprises and to trade with India direct. Genoese residents in Seville invested in Columbus' first and second voyages and were the chief backers of Sebastian Cabot's expedition to the R!o de la Plata. The Florentine house of Marchionni, established in Lisbon since 1443, invested in Vasco da Gama's first voyage and in many subsequent ventures. As for the Germans, the houses of Fugger, Hochstetter, and Welser all invested heavily in the early six- teenth-century Portuguese voyages to India, and the Fuggers, through their Spanish agent Cristobal de Haro, provided the trade goods carried by Magellan's fleet. The international financiers retained their grip upon the trade and products of the Indies, East and West, because of the insistent financial needs of the Iberian governments. Though the beginnings of the Reconnaissance, the first great moves in oceanic discovery, were the work, for the most part, of adventurous Portuguese and Spaniards, the development of discovery, the foundations of settlement, trade, and empire were paid for by capitalist whose bases were in the older commercial centers of the Mediterranean and South Germany. To those centers, the profits mostly re- turned. International finance made the Reconnaissance the concern of all Europe. p. 25 The Book of John Mandeville is a compilation of travelers' tales, thinly disguised as a guide to the Holy Land, but includ- ing descriptions and anecdotes of almost every country in the Near, Middle, and Far East whose name was known in Europe. Whether its author had ever visited the Holy Land is doubtful; he had certainly never traveled further east, and may never have been further afield than Liege, where he wrote his book and where, in 1372, he died. The information in the book is derived from other books. Mandeville's chief sources were the Speculum historiale and the Speculum naturale of Vincent of Beauvais; but he was a widely read man, if not in the technical sense a learned one, and he incorporated scraps from many other writers, some genuine travelers, some academic theorists, and some armchair travelers like himself. He delighted in monsters and marvels; nothing came amiss; and he freely assumed the pose of an eye- witness to lend verisimilitude to his tales. The skill with which he combined his diverse material to make a coherent whole was all his won . The book is well constructed, well written, and very entertaining; and this, no doubt, was what its author chiefly intended. pp. 30-31 Western Europeans in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries were better informed about the Far East than they had ever been before, or than they were to be again for nearly two hundred years. The Tartar Khans, the successors of Chingis [sic] Khan the conqueror, governed, first from Karakorum and later from Peking, an empire which covered northern China and the greater part of Central Asia. They kept order on the caravan routes and tolerated, even welcomed, foreign ambassadors, missionaries, and traders. A number of Europeans made the arduous journey, partly or wholly overland, to the court of "Cathay," and some wrote detailed accounts and descriptions. Of surviving writings, the most informative are those of the missionary-ambassadors of John of Plano Carpini and William or Rubruck, one despatched by the Pope in 1245, the other by Saint Louis in 1251; Marco Polo, the Venetian merchant who became a trusted official and spent nearly twenty years in the service of Kublai Khan; and Friar Odoric of Pordenone, who traveled to the East, partly by sea, between 1316 and 1318, and spent three years in Peking. Extracts from some of these eyewitness accounts were quickly incorporated in academic treatises such as the Speculum historiale of Vincente of Beauvais and Haiton's Fleurs des histoires d'Orient. The author of the Book of John Mandeville knew most of this literature well. For his descriptions of the Far East he drew most heavily upon Odoric of Pordenone, somewhat less upon Marco Polo, and upon Carpini, whose writings he knew indirectly from the pages of Vincent of Beauvais... p. 31 In the middle of the fourteenth century, all this coming and going ceased. The Black Death inhibited travel. The mili- tant Muslim power of the Ottoman Turks imposed a new barrier between East and West. The Tartar Empire broke up. In 1368 the descendants of Kublai Khan were driven from their Peking throne by a native dynasty, the Mings, who brought back the traditional official distastes and contempt for western barbarians. Mandeville, therefore, in popularizing information derived from Odoric, Marco Polo, and the rest, was not only fixing Cathay in the European mind as a symbol of wealth and splendor; he was also describing a political situation which, when he wrote in the 1360's, was passing away, to be replaced by one far less favor- able to western contact. No news of this overturn reached Europe. The notions which Mandeville put about could not effec- tively be questioned. When Columbus, over a hundred years later, tried to reach Cathay by sailing west--an enterprise which Mandeville would surely have applauded--he carried letters of credence for the Great Khan. p. 36 The barrier between East and West remained almost con- tinuously intact for a century and a half. Many Europeans traveled, for purposes of trade or pilgrimage, to the western fringe of the barrier in the countries of the Levant, for the Mediterranean commerce of Venice and other Italian cities soon accommodated itself to the facts of Turkish power. Very few Europeans, between the middle of the fourteenth century and the end of the fifteenth, succeeded in penetrating further, and those few who did so by means of hazardous subterfuge: by traveling disguised as Arabs and adopting at least the outward forms of Islam. Of this handful of travelers in disguise, the best known and most influential was Nicolo de' Condi, a Venetian trader who spent twenty-five years in the East; who visited Mesopotamia, India, Burma, the Indonesian archipelago, the approaches to the Red Sea, and Egypt; and who returned to tell the tale in 1441. Conti recounted his experiences to Poggio Bracciolini, secretary to Pope Eugenius IV. Poggio was a humanist scholar of formidable learning, who had himself traveled widely within Europe in the course of his ecclesiastical duties, and who was an enthusiastic amateur of travel further afield. he was interested in facts, in so far as they could be ascertained, rather than in tall stories, and he used the information given him by Conti as the basis of one section of his own book of historical reflection, De varietate fortunae. The section soon became detached from the rest of the work, circulated widely in manuscript, and was printed in 1491 under the title India recognita--the Indies rediscovered. Europe--at least Mediterranean Europe--was thirsting for knowledge of the East, and the Bracciolini-Conti account exerted considerable influence on geographical though. Signs of its influence can be seen in maps, notably the so-called Genoese world map of 1457, and the descriptions of India in the Historia rerum ubique gestarum of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, Pope Pius II. One of Conti's important contributions was to distinguish between Ceylon and Sumatra, which had long been confused under the Ptolemaic name of Taprobana. pp. 54-55 Between 1420 and 1460 Madeira and the Azores were settled by Portuguese adventurers, and a series of Portuguese expeditions explored the West African coast as far south as Sierra Leone. Most of these expeditions--at least those of which record remains--were undertaken by the command, or with the encouragement, of Prince Henry of Portugal, the "Navigator," most famous of the precursors and inspirers of the Reconnaissance. The waters between Cape St. Vicente, the Canaries, and the northwest coast of Morocco were already known in his day to adventurous Portuguese fishermen. Prince Henry placed gentlemen of his own household in command of the ships, and set them definite geographical objects to be reached and passed. Thus from the habit of making fishing and casual trading voyages along a relatively short stretch of coast, there developed a program of progressive, though intermittent, exploration much further south...Azurara, the contemporary chronicler of Prince Henry's achievements, lists the motives which impelled the Prince to support these enterprises. They were the traditional motives of an orthodox medieval prince. Even the last--Prince Henry's desire to fulfill the predictions of his horoscope--was a conven- tional late medieval attitude, and a reminder that in his day astronomical knowledge was still more commonly applied to for- tune-telling than to navigation. Azurara, it is true, wrote as a panegyrist in Prince Henry's lifetime; but that is all the more reason for supposing that he emphasized traits in which Henry himself took pride--his rigid piety, his personal asceticism, his obsession with the idea of the Crusade. pp. 52-53 Henry's activities attracted considerable interest in learned circles in Italy; Poggio Bracciolini, among others, addressed adulatory letters to the Prince. yet Henry himself, it is clear, was no Renaissance humanist. There is no evidence that he shared the omnivorous curiosity, the intellectual excitement, the passion for the revival of classical learning and ancient science, of a man like Poggio. He was not particularly learned himself, and unlike his royal brothers he left no writing. Henry was a generous patron of sailors and cartographers; but the story of a school of astronomy and mathematics at Sagres is pure invention. p. 57 The motives of the Portuguese in exploring the West African coast were at least in part commercial. They hoped to wrest from foreign and often hostile hands the considerable trade between Guinea and Morocco, and to divert it from the trans- Saharan caravans to their own ships. In this they achieved some success. Besides fishing and sealing off the Mauritanian coast, they exported cloth, trinkets, and later horses, to Upper Guinea, and procured there slaves, gums and resins, a little ivory, a little gold dust. The returns helped to enrich the Order of Christ, which had provided some of the capital for the trade, and of which Prince Henry was the Grand Master. The Prince secured from the Portuguese Crown a monopoly of West African trade, and from the Papacy, in 1454 and 1455, bulls conferring on the Order a monopoly of missionary work in the area. Within the general terms of his monopoly, he was liberal in licensing the trade of other investors. Among those who sailed under his license and with his support was the Venetian Alvise da Ca' da Mosto, who made two voyages, probably in 1455 and 1456. Although almost certainly the first European to report sighting the Cape Verde Islands, Cadamosto was a businessman and not primarily an ex- plorer. He shared, however, the open-minded curiosity charac- teristic of Renaissance Italy. He had a good eye for detail himself and was assiduous in collecting information from others. The fabulous and the sensational had no place in the story he had to tell. he wrote by far the best of the accounts of the upper Guinea coast which survive from the time when that coast was first becoming known to Europeans. His narrative was first published in the collection Paesi novamente retrovati, printed in Vicenza in 1507, and later, in 1550, included by Ramusio in the first volume of his Navigationi. pp. 67-68 When Prince Henry died in 1460 his rights in West Africa passed to the Portuguese Crown, and a pall of silence descended. Between Cadamosto's voyages and the first voyage of Vasco da Gama there are no surviving eyewitness reports. Partly, do doubt, this was due to an official policy of secrecy about valuable discoveries; partly to the destroying hand of time. Whatever the cause, we know nothing at first hand of Fern~o Gomes, the Crown lessee whose captains explored the Bights of Benin and Biafra; of Diogo d'Azambuja, who in 1482 built the factory-fort of Sao Jorge da Mina on what became the Gold Coast, to protect Portuguese trade in gold dust, slaves, and malagueta pepper; of Lopo Gonzalves and Rui de Sequeira, who discovered the southerly trend of the Gaboon coast--a sore disappointment to men who were beginning to think that India lay round the corner; of Diogo Ca"o, who defied that disappointment, discovered the mouth of the Congo and explored the Angola coast. In 1488 Bartolomeu Dias passed the Cape of Good Hope. With this event began the long story of Portuguese navigation, trade and piracy in the Indian Ocean; yet still we have no firsthand report. Even the chroniclers have little to say Neither Ruy de Pina nor Garcia de Resende describes the event. Barros gives a brief account; to him we owe the story that Dias named the cape the Cape of Storms, and that the King renamed it the Cape of Good Hope; but Barros wrote more than sixty years after the event, and his dates and details are unreliable. pp. 71-72 Ten years elapsed between Dias' discovery of the seaway into the Indian Ocean and Vasco da Gama's arrival in India. The delay was probably due to political uncertainties, and to the illness and death of John II, who was succeeded by Manoel "the Fortunate" in 1495; but incidentally it allowed time for the collection of valuable information. In the 1480's a number of explorer-ambassadors were sent from Portugal to various places in the Near and Middle East, both to discover what they could about India, and to establish relations with any Christian princes they might encounter on the way there. The most success- ful of these Portuguese travelers was Pedro da Covilho, who left Lisbon in 1487, the same year in which Dias sailed for the Cape. Covilho was a picaresque individual who had formerly been employed as a spy in Spain and Morocco. He traveled disguised as a Muslim merchant--he spoke Arabic--via Cairo and Suakin to Aden, where he shipped in an Arab dhow to Calicut. There he made a reconnaissance of the ports of the Malabar coast, including Goa, the terminus of the Arabian horse trade to India. From Malabar he sailed to Ormuz, the great commercial entrepot of the Persian Gulf; and from there to Sofala, where he carried out a corresponding survey of the Arab trade along the East African coast. He then returned to Cairo, arriving there late in 1490. Eventually, after three more years of fantastic adventure, including a "pilgrimage" to Mecca, he reached Abyssinia, and there spent the remaining thirty years of his life as a powerful and trusted (but probably captive) servant of the emperor. He had indeed found "Prester John." During his stay in Cairo in 1490 he had induced a messenger to carry a report of his travels back to John II. If this letter reached the king--and though positive evidence is lacking, there is reason to believe it did-- then Vasco da Gama could have been told what Indian Ocean harbors to make for and what kind of reception to expect; though the unsuitability of the presents and trade goods he carried shows how sketchy this information must have been. p. 72 The ten years' interval may also have been used for further maritime reconnaissance. Before sending an expensive expedition all the way to India, it may well have been thought prudent to investigate more thoroughly the wind system and other navigational peculiarities of the central and south Atlantic; perhaps even to reconnoiter the Muslim harbors in East Africa. There is a reference, in an Arabic book of sailing directions, to Portuguese vessels wrecked of Sofala in 1495; though the story is not confirmed in any known Portuguese source. Be that as it may, Vasco da Gama's navigation through the Atlantic, by a route very different from that of Dias, was bold, well informed, and accurate. In the East African ports also he shoed a self-con- fidence which suggested reliable intelligence. When he set sail from Malindi to cross the Indian Ocean, however, he was in waters totally unknown to European pilots. He required a remarkable stroke of luck, as well as courage and skill, to bring his three ships safely to anchor in Calicut Road in May 1498. The Portuguese chroniclers naturally had much to say about his famous voyage; but as usual firsthand evidence is scanty. All reports, logs, and trading accounts brought back by the fleet have disappeared. While they survived, they must have been treated as highly secret. Some of the chroniclers used them. Of the secondary descriptions of the voyage, the best are in the Decades of Joao de Barros and in Damiao de Gois' Chronicle of King Manoel. Barros was a Casa da India official and Gois an official archivist; both had access to documents; but they wrote many years after the event, and neither was a sailor. Of the voyage as a triumphantly successful maritime operation--which it was--they tell us very little. pp. 72-73 The only surviving eyewitness account of the voyage is the Roteiro...In some ways it is a disappointing document, but apart from the chronicles it is the foundation of our knowledge. It is not a true roteiro, but a simple diary. Its author has never been identified and we de not know his rank or duties; but he was not in the flagship and does not seem to have participated in the inner councils of the fleet. He may have been a soldier; he does not write like a seaman. he tells us little about navigation. Perhaps the most tantalizing sentence in the whole document is the casual reference to "the pilot whom the king had given us" at Malindi. This man is described in the chronicles as a Gujerati, but a modern scholar has identified him as the celebrated Arab astronomer-pilot Ahmad ibn M djid, the best-know Asian navigator of his day, and author of a distinguished collec- tion of rutters and nautical instructions. Why he happened to be in Malindi, and how he was persuaded to accompany the fleet, we do not know. His services were crucial to the success of the enterprise. p. 73 Vasco da Gama's expedition was not primarily a voyage of discovery--the commercial importance and the general position of India were well known--but an armed commercial embassy and reconnaissance. On this side of the fleet's activities the Roteiro is more informative. The writer understood that the vested interests of Arab traders, both in East Africa and in India, and of the Malabar Muslims...stood in the way of Portuguese commercial plans at Calicut. He saw also the contempt with which the goods carried in the fleet were regarded by upper- class Malabaris; and unwittingly he revealed the unfavorable impression which the behavior of the Portuguese, compounded of ignorance, arrogance, and suspicion, made upon their hosts. He shared his commanding officer's delusion the Hindus of Malabar, like the Nestorians, were a heretical kind of Christian--a delusion in which many Portuguese, with what seems to us singular obtuseness, long persisted. Vasco da Gama was a sea commander of great determination, courage, and skill. As a commercial ambas- sador he was much less successful. His first visit to Calicut made it clear that his countrymen could break into the Indian Ocean trades only by force of arms. pp. 91-92 Most of the early sixteenth-century accounts of European visits to the East were written by Portuguese seamen or officials, and the Portuguese government endeavored, on the whole successfully, to prevent their publication. They remained in manuscript until at least the second half of the century, some much longer; and some have entirely disappeared. When, occasionally, a non-Portuguese traveler succeeded in getting to the East, he could publish his experiences without much fear of contradiction and in the expectation of ready sale. The Itinerary of Ludovico di Varthema of Bologna first appeared in Rome in 1510. Unlike most sixteenth-century commentators (but like Condi in the preceding century) Varthema went to the East over the land routes of the Levant, learned colloquial Arabic and accepted Islam, passing himself off as a Christian born, but captured in early youth. He arrived in South India in 1504, six years after Vasco da Gama's first visit, six years before Alboquerque's capture of Goa, during the early struggle of the Portuguese to establish armed trading posts on the Malabar coast. In 1505 Varthema--according to his own account--rounded Cape Comorin by sea, touched at several places on the east coast of India, and visited Tenasserim, Pegu, Malacca, Sumatra, the Moluccas, Borneo, and Java. Doubts have been cast on the authen- ticity of these travels east of Cape Comorin. If the dates usually ascribed to them are correct, and if Varthema really visited all the places he claimed to have visited, his journey must have been somewhat hurried; and certainly his descriptions of Burma, Malaya, and the islands are shorter, vaguer, and less detailed than those of South India. It is fairly generally conceded, however, that the journey was possible; and whether or not the information which Varthema recorded was all derived from personal knowledge, it is of great interest...Varthema returned to Calicut late in 1505, and after a series of escapades there took employment with the Portuguese at Cochin. He was knighted for his services, and sailed for Lisbon in 1508 with a Portuguese fleet, in a ship belonging to the Florentine house of Marchionni. From Lisbon he went on to Rome to arrange for the publication of his book. pp. 92-93 The Itinerary is at least plausible; in its day it was influential; Magellan is said to have used it in the arguments which he laid before Charles I of Spain. If modern scholars do not entirely believe Varthema, his contemporaries in Europe did. The book was an immediate success. It appeared in six Italian editions between 1510 and 1535, and was translated into Latin, German, and Spanish; later in the century into French, Dutch, and English. Varthema's descriptions of South India, in particular, are vivid and apparently accurate... Most interesting among them is brief account of the great Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar. Later in the century, at Talikot in 1565, Vijayanagar was to be defeated and dismembered by a league of Muslim princes; but in Varthema's day it was still strong, prosperous, and secure, the suzerain power of most of Hindu South India. Today its capital city is a vast deserted ruin. Varthema wrote the best descrip- tion we have of Vijayanagar, the Sanskrit "City of Victory," at the height of its splendor. pp. 96-97 After an initial rebuff at Calicut the Portuguese established themselves, by agreement with the local ruler, in a fortified factory compound at Cochin. Their intrusion into the spice trade provoked universally hostile reaction among the Muslim rulers of the whole Indian Ocean littoral, led by the Sultan of Egypt, egged on by the Venetians. King Manoel quickly became convinced of the need for a secure base in India, under Portuguese control. In 1510 Affonso d'Alboquerque, in alliance with a Hindu corsair named Timoja, captured the island city and harbour of Goa from its Muslim ruler, and began to develop it both as a naval base and as the administrative and commercial center of Portuguese activity throughout the East. From Goa expeditions went out in attempts to seize other points of stra- tegic and commercial importance, both of the Indian Ocean coasts and in the Malay archipelago. Portuguese superiority in naval armament, especially in gunnery, gave these attempts an initially rapid success. In the second decade of the sixteenth century the Portuguese established an effective though, as it turned out, short-lived monopoly of the supply of spices to Europe. The Book of Duarte Barbosa describes the situation in the East in the middle of this decade of Portuguese success. Barbosa served in India as a government official between 1501 and 1516 or 1517. He learned Malayalam, knew South India thoroughly, and described it well; his Book, though it describes perfunctorily many other places in the East, is chiefly concerned with India. So valuable and informative a manuscript, as might be expected, was allowed only a very limited circulation in Portugal, but a copy was supplied, no doubt clandestinely, to an Italian translator in 1524, and the Italian version appeared in print as part of the firs volume of Ramusio's Navigationi in 1550. This was the only version known to scholars until 1812, when a Portuguese manuscript copy came to light and was published in Portugal. The differences between the two versions are slight: a tribute to Ramusio's skill as an editor. p. 109 The eastern luxury goods in which Portuguese factors were chiefly interested were product not of India, but of islands in the Malay archipelago; nor were the Malabar ports the only markets, or even the principal markets, where such goods were bought and sold. Arab merchants shipping to the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf could easily elude Portuguese interference by making their purchases in one or other of the Malayan or Indonesian markets, of which Malacca was the best known. Malacca had a strategic as well as a commercial importance, because most shipping between the archipelago and the Bay of Bengal passed through the Malacca Strait. The Portuguese commanders in India soon grasped that in order to establish a monopoly of the supply of spices to Europe they would have to destroy the trade of their Arab competitors; and that in order to achieve this end they must control Malacca. If they could establish their own factories still further east, and make their own spice purchases, or some of them, in the actual places of origin, so much the better. pp. 109-10 Malacca was taken by a Portuguese force under Affonso d'Alboquerque in 1511. It became, like Goa, a fortified Portuguese base, and remained so until 1641. In 1512 Alboquerque sent a fleet of three ships under Antonio de Abreu to reconnoiter the "spicery." Abreu got as far as the Banda Islands before returning to Malacca. His navigator, Francisco Rodrigues, wrote a brief report on maritime routes in the East--a rudimentary "China rutter"--illustrated by views and sketch charts, partly drawn from Javanese originals, which provided the Portuguese government (and subsequently, through "leakage," the Spanish government) with their first reliable cartographical information on the eastern archipelago. Another of Abreu's officers, Francisco Serrao, was shipwrecked, and made his way to Amboina and thence to Ternate in the Moluccas, where he spent the rest of his life as an advisor to the Muslim ruler and as an occasional, and somewhat unreliable, informant to Europeans on island affairs. Ternate was at that time one of the very few islands in which cloves were grown. With the information so acquired and the contacts so established, the Portuguese at Malacca, shortly after Abreu's return, began regular trade with the Moluccas and, by agreement with the ruler, established a factory (but not a fort) on the island of Ternate. p. 110 Toma Pires served from 1512 to 1515 as accountant (contador) of the royal factory at Malacca. It was a compara- tively humble office and Pires, the son of an apothecary, was a comparatively humble person; but he was a competent and trust- worthy official and his connection with eastern trade made him a rich man. He was also an intelligent and accurate observer, who knew the East well. The Suma Oriental was written partly in Malacca, partly in Goa, and completed in 1515. It is a descrip- tion of the whole of the East, but is primarily concerned with commercial matters, and well reflects the commercial euphoria of the Portuguese in the second decade of the sixteenth century. On India, Pires was less well informed than Duarte Barbosa; but he wrote by far the best contemporary account of Malacca and the islands immediately after the Portuguese arrival in the area. The Suma Oriental must have been a great interest and use to the authorities in Lisbon. Like Barbosa's Book, it was treated as a secret document. Ramusio got hold of part of the book--that dealing with India, Ceylon, Burma, China, Japan, Borneo, and the Philippines--and published it in 1550; but information on Malacca, Sumatra, Java, and the Spiceries was more closely guarded, and these portions of the Suma Oriental remained unpublished until 1944. pp. 122-23 In the second decade of the sixteenth century, Portuguese traders in the East discovered that Europe was not the only market for Indonesian luxury products. An equally avid, and probably richer, market for spices, and for sandalwood and other aromatic woods, was mainland China. In the South China ports visiting traders could obtain return cargoes of silk and of porcelain, then exceedingly rare in Europe and expensive even in the bazaars of India. In the early fifteenth century the merchants of these southern ports had themselves carried on a flourishing foreign trade as far west as Malabar; but from the 1430's the imperial government, in the interests of security, enforced more and more strictly the rules of the Ming Code forbidding Chinese subjects to travel outside China. Foreign trade in Chinese shipping--though it could not be entirely prevented--was much diminished; visits of foreign merchants to Chinese ports, therefore, though regarded with suspicion in official circles, were welcomed by the local mercantile community, who depended on foreign trade for much of their livelihood. At the same time, the resurgence of Mongol aggressiveness and the concentration of Chinese military strength on the northern frontiers led to the neglect and decay of the southern navy and coastal defenses, so that the authorities could neither control the movement of foreign ships along the coast nor defend the smaller harbors against the depredations of Japanese, and later Portuguese, pirates. p. 123 The first Portuguese traders to China traveled in local junks. The first recorded visit was that of Jorge Alvarez (who later made trading voyages to Japan) in 1514. In the next few years a number of Portuguese traders, some arriving in their own ships, did business with Chinese merchants who came out, somewhat furtively, to meet them at various islands in Lintin Bay, down- river from Canton. Their reports were encouraging; and in 1517 an official Portuguese embassy was despatched from Malacca to Canton. The chief of the mission was Toma Pires, the author of the Suma Oriental. He bore letters from the Kings of Portugal to the emperor, proposing friendship and trade and requesting a site for a factory. pp. 123-24 The Portuguese had already made themselves respected, or at least fears, in many places on the coasts and in the islands of southern Asia, but their negotiations had been with relatively minor rulers. They had no notion of the character of the mighty state they were now approaching. The Chinese Empire was vast in size, ancient in civilization, centralized and bureaucratically administered. It was self-sufficient and supremely confident of its own unique superiority over other human societies. To its officials, the idea of the emperor negotiating with other rulers as equals was unthinkable. Embassies were allowed to enter China only for the purpose of rendering homage and tribute and seeking protection. An embassy such as that of Pires, arriving in a formidable armed fleet, was a totally new experience. Pires was received in Canton with wary and noncommittal civility, and was kept there for three years awaiting permission to proceed to Peking. Permission was even- tually granted in 1520, largely because the mission had been mis- takenly described by the official interpreters as a tribute- bearing embassy of the usual kind. There was even a possibility that the Chang-ta Emperor--curious about the Portuguese and magnanimously tolerant of their uncouth ignorance--might receive the ambassador. The emperor, however, was absent on a tour when Pires arrived in Peking, and a further seven-months' wait ensued. During this time, the mistranslation of the King of Portugal's letters was discovered; complaints were received of various piracies and violations of Chinese territory committed by Portuguese ships along the coast; and the exiled Sultan of Malacca (who had for years past acknowledged a loose vassalage to the emperor) sent an embassy to report the seizure of his capital by the Portuguese and to beg for help. In 1521 the Chang-ta Emperor died without having received Pires, a decree was issued prohibiting all trade with Europeans, and the embassy was bundled unceremoniously back to Canton. There, after a further period of indecision and delay Pires and his staff were arrested, and Pires was ordered to write to the King of Portugal instructing him in the emperor's name to restore Malacca to the sultan. On his refusal, his presents for the emperor--already rejected--were confiscated. He and his companions were manacled and placed in prison; where, one by one, they died. The date and the manner of their deaths is uncertain; but two at least were still alive in 1524, and managed in that year to smuggle out letters, which three years later reached Portugal, describing their fate and urging the king to undertake a military expedition against China. These letters are the first detailed eyewitness accounts of life in China to reach Europe since the early fourteenth century. Cristav~o Vieira, in particular, was the first European since the discovery of the Cape to visit Peking and write home describing his experiences. pp. 142-43 Japan was the last major country of the East to be "discovered"--that is to say, visited--by Europeans; though under the name "Cipangu" the island kingdom had been known to Europeans by repute, as a synonym for exotic wealth, since Marco Polo's time. Portuguese seamen, in the course of smuggling and minor depredations off the China coast, probably made contacts with Japanese Wako pirates in the 1530's. Other travelers and traders followed in the next few years, including Fernao Mendes ("Mendax") Pinto, who made several visits, though nothing which he said could be accepted without corroboration. The first clear eyewitness description was written at Malacca in 1547 by the trader Jorge Alvarez, at the request of St. Xavier. Alvarez had just returned from Japan, having spent some time at the port of Yamagawa in southern Kyushu. He was accompanied by a Japanese named Yajiro, a fugitive from justice who became a Christian convert. Alvarez was a good observer and a man of some educa- tion. Besides topographical, economic, and social comment, he remarked in his report on the courtesy of the Japanese, their interest in strangers, and their willingness to listen to argu- ment; characteristics which contrasted sharply with the indif- ference or contempt commonly displayed by the Chinese. These were the characteristics which above all attracted the attention of St. Francis and aroused his hopes of a fruitful Christian mission. In 1549 Xavier himself went to Japan, with money and supplies lavishly provided by the Portuguese captain of Malacca. His party, which included Yajiro, left Malacca in May 1549 and landed at Kagoshima in August, a quick passage. He was kindly and courteously received by the daimyo of the province, and by other daimyo subsequently; probably these semi-independent feudatories hoped that the missionaries would be followed by more Portuguese traders from whom they could purchase firearms. Whatever the motive, all the Japanese with whom Xavier came in contact--even Buddhist monks--seemed pleased to see him and interested in what he had to say. The letter quoted here describes his enthusiastic response to this agreeable reception. Its description of Japanese society is in some respect super- ficial, as it was bound to be after a residence of only a few weeks, especially since conversations had to be interpreted by Yajiro; but it is the letter of a sympathetic, observant, edu- cated man. pp. 143-44 Xavier spent two years in Japan, during which time his initial enthusiasm became tempered by appreciation of the obstacles in the way of his mission. The deep hold of Buddhism he rightly considered most formidable of these obstacles, despite the friendliness of individual Buddhist monks. In 1551 he visited Kyoto, the imperial capital, and discovered another obstacle in the prevailing anarchy and lawlessness. The daimyo were the real local rulers; the emperor was powerless to control his subjects, and the project of a systematic programme of conversion from the Court downwards was clearly hopeless. By 1551 Xavier became convinced that China, not Japan, was the key to the Christianizing of the East. He was to spend the last years of his life in fruitless attempts to secure admission to China. Nevertheless, as a mission his visit to Japan was a notable success. He left behind him a promising Christian community of a thousand souls; and he never lost his initial liking for the Japanese. p. 151 Columbus was not the first European seagoing commander to land in the Americas. The Icelanders and Greenlanders preceded him by nearly five hundred years; and it is possible that in his own time fishermen from English west-country ports were fishing off Newfoundland, and may have sighted land before 1492. Never- theless, the significance of historical events must be measured by their consequences. Columbus' expedition of 1492 was the first trans-Atlantic voyage to have immediate, significant, and permanent results. Columbus, not Leif the Lucky or a nameless fisherman from Bristol, made the landfall which brought the Americas firmly within the range of European action. pp. 151-52 The precise objects of Columbus' first voyage have been much discussed, and mystery still surrounds them. By the agreement under which he sailed, he was to "discover and acquire islands and mainland in the Ocean Sea." This standard formula doubtless included Antilla or Atlantis, if such a place existed; but almost certainly the phrase "islands and mainland" was also understood to mean Cipangu and Cathay. There was nothing fantas- tic, at least in theory, about a proposal to reach eastern Asia by sailing west. The earth was round; no one suspected an intervening continent; it was a matter of winds, of currents, above all of distance. Could a ship, the stores she could carry, and the men in her, endure so Far? Columbus apparently thought they could. What he proposed to do, if he actually reached "Cathay," he never explained. His ships carried no trade goods, no presents for princes, and were unarmed. He bore a letter for the "Great Khan"; but once he had arrived (as he thought) in the general neighborhood of "Cathay" he made no serious attempt to find and enter its harbors. Instead, he made excuses, wandered among the islands searching for god, and eventually, having lost his flagship, set sail for home. p. 152 Columbus returned to Spain in 1493 convinced that he had found outlying islands in the archipelago of which Japan was supposed to form a part; such an archipelago as is marked, for example on Martin Behaim's 1491 globe. He supported his con- clusions by combining Marco Polo's estimate of the east-west extent of Asia, which was an overestimate; the same traveler's report of the distance of Japan from the Asian mainland--1,500 miles, a gross overestimate; and Ptolemy's estimate of the circumference of the earth, which was an under-estimate. He assumed the length of an equatorial degree to longitude to be 10 per cent shorter than Ptolemy had taught and 25 per cent shorter than the true figure. This calculation would make the westward distance from Europe to Japan less than 3,000 nautical miles. The actual great circle distance is 10,000 nautical miles; but according to Columbus' reasoning, Hispaniola and Cuba were near to where Japan ought to be. The east coast of the mainland of Cathay might well be, as Columbus stated, distant only ten days' sailing. As time went on, as more and more doubts were cast on his reliability, Columbus thought of more and more ingenious or fantastic arguments to support his main contention; to the contention itself, he clung with passionate insistence to the end of his life. Columbus was a self-taught and extremely persuasive geographical theorist, a capable sea commander, and a careful, though not very up-to-date navigator. He never took solar observations, as far as we know, and may not have understood them. His Polaris observations were sometimes unreliable. On the other hand, his dead reckoning had an uncanny accuracy. He carried a compass rose in his head. Once he had been to a place, he could always find it again. In matters pertaining to naviga- tion, also, he was uncommonly observant. He not only discovered the West Indies; he discovered the best way to get there, in the zone of the northeast trade winds, and the best way to return, before the westerlies of middle latitudes in the North Atlantic. pp. 152-53 On his return to Spain, Columbus sent to Ferdinand and Isabella a letter summarizing the long or journal of his voyage, which he had kept from day to day. Subsequently, on his reception at Court, he presented the journal itself. The letter received wide and immediate publicity, but the journal was kept secret; the original of it has disappeared, and so has a copy which the Columbus family was allowed to retain. An abstract of one copy, however, was made by the Dominican missionary and historian Bartolome de las Casas, who was a friend of the family. Las Casas quoted some parts of the journal verbatim; summarized other parts in the third person; and here and there interpolated comments of his own, as from his knowledge of the West Indies, he was well qualified to do. The Las Casas abstract was discovered in 1791 in the library of the Duque del Infantado by Mart!n Fernandez de Navarrete, who published it in the firs volume of his Coleccion de Viajes in 1825. p. 153 A better edition appeared in the Raccolta Colombiana in 1892. Since then there have been several other Spanish editions, and translations have been made, some from the Navarrete version, some from the Raccolta, into other major European languages. pp 171-72 European reaction to Columbus' discoveries, and to the interpretation which he put upon them, ranged from excited optimism through skeptical questioning to flat disbelief. The discoverer's Procrustean handling of Ptolemy naturally aroused the suspicions of the learned; and except for a few gold trinkets, no evidence of Oriental wealth had been produced. Apart from gold, the commonest criterion for assessing the cultural standing of strange peoples was clothing. Civilized people wore woven fabrics, preferably silk; savages went about in skins or plaited grass or bunches of leaves. By this test, Arawaks made an indifferent showing; they knew how to spin cotton and in some islands had some knowledge of weaving, which they employed in making hammocks; but for the most part they wore no clothes. Clearly they must be primitive people; but did this necessarily prove Columbus wrong? Nicolo de' Conti had reported primitive peoples in some of the Asian islands. If the Caribs ate their neighbors, so--according to Condi--did the Bataks of Sumatra. Ptolemy, also, was not infallible; he had never been in Asia; wise and well-informed as he was, he too might be mistaken. What were officials, investors, and stay-at-home experts to Believe? Peter Martyr, the shrewd contemporary chronicler of discovery, though he kept an open mind for some years, inclined to skepticism. He wrote in 1493 that Columbus had found islands and "indications of a hitherto unknown continent." The identification with Asia seemed to him "contradictory to the theories of the Ancients concerning the size of the globe." He found some support for Columbus, however, in Aristotle and Seneca, and admitted that the parrots which the expedition brought back recalled Pliny's descriptions of Indian birds. Reports of the second voyage made him more skeptical: "When treating of this country one must speak of a new world, so distant is it and so devoid of civilization and religion." Peter Martyr's skepticism, however, was not widely shared, in the early years, in Spain, where the general mood was one of confident hope. The Portuguese, as usual, kept their considered opinions to themselves. Publicly they seemed unmoved by Columbus' claim to have reached Asia; but they objected strongly to Spanish exploration in the tropical Atlantic, uncomfortably close to their Guinea preserve and athwart their own prospective route to India. As for Ferdinand and Isabella, they seem initially to have accepted Columbus' interpretation. In any event, reports of gold, pearls, and docile natives led them to seek papal approval of their activities, to negotiate with the Portuguese a demarca- tion of areas of Atlantic exploration, and to authorize further expeditions to explore and settle the West Indian Islands. Columbus himself made three more voyages. In 1498 he sighted the northern coast of South America and discovered the mouths of the Orinoco, clearly a continental river. Two years later, the second Portuguese India fleet, commanded by Pedro Alvares Cabral, sighted the east coast of what is now Brazil, south of Cape Sao Roque. These and other reports revealed the presence of a landmass, possible more than one landmass, of formidable size, laying partly within the area allocated to the Portuguese by the Treaty of Tordesillas. The nature of these lands, their relation to one another and to Asia, had still to be explained. pp. 172-73 Amerigo Vespucci, who began the process of explana- tion, was a better educated person than most of the professional explorers. He was a businessman, a man of substance and indeed of some eminence in his native Florence. He first went to Spain in 1492 as a representative of the Medici, to supervise a number of maine supply contracts. His study of geography and navigation was a pastime, though one which, to judge from his letters, he pursued systematically and seriously. His residence in Seville gave him the opportunity to apply his theoretical knowledge to practical ends, and in early middle age he left his business concerns to become an explorer. p. 173 Vespucci's voyages received a great deal of publicity in his own time and have been the subject of much controversy since. The earliest printed accounts of them appeared in 1504, in the form of pamphlets purporting to be letters written by Vespucci. One, in Latin and addressed to Lorenzo di Pier Francesco de' Medici, under the title Mundus Novus, described a voyage along the west coast of the South Atlantic. Another, in a somewhat crude Italian and addressed to the Gonfaloniere Piero Soderini, described four voyages in the western regions. The pamphlets were an immediate success and went through many editions. The celebrated collection of voyages entitled Paesi novamente retrovati, published by Francanzano da Montalboddo in 1507, included the Mundus Novus, and further attributed to Vespucci a spurious voyage to Calicut. In the same year, 1507, Martin Waldseemueller included a Latin version of the Soderini letter, under the title Quattuor navigationes, in his Cosmographiae introductio, published at St. Die. In the introduction to this work, Waldseemueller suggested that Vespucci's name should be given to the continent whose coast he had explored. The sugges- tion caught the popular fancy, and the name America quickly became attached to the southern continent. Latin in the century, largely through Mercator's use of it, it came to be extended to North America s well. pp. 173-74 Mundus Novus and the Four Voyages are now generally, though not universally, considered by scholars to be forgeries, in the sense that they were not written by Vespucci. They were pirated accounts, partly based on genuine letters by Vespucci, partly invented. Manuscript letters more convincingly attributed to Vespucci...were discovered in the Riccardiana in Florence in the eighteenth century. These letters, all of which are addressed to Vespucci's patron Lorenzo di Pier Francesco de Medici, contradict the printed tracts in important particulars, and record only two voyages: the only two now generally accepted as authentic. The first was made in 1499 by Spanish ships, and al least part of the way in company with Alonso de Ojeda. It covered the coast from a point west of Cape Sao Roque, northwest and west to the Maracaibo Lagoon. On this voyage Vespucci made original and significant trails of a method of calculating longitude from the times of the conjunction of planets with the moon; a method too cumbersome to be of much practical use, though it persisted in manuals of navigational theory until the late eighteenth century. In 1501 Vespucci embarked on a second voyage, under Portuguese auspices and with knowledge of Cabral's sighting of the coast of Brazil. Vespucci sailed from Lisbon to the Cape Verde Islands and thence across the Atlantic. He reached Cabral's coast in about 5oS., and followed it in a southwesterly direction for more than two thousand miles, beyond the Rio de la Plata, to a point--perhaps San Julien--on the coast of Patagonia; which coast he rightly reckoned to be on the Spanish side of the Tordesillas demarcation line. Vespucci's two voyages, therefore, between them covered the greater part of the Atlantic coast of South America, revealing the continuity and immense size of that continent, and pointed the way which Sol!s and Magellan were later to take in seeking a western passage round it. p. 174 In the first of the two letters...--the letter from Seville in 1500--Vespucci apparently still accepted Columbus' theory that the coast he had explored was a remote and primitive part of Asia. He wrote in Ptolemaic terms of his hopes of rounding the "Cape of Catigara" and entering the "Great Gulf" which separated Cathay from the Golden Chersonese, Taprobana, and India intra Gangem. In the letter from Lisbon in 1502, describing his souther voyage, he made no mention of Ptolemy. At some time between the two dates he had reached his momentous conclusion: that the coast he was exploring belonged to a con- tinent unconnected with Asia, unknown to the Ancients, and to Europeans wholly new. PARRY-01.NTS