J.H. Parry, The Age of Reconnaissance, The World Publishing Company, Cleveland & New York, 1963. 2231 West 110th St., Cleveland 2, Ohio. p. 1 Geographical exploration...is only one of many kinds of discovery. The age saw not only the most rapid extension of geographical knowledge in the whole of European history; it saw also the fist major victories of empirical inquiry over authori- ty, the beginning of that close association of pure science, technology, and everyday work which is an essential characteris- tic of the modern western world. pp. 1-2 The modern historian, accustomed to finding as the result of seeking, to discovery as the product of research, is tempted both to exaggerate and to anticipate. it is confidently expected today that every decade will produce new and important additions to the mounting sum of human knowledge. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries people--even educated people--had no such confident expectations. The intellectual temper of the sixteenth century, particularly, was conservative, respectful of authority. Even with evidence before their eyes that seamen were in fact finding lands formerly unknown and unsuspected, learned men were slow to draw analogies in other field of inquiry...Students of science were concerned less with research than with attempts to provide neat and consistent explanations of known phenome- na...scientific inquiry in general tended to remain hypothetical and tentative, more given to broad speculation than to precise observation and experiment. p. 4 If the discoveries and the hypotheses of the scientists were only occasionally and fortuitously helpful to seamen, most seamen--even sometimes sea-going explorers and compilers of navigation manual--tended for their part to be skeptical and unreceptive of scientific ideas. Seamen were then, much more than now, a race apart, practical, conservative, employing traditional skills relying on accumulated experience. To say this is not to belittle the skill of the experience. p. 4 Even the great discoverers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were not primarily interested in discovery for its own sake. Their main interest, the main task entrusted to them by the rulers and investors who sent them out, was to link Europe, or particular European countries, with other areas known or believed to be of economic importance. The discovery of distant, unknown islands and continents, like much scientific discovery, was incidental, often fortuitous. Sometimes it was positively unwelcome. p. 5 A more practical channel of information was the school of Jewish cartographers and instrument-makers in Majorca in the later fourteenth century. Iberian Jews were well placed as intermediaries between Christendom and Islam, and the Majorcan Jews had particular advantages because of their connection, through Aragon, with Sicily, and because of their commercial contacts in the Maghreb. They were familiar with both the Arab and (such as they were) the European travellers' tales from Africa. The famous Catalan Atlas, drawn in Majorca by Abraham Cresques about 1375, was perhaps the best and most accurate, certainly the most beautifully executed medieval chart collection in the practical maritime tradition. it represents the firs, and for long the only, attempt to apply medieval hydrographical techniques to the world outside Europe. pp. 6-7 p. 8. Marco Polo, and the travellers generally, had very little influence upon the academic geographers and cosmographers of the later Middle Ages; so wide was the gap between theory and knowl- edge...Symmetry and orthodoxy rather than scientific verisimili- tude were in general the guiding principles of [the scholastic geographies of the later Middle Ages]. The most important, indeed almost the only, departure from this tradition before the fifteenth century, was the geographical section of Roger bacon's Opus Majus of 1264. Bacon had, for this day, an unusually wide acquaintance with Arab writers. pp 8-9. The Imago Mundi of Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly, the leading geographical theorist of his time, was written about 1410. It is a vast mine of scriptural and Aristotelian erudition, bearing little relation to travellers' experience--its author knew nothing, for instance, of Marco Polo. D'Ailly was a prolific writer on may topics, whose works enjoyed an immense prestige among scholars. The Imago Mundi had a widespread influence throughout the fifteenth century. it was printed at Louvain about 1483. Columbus' copy, with his marginal annotations, survives in the Colombina at Seville. Like all theorist of whom Columbus approved, d'Ailly exaggerated the east-west extent of Asia and the proportion of land to sea in the area of the globe. His section on this subject was copied almost word for word from Bacon's Opus Majus. Apart from his influence on Columbus, d'Ailly's main interest lies in his acquaintance, much wider than that of his predecessors, even than Bacon, with Arab authors a d with little-known classical writers. He made relatively little use of them; he know Ptolemy's Almagest well, for example, but where they conflicted he considered Aristotle and Pliny to be of greater authority. Nevertheless, for all his scholastic conser- vatism, d'Ailly was the herald of a new and exciting series of classical recoveries, and of geographical works based on their inspiration. pp 9-10 Ptolemy set out to summarize, in his writings, the entire geographical and cosmographical knowledge of his day. He was not himself a discoverer or a particularly original thinker, but rather an assiduous compiler. His fame rests on two works: the Geography and ...Almagest...[Almagest] was a book for the learned practitioner, serving the esoteric purposes of astrology rather than the satisfaction of general scientific curiosity-- still less the task of finding one's way at sea. it enlarged upon the austerely beautiful Aristotelian picture of transparent concentric spheres, revolving round the earth, and carrying the sun and the stars with them; and added an immensely elaborate and ingenious system of circles and epicycles to account for the eccentric movements of the planets and other heavenly bodies relative to the earth...The Aristotelian-Ptolemaic system with its celestial spheres and its epicycles remained--albeit with many variants--the standard academic picture of the universe until Copernicus, distrusting its over-stained complexity, began its demolition in the sixteenth century. p. 11. The main part of Ptolemy's text is an exhaustive gazetteer of places, arranged by regions, with a latitude and longitude assigned to each place. Ptolemy divided his sphere into the familiar 360 degrees of latitude and of longitude, and from his estimate of the circumference of the earth he deduced the length of a degree of the equator or of a meridian...Ptolemy's use of co-ordinates as a base and a frame of reference in the construc- tion of maps reappeared in the fifteenth century as a new and revolutionary invention. The second part of the Geography is a collection of maps, a word map and regional maps. Whether Ptolemy himself drew maps to accompany his text is doubtful. p. 12 Ptolemy was a compiler, not an originator...Compilation involves selection, and the authorities used by Ptolemy did not always represent the best classical thought on the subject...he perpetuated and popularized an under-estimate of the size of the earth...Ptolemy assumed...that the "known" world of his day covered exactly 180 degrees of longitude; he numbered these off from the furthest reported land to the West--the Canaries or Fortunate Isles--and stretched the continent of Asia eastward accordingly. These errors, together with those of the enclosed Indian Ocean...were to have momentous consequences. p. 13 The scholars of early fifteenth-century Europe...had no reliable criteria for criticizing Ptolemy, just as they had none for criticizing Marco Polo...His use of co-ordinates was a major advance which--though still unintelligible to seamen--could not be ignored by scholars...Growing dissatisfaction with Ptolemy's archaic maps did little, at first, to diminish the popularity of his text, for improved maps, incorporating the results of sailing experience, were bound up with it from 1482 onwards. pp. 13-14 For nearly two hundred years, therefore, Ptolemy was the leading academic source of geographical knowledge. His ideas, in geography as in astronomy, were both stimulating and enslaving, and the advancement of knowledge in both fields required that his theories 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. Not only in the specific field of geography, but in almost every branch of science, at some time during our period 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 ancient had taught, were, nevertheless, ready to dispute their conclusions. So in the process of Reconnaissance, explorers by sea, pushing rashly out into a world unknown...and finding it bigger and more varied than they expected, began first to doubt Ptolemy, then to prove him wrong in many particulars, and finally to draw on maps and globes a new and more convincing picture. Similarly, but independently, Copernicus and his successors, studying their Ptolemy and watching the heavens, noticed certain celestial phenomena which Ptolemy's theories failed adequately to explain. They began, timidly and tentatively, first, to ques- tion, then to dismantle the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic geocentric scheme of the universe, and to postulate a heliocentric system in its place. In both studies, the whole progress from deferential acceptance to doubt, from doubt to discard and replacement, took many years. Eventually, in all branches of science, Reconnais- sance became Revolution. p. 22 The fifteenth-century voyages of discovery have often been described as a continuation of the crusades. Certainly the menacing proximity of Islam was always in the minds of fif- teenth-century kings, especially in eastern and southern Europe. Nevertheless, those kings were realist enough, for the most part, to see that a crusade of the traditional pattern--a direct campaign against Muslim rulers in the eastern mediterranean lands, with the object of capturing the holy Places and estab- lishing Christian principalities on the shores of the Levant-- was no longer even a remote possibility. Crusades of this type in earlier centuries had been, in the long run, costly failures. p. 25 By the middle of the fifteenth century the mantle of the crusades had fallen upon the iberian kingdoms. Alone among European States, they were still in a position to inflict damage upon Islam. Their activities were necessarily, in the circum- stance, local and limited; but the effect even of local successes might be widely felt throughout Islam, if vigorously exploited. it is against the background of disastrous European defeats in the Levant that Castilian campaigns against Granada and portu- guese expeditions to north-west Africa must be considered. p. 28 Within a generation, the feelings which had rallied Spaniards against Granada developed into a bold and methodical imperialism which, casting about for new provinces to conquer, found its opportunity overseas. While Portuguese imperialism in West Africa sought, among other objects, a back door through which to attack the Arab and the Turk, Spanish imperialism, by chance discovery, was led to operate in a new world. p. 36 The concept of Renaissance itself is elusive and hard to define. An eminent scholar has recently reminded us that the Renaissance, in some of its aspects, was more "medieval" than many historians have supposed. However Renaissance be defined, Reconnaissance, the early process of discovery, began indepen- dently, with medieval motives and assumptions. Prince Henry and his captains were, in the main, men of the Middle Ages. Even Columbus, as we shall see, embarked on his famous enterprise with an intellectual equipment which was mainly medieval and tradi- tional. Chapter 2--very good, brief account of commerce and finance in the Old World. p. 46 The Italians were able, so long as they enjoyed a monopo- ly, to pass on to their European customers the cost of these successive obstacles to a steady trade in luxury goods. To the customers, high prices emphasized the desirability, either of finding alternative sources of supply, or else of finding alter- native routes to the same sources. Portuguese sailors, and Spaniards from the Atlantic ports, were well placed to attempt the search. The Portuguese especially possessed a large fleet of small ships. and a seafaring population trained in the ocean fisheries. Their captains were gaining experience and knowledge of the Mediterranean trades. p. 47 It is true also that in the early years of the sixteenth century spices were scarce in the Levant markets--a shortage caused partly by Portuguese depredations against Arab trade in the indian Ocean, but prolonged and accentuated by the Turkish conquest of Egypt. on several occasions between 1512 and 1519, Venetian merchants were reduced to buying spices from Lisbon to fulfil the orders of their own regular customers in south Germany and elsewhere. The Italians showed a remarkable resilience, however, in the face of mounting difficulties. By 1519 Venice had come to terms with the Turkish authorities in Cairo and Alexandria, and had imposed a stiff import duty against spices entering the Republic form the West. The Spice trade, or a large part of it, soon re-entered its old channels. In the middle years of the sixteenth century, the volume of the Levant trade was as great as it had ever been, and at least as great as that which the portuguese carried round the Cape. The European demand for spices in the sixteenth century seemed insatiable. In straight competition over price and quality, the advantages were by no means all on the side of the ocean trade. p. 48 The Venetians, therefore, far from being put out of business by the Portuguese discovery of the Ocean route, complet- ed successfully with the portuguese throughout the sixteenth century as purveyors of spices, at least to part of Europe, and continued to get their spices by the old routes...For a hundred years after Vasco da Gama, the trade of the Mediterranean was still of greater significance than that of the outer world, the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans. It was not the sixteenth century, but the seventeenth, which saw the eclipse of the Mediterranean. The heirs of Italian mercantile predominance were not the Portuguese, but the English and the Dutch. Good review of ships, seamanship, navigation, maps, and seafar- ing. p. 106 All these marine charts, world charts and sectional charts alike, were designed to serve, directly or indirectly, a practical end: to assist navigators to find their way about the world by sea; in particular, to help them to find places recently discovered, or to discover places unvisited by Europeans but believed, on the evidence or reliable reports, to exist in the positions shown. They represent a steady progression, from a blend of ascertained fact and native report, towards the comple- tion or relatively accurate charting p. 109 Dias and Vasco da Gama, by sailing round the souther tip of Africa, dealt one blow against Ptolemaic geography. Magellan and del Cano, by sailing round the world, by revealing the immense size of the Pacific, and by setting limits to the easter- ly extent of Asia, deal another. pp. 109-10 After 1529 not even Spaniards had any interest in perpetuating Ptolemy's estimate of the size of Asia. The Geogra- phy did not, for many years, lose all its authority..."terra australis incognita" in particular survived on most world maps for many years; but in general, in the second half of the six- teenth century, Ptolemy became, for most serious geographers, a revered antiquarian curiosity. p. 114 The early voyages of discovery were not made by fighting ships. The only specialized warships of the time--galleys--were obviously useless for such service: and there were good reasons, especially were coastal exploration was intended, for preferring caravels to larger ships which could carry heavier armament. Dias, Columbus, Cabot, went in search of india, or Cipango, or Cathay, in small ships designed for coastwise trade, with few arms beyond the personal weapons of the ships' companies. To enter the harbours of great and rich kingdoms with so little armed force would require--in men who knew the violent and lawless nature of life at sea in European waters--a remarkably self-confident courage; yet the explorers apparently did intend to enter those harbours if they could find them. p. 114 Possibly they assumed that they would be peaceably re- ceived, as the Polos had been; that oriental princes, even in not Christian, would share the Christians' antipathy to Islam, and welcome them both as peaceful emissaries and as potential allies. Possibly the commanders' minds were so full of the problems of exploration and of the hazards of the voyages that they gave no thought to the possible hazards of fighting when they reached their destination. Whatever the frame of mind in which they set out, their expeditions were not equipped for any aggressive purpose; their armament was no more than that required for elementary self-defence. p. 115 Guns and gunpowder, it is true, were not European monopo- lies, nor, in the fifteenth century, were they more highly developed in Europe than in some parts of the East, particularly in the Ottoman Empire, as the defenders of Constantinople had found. The use of guns as a major part of the armament of ships, however, was first developed by western Europeans, and gave them a naval superiority in the East which lasted until recent times. p. 131 The far-reaching plans and hopes attributed by the chroni- clers to Prince Henry of portugal have attracted more attention than his actual achievements. The exploration of the West African coast appears as a mere preliminary, a rehearsal for the opening of the india trade forty years after the Prince's death. Yet the two enterprises were separate and distinct. Guinea is not on the way to India; not, certainly, for a sailing ship. The Guinea trades had a value of their own, independent of the lure of India. The discovery of a coast where gold could be obtained from the same sources which supplied, by desert caravan, the cities of Morocco, was a geographical and commercial achievement of great significance in its own right. p. 140 Vasco da Gama's expedition was well-planned, and planned to all appearance with a confidence which could have come only from reliable intelligence. he himself, though by no means ignorant of navigation, was not a professional seaman, but a nobleman, a soldier, and a diplomat. his ships, except for the Berrio, were not caravels, but "naos", square-rigged ships, mounting twenty guns between them and carrying trade goods. This was not, then, a voyage of discovery, but an armed commercial embassy. Da Gama had 170 men with him, some of whom had been with Dias. They were all well armed. The fleet was fitted out under Dias' supervision; and the type of ships employed in itself suggests the expectation, based on knowledge, of finding favor- able winds. The suggestion is strengthened by da Gama's tack, which in the Atlantic was close to that subsequently followed by generations of Indiamen. p. 141 ...by a remarkable stroke of luck, da Gama secured the services--by what inducement we do not know--of the Gujerati seaman Ahmen ibn Majid, the most celebrated Asian navigator of his day, the author of the collection of rutters and nautical instructions known as Al Mahet. The season and the weather were propitious, between the monsoons, Ibn Majid brought the fleet safely through the scattered atolls...to anchor in Calicut road in May 1498. pp. 142-42 [After Cabral's trip in 1500, the next one was by Vasco da Gama in 1502] It was a powerful and well-armed force, fourteen sail in all, equipped for a demonstration of force. [Da Gama used force on ports and navel targets] Gunnery decided these encounters; at that time a Portuguese fleet, if well armed and commanded, could defeat any Asiatic fleet in the open sea...Once committed to force, the Portuguese could not renounce it. Their plan in the East was never out of mere commercial competition. They never proposed to undersell Arab and Venetian merchants by flooding Europe with cheap spices; nor could they have done so had they wished. Portuguese goods were crude and unattractive in Eastern eyes; and the local rulers could not be expected to see, in tattered crews and crowded sea-stained ships, the forerunners of a power which was to conquer half the East. Momentarily danger- ous the Europeans might be; but in the eyes of a cultivated Hindu they were desperadoes, few in number, barbarous, truculent and dirty. In fair and open trade, therefore, the portuguese could neither compete with the Arabs nor rely on the goodwill of the local rajas. in order to profit fully by their monopoly of the Cape route they would have to destroy the Arab trade in spices by force of arms at sea. The task of planning this deliberate oceanic was for trade fell to Alfonso d'Alboquerque, perhaps the ablest naval strategist of his day. pp 146ff [Good summary of Atlantic and South Sea travel during the Age of Discovery] p. 148 Throughout the fifteenth century sailors were discovering islands in the Atlantic. There was no apparent reason why the discovery of fresh islands should not go on indefinitely...It was one of the dreams of fifteenth-century sailors to rediscover [the]..mythical country [of Atlantis or Antilla], its Christian people and its gold. Probably in the Atlantic harbours of Portugal and Andalucia there were men who claimed to have sighted Antilla. it was into such a world of sailors' yarns, where anything might happen, that Columbus came peddling the "enter- prise of the Indies" round the courts of Europe. pp. 157-58 The exploring activity of the early sixteenth century was dominated by a small group of men whose national allegiance sat lightly upon them and who were qualified and willing to undertake exploration on behalf of any prince who would employ them. They were the maritime counterpart of the great army of mercenary soldiers who by the time were making a profession of the land-fighting of Europe p. 167 The system of encomiendas was not new; it had been used in Granada, in the Canaries and in the West Indian islands; but in Mexico it received more precise definition and far more extended use. An encomienda was a native village, or group of villages, 'commended' to the care of an individual, to appoint and maintain missionary clergy in the villages and to undertake a share in the military defence of the province. The conquering army was thus to be settled as a quasi-feudal militia, residing in towns of Spanish foundation but living on the country. Encomenderos were entitled by their grants to support their household by levying tribute from the villages in their care, tribute which in the early days took the forms both of food and cotton clothing and of free forced labour. A grant of encomienda, however, involved no cession of land or jurisdiction. Encomiendas were not feudal manors; nor were they slave-worked plantations. In theory and in law the Indians remained free men and their rights over the land they occupied were unimpaired. In the valley of Mexico, and in many other places, Indian land custom already made provision for the payment of tribute to overlord peoples and for the support of chieftains and priest, of temples and community houses. The Spanish encomenderos stepped into the places of the Aztec rulers and drew the tributes and services formerly paid to them. As a means of initial settlement the encomienda was logical, indeed obvious. Without it there would have been no settlement. As a permanent arrangement, however, it had grave disadvantages. Like any system involving forced labour, it lent itself to abuse, especially in view of the Spanish mania for building. pp. 175-6 The rule of the conquistadores was quarrelsome and brief. They had gone to America at their own expense, endured great hardships, risked their lives and fortunes, such as they were, without help from their government at home. Most of them looked forward to a pensioned retirement. left to themselves, they would probably have settled in loose communities, employing the feudal terms which already were anachronism in Spain, ex- ploiting the indians as the needs of the moment dictated, and according verbal homage but little else to the Crown. The rulers of Spain never for a moment thought of allowing such a state of affairs to persist. in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the Crown, with considerable bloodshed and expense, had cut the claws of the great feudal houses, of the knightly orders and of the privileged local corporations. A growing royal absolutism could not tolerate the emergence of a new feudal aristocracy overseas. Private commanders like Cortez, Pizarro, Belalcazar and Nuno de Guzman, if they escaped the knives of their rivals, were for the most part soon displaced by royal nominees. Lawyers and ecclesiastics took over the direction of the empire; cattle ranchers, mining capitalists and the exporting merchants of Seville exploited its riches. The great age of the Conquistadores ended when the principal settled areas were deemed secure. There was nothing further for them to do. Forests and empty prairies were not to their taste. Some succeeded in settling down as encomenderos, ranchers or miners; some met violent ends; some, like Bernal Diaz, lived on in obscure poverty in America; some like Cortez, returned to Spain with their winnings and spent their last years in bored and litigious retirement. Very few were trusted by the Crown with any real administrative power. They were not the stuff of which bureau- crats are made. pp. 177-78 Of the two monopolies, that of Spain was the larger both in bulk and in value. Trans-Atlantic trade between Spain and Spanish America in the 16th century employed far more ship- ping and moved far more goods than the trade from Portugal to India--paradoxically, since the one served the needs of, at most, a few hundred thousand Spanish settlers, mestizos and Hispanicized Indians, while the other connected western Europe directly with the great populations of the East. But precisely because it was a colonial society, Spanish America, much more than the highly-developed societies of the East, was the economic complement of Europe. The settlers imported from Spain the goods they needed to maintain their Spanish mode of life in an American environment. They developed, to pay for these imports, a ranch- ing, planting and mining economy, producing goods for sale in Europe. For their plantations they required slaves, and so created a market for a whole new trade with West Africa. Final- ly, in the middle of the sixteenth century they stumbled upon the richest silver mines in the world. The great silver discoveries of the fifteen-forties encouraged a great increase in trans- Atlantic trade. pp. 192-93 ...In the second half of the sixteenth century about one sailing in every six ended in disaster. At best, the quality of spices which these ships carried was insufficient to meet the European demand, even when added to the trade which persisted through the Levant. Except for local and temporary gluts, the price of spices remained high. The temptation to the interloper was as great at the end of the sixteenth century as it had been at the end of the fifteenth. p. 233 The success of the friars in establishing their ascendan- cy over the Indians was extraordinary, and can be explained only in terms of Indian psychology. The Indians were accustomed to living in accordance with an intricate and continuous ritual which governed all their communal activities, including the all- important processes of agriculture. Ceremonial and work were intertwined and inseparable. The Spanish conquest, with its destruction of temples, its prohibitions of pagan dances, its forceful proselytizing, weakened and in some places destroyed the old ritual organization. pp. 273-74 The Reconnaissance was a movement not only of discov- ery and trade, but of migration on a scale which Europe had not known since the Dark Ages; a migration of whole communities, men, women and children, animals and cultivated plants. The migration was sea-borne, at least initially, and its tide set for the most part from east to west across the Atlantic. The Europeans who went to West Africa or to the East were few in number, and were mostly temporary residents; a handful of factors, a few bands of soldiers, sent to man scattered trading posts and forts. Their influence on the great settled populations of the East in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was small. Even the Cape of Good Hope, though a true colony of settlement, for long main- tained only a very small population. In the Americas, on the other hand, the whole ethnographic pattern as well as the economic and social structure was radically altered by immigra- tion from the Old World. The trans-Atlantic emigrant can be classified in three broad groups. The first in time consisted of people from south-western Europe, mostly Spaniards, who settled in the West Indies, in Central America, in Mexico, and in high- land regions with their coasts in South America. They chose for the most part areas already settled by agricultural populations, as was natural, since they intended to live by the fruits of native labour, and in the process to evangelize and in some degree to Europeanize the people who provided that labour. They became a privileged caste. Their numbers were considerable, crossing the Atlantic in a steady stream, perhaps a thousand or two in a year throughout most of the sixteenth century; enough to raise fears of depopulation in Spain itself. For the Amerindian peoples their intrusion was major demographic catastrophe. In most of the antillean islands the natives quickly dwindled under the impact of an aggressive alien culture, with its diseases and its animals. They could not adapt themselves to living beside Europeans; they could not retreat, as the plains indians were to retreat centuries later, with the dwindling buffalo herds; there was nowhere for them to go. Within a century they were extinct, and a new society of immigrants from the old World had taken their place. On the Mexican mainland, also, conquest was fol- lowed by depopulation, a steady decline throughout the sixteenth century punctuated by abrupt downward plunges due to epidemics. The settled peoples of central Mexico, however, were more civi- lized, more resistant, more adaptable; they had more elbow-room. many minor migrations took place among them after the conquest. The lowland population declined more rapidly than that of the highland, a circumstance which may have been due to introduced malaria, but which may also indicate migration. pp. 278-79 ...On the other hand, the natural resilience, physi- cal strength and imitative capacity of the African enabled him to adapt himself to adverse conditions and to acquire, given the opportunity, such European habits and skills as seemed to him desirable. Eventually negroes and mulattoes worked out, in the West Indies as in Brazil, a way of living which was not that of any single African group from which slaves were drawn, nor a composite of African folk-ways, but a characteristically West Indian--or Brazilian--amalgam. The process was slow; for planta- tion life discouraged inventiveness, and the purely African element was constantly reinforced, for a hundred and fifty or two hundred years, by fresh importations. pp. 305-07 The question of the validity of Spain's title to the Indies exercised some of the best minds in the sixteenth century. The most distinguished and in many ways most original discussion of the problem was contained in a series of lectures delivered at Salamanca in 1539 by the great Dominican jurist, Francisco de Vitoria. Vitoria never visited America. His interest in the subject was academic in the best sense, and was concentrated on the rights and wrongs of war and conquest. He was probably the first serious writer to reject firmly and unequivocally all claims of Pope or Emperor to exercise temporal jurisdiction over other princes, Christian or infidel. he considered that the Pope possessed a 'regulating' authority, recognized among Christian peoples, by virtue of which a single prince might be charged, to the exclusion of others, with the task of supporting missions among a heathen people. This regulating power might authorize certain secular acts, such as the provision of armed force for the protection of missionaries; but it could not authorize war or conquest..Just cause for waging war against [the indians] could not be found, not in any papal edict, probably not in their idolatry or alleged barbarity or wickedness, but certainly if they transgressed the rules of International Law. p. 307 Those people are not unintelligent, but primitive... Conclusion p. 321 By the middle of the seventeenth century the main geo- graphical impetus of the Reconnaissance was spent; the first tentative charting of the size, shape and position of the conti- nents had been in large measure completed. There were still, it is true, large gaps in European knowledge, even of coastlines. The Pacific coast of North America, north of Lower California, was almost unknown, and the longitudinal extent of the continent was the subject of wild and widely differing guesses. The Pacific coast of Asia was little better known, though a few Chinese and Japanese ports had been visited by Europeans ships and there were flourishing European settlements in the Philip- pines. Of the thousands of island scattered in the vast expanse of the Pacific, few had been sighted; and for all men knew, there might be whole continents there, still undiscovered. One such continent, indeed, was know to exist; the west coast of Australia had been sketched in rough outline by Dutch navigators who had learned to fear its dangers. it clearly belonged to a great land mass, whose dimensions were unknown, but which was generally supposed to include New Guinea. "Terra Australis Incognita," the old southern continent of Ptolemy, also lingered in men's minds. The west coast of New Zealand, which Tasman had sighted, might be part of it; and Tasman himself--not a very careful explorer--had assumed Cook Strait to be a mere inlet. No man had seen the coast of the real Antarctic continent. pp. 321-22 The main coastlines of the rest of the world--the Atlantic coasts of the Americas and the Pacific coast of South America; the whole outline of Africa; the southern coasts of Asia, and the Asian archipelagos; all these were known in varying degrees of detail to European navigators, and through maps to the reading public Here and there European knowledge went behind the coastlines. Spaniards had explored by land most of Mexico and Central America, considerable areas of South America, and, very sketchily, parts of what are now the United States. In eastern North America, French explorers had travelled great distances in canoes, and acquired some knowledge of the great labyrinth of lakes and rivers used by indian traders. In the Old World, on the other hand, there had been little inland penetration, and the interior of Asia was hardly better known to Europe in the seven- teenth century than it had been in the thirteenth. A few Europe- ans had travelled inland in mainland Asia as ambassadors or adventurers, but they had stuck for the most part to the ancient roads regularly used by pilgrims, merchants and officials. Interior Africa, still more, was unknown save for a few visits to Egypt and Abyssinia. in general, the world outside Europe, as known to Europeans, was a world of coastlines, roughly charted, of scattered harbours connected by a network of seaborne commu- nication. p. 322 Seaborne skill and strength had enable Europeans to exploit their geographical knowledge and to settle here and there in all the known continents except Australia. The nature of their settlements varied greatly, but all alike depended upon metropolitan countries in Europe. None was fully self-support- ing; none yet aspired to independence of the founding State, though some colonies had changed hands as the result of European wars and many more were to change hands later in the century. The hold of the European nations upon many of their outposts was still weak. Only a few relatively small areas could be said to be Europeanized, and the most potent factor in determining the nature of a European colony was the character of the native race among whom it was planted. In some places Europeans had settled as a permanent resident aristocracy among more primitive, but settled peoples, living by their labour and to a limited extent intermarrying with them. This was the situation in Spanish and Portuguese America; though the areas under effective European government still covered only a small part of the immense areas claimed by Portugal and Spain, and no province was without its Indian frontier. In the West Indies also, Europeans formed a resident aristocracy, though the primitive labour force there was not native but imported. In other regions, where the native population was too sparse or too intractable to furnish an adequate labour force, and where settlers did not want, or could not afford to buy, imported slaves, Europeans had cleared land and formed purely European communities, living largely by their own labour as farmers, fishermen or traders. A thin fringe of settlements of this type stretched along the Atlantic seaboard of North America; settlements with small harbour towns looking towards Europe, with a dangerous forest frontier not far inland. English and French America lagged far behind Spanish America in population, wealth and cultural attainments, but was growing rapidly in assertiveness and strength. pp. 322-23 In the Old World, Europeans had concentrated their efforts upon regions known to produce articles of value, and seaborne commerce rather than empire had been their principal object. In West Africa, source of gold, ivory and slaves, the climate and the forest, no less than the hostility of the inhab- itants, had deterred them from settling. In the East they had encountered numerous and civilized peoples, organized and well- armed States. Here there could be no question of invading, of settling as a resident aristocracy. They came as armed traders, sometimes as pirates, constantly quarrelling among themselves as pirates commonly do. Their impact upon the great empires of Asia had been very slight. The government of China, with its highly organized, deeply cultivated official hierarchy, barely conde- scended to notice the uncouth foreign hucksters in the Canton river. In the territories subject to the Mughal Empire, various European groups had secured footholds, as merchants residing on sufferance, as vassals, as allies and somewhat unreliable merce- naries, in a few places as minor territorial rulers, nowhere as overlords. With Persia they had little direct contact, save through the Dutch factory at Bandar Abbas. The Ottoman Empire, with conquests thrust far into eastern Europe, was obliged to pay serious attention to Europeans, for it faced them continuously on two fronts. In the Mediterranean and the balkans they were traders and profitable customers in peace, military enemies in war. In the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, they were wee-established armed interlopers, intercepting and divert- ing a great part of the commerce which had formerly been in Arab hands, As yet, however, the Turk was little influenced and not seriously threatened by European power. Among the smaller principalities on the southern fringe of Asia, European invaders had asserted themselves more effectively; but even here, except for a few small areas in south India and in the East Indian islands, actual European possessions were still confined to forts and trading factories. p. 323 Nevertheless, considering the relatively small size and loose organization of most European States, the achievements of two centuries of reconnaissance were remarkable. The objects with which the early discoverers set out had been in great measure achieved. The Turk had been taken in the rear, and his power, though great, no longer seemed overwhelming. Europe was connected by regular sea passages with the sources of most of the goods which Europeans most desired, and many of these good were being shipped from European factories abroad, in European ships. The colonies which Europeans had established in places suited for European habitation seemed likely to endure and to develop. Moreover, wherever conquerors, planters or merchants had settled, churches had been founded, and there were Christian communities in every inhabited continent. pp. 323-24 The success of the Reconnaissance, by its very magnitude, produced in the later seventeenth century a dulling of geographical curiosity. Men no longer expected to find Atlantis. Few still seriously hoped to penetrate by a northern route to Cathay. Though many thousands of miles of coast remained un- charted, an whole continents still awaited the explorer, these little-known places appeared to offer little prospect of immedi- ate gain. The business corporations which , in the seventeenth century, controlled most long-distance voyaging, would not dissipate their shareholders' capital in the profitless pursuit of knowledge. There is a striking contrast between the intense, expectant curiosity of a Magellan, a Sabastian Cabot, a Henry Hudson, and the perfunctory attention which Dutch navigators, a little later, gave to the coasts of Australia and New Zealand. The exploring freelance buccaneer--such as Dampier, for examples- - was an increasingly rare exception. On the whole, the seven- teenth century, by contrast with the sixteenth, was an age of consolidation overseas, of trading and planting exploitation, rather than of original exploration. pp. 324-25 Seventeenth-century concentration on distant trade and planting was accompanied by a fierce competitive pugnacity, to be expected in a mercantilist age which regarded foreign trade as another form of war. In their incessant fighting over trade and territory, most European governments, lacking adequate naval force, made free use of buccaneers and pirates. In both East and West Indies, any gang of cut-throats whose predatory activities could be made to serve an immediate national advantage, could secure letters of marque and could be sure of the support and countenance of one or another colonial governor. The result was the creation of great areas of savage, unorganized conflict, through which only the very well-armed or the very inconspicuous could move with any confidence. The indiscriminate employment of buccaneers, it is true, was a temporary phase. These ruffians soon became so serious a nuisance to peaceful traders among their own countrymen that even French and English colonial governors were in time induced to co-operate with naval forces in their suppression; though naval officers themselves were not above occasional piracy. In the late seventeenth century a series of treaties between colonial powers formally repudiated the old convention of 'no peace beyond the Line', and the practice of egging on pirates to attack other nations' harbours and shipping ceased to be regarded as a respectable expedient of international conduct, even in the West Indies. The gradual suppression of buccaneering, however, did not mean an end of fighting in the Tropics. It merely confined major hostilities to periods of formal war; and wars were frequent. Throughout the last decades of the seventeenth century and the whole of the eighteenth, tropical possessions were among the principal bones of contention in every major war, and among the principal prizes in every major treaty. it was a sigh of the growing importance of tropical colonies and trade in the estimation of the western world, that the age of the buccaneers should be followed by the age of the admirals. p. 325 Seventeenth-century expansion overseas, increasingly concentrated upon commercial ends, savagely competitive, became also increasingly independent of religious motives. In the colonies of the Catholic powers in the sixteenth century the period of crusading war and plunder had been succeeded by a period of deep and thoughtful missionary fervour. In Spanish America especially, the Church had striven not only to convert but to teach the indians, and to recruit and train an educated native priesthood. By the end of the sixteenth century the attitude of Spanish missionaries, and still more the attitude of the secular clergy, towards the Christian Indian had become less optimistic. The ideal of a native priesthood was in large measure abandoned, partly through conviction of its hopelessness, partly through social opposition from secular sources. The principle upon which Las Casas had insisted, that the indian was potentially the spiritual and intellectual equal of the European, was less emphatically urged in the seventeenth century, both by theologians and by those who professed to know the indian. The work of spreading the Faith went on, it is true, in hundreds of Franciscan and jesuit missions, penetrating into remote regions of the Americas far beyond the limits of ordinary white settle- ment. In French America, Jesuit explorer-missionaries performed miracle of endurance and devotion, though often to little appar- ent effect. In the portuguese East, also, the work of Jesuit missionaries went on steadily, though often discredited by the piracies which their countrymen committed. In Europe, the establishment in 1622 of the propaganda--the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith--evinced the direct concern of the Papacy in colonial missions, in the training of missionaries, and once again in the creation of native priesthoods. pp. 325-26 In the later seventeenth century, despite the efforts of the propaganda, missionary enterprise began perceptibly to slacken. The growing weakness of Spanish and Portuguese colonial government and French preoccupation with European affairs togeth- er cause a loss of effective support. The general intellectual temper of Europe, also grew less favorable to missions. The seventeenth century was a time of profound religious conflict, often expressed in war and persecution. it was also a time of deep and original religious thought; for the Church had to face not only the challenge of schism and dissent, not only the challenge of growing national absolutism, but also the intellec- tual challenge presented by mathematics and physical science. The last challenge was, as yet, only latent; but the intellectual and spiritual energies of European Christendom were more and more directed to its own internal problems, less and less to the problem of how best to spread a simple agreed version of the Faith among supposedly simple pagan peoples. Moreover, the main initiative in expansion was passing from the Catholic to the Protestant nations of Europe; and though many Dutchmen and Englishmen carried abroad religious convictions of an uncom- promising kind, they showed considerably less skill and enthusi- asm than their Catholic rival in missionary enterprise. They showed, also, on the whole, correspondingly less care for the material well-being of peoples who came under their influence. It was not to be expected, in particular, that commercial con- cerns should spend much money or thought upon missionary work or upon the work of general welfare which commonly accompanies evangelization. 'Impiger extremos curris meercator ad Indos, per mare pauperiem fugiens, per saxa, per ignes.' Horace's famous lines roused ready echoes among the men of the Reconnaissance; but, apart from economic enterprise, there were two characteristics of the Reconnaissance which commanded respect and which, together with high courage, gave a certain nobility to the whole movement, despite the plunder and the savagery. One was intellectual curiosity, disinterested zeal for the increase of knowledge; the other a sense of responsibility, of obligation, towards men of other races. Both were in eclipse, in the field of overseas exploration, in the later seventeenth century. Both were to revive in different and more effective forms later. p. 326 The prodigious advances made by Galileo and Newton in astronomy, in optics and in mechanics, and the increasing skill of craftsmen in applying scientific knowledge, were to place in the hands of navigators and explorers instruments of a range and accuracy formerly undreamed of, and so to lay the foundations of a new age of discovery. When geographical curiosity reasserted itself, as it did in the mid-eighteenth century, in the hands of Cook and his successors and the scientists associated with them, it took the form, not of a search for particular places of interest or value, but of a systematic and precise charting of the earth's surface in the interest of science. Eighteenth- century exploration, moreover, was backed not merely by individu- als or trading companies, but by the power and resources of governments. pp. 326-27. Science and technology not only sharpened the perceptions and improved the techniques of explorers; they also conferred upon European peoples ever-increasing military and naval advantages over the rest of the world. These reinforced the truculent and cynical greed with which European States in the eighteenth century often embarked on wars of colonial aggression. But just as the brutalities of the Spanish conquest in America had produced anxious searchings of conscience and movements for reform among Spanish theologians and officials, so in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the destructiveness of European imperialism was met by the revival of a feeling of responsibility. Chief among the symptoms of this revival were the growth of the great Protestant missionary societies, with their emphasis upon educational and medical work as well as upon evangelization; the profound revulsion against slavery and the trade in slaves; the repeated emphasis laid upon the creation--in India, for example--of an accessible and uncorrupt judiciary. Later still, this feeling of responsibility has shown itself in the development of the idea of trusteeship, and in deliberate at- tempts to build up, among subject people, workable modern systems of government and welfare. Inevitably the development of western education among dependent peoples has proved, from the imperial point of view, to be a Trojan horse; but it has rarely been discouraged for that reason. in recent years an enlightened realism about the political aspirations of such peoples has led to many more or less voluntary withdrawals of imperial control and the establishment, on friendly terms, of independent states. None of the ideas which prompted these acts were entirely new. All were suggested, in one form or another, in the days of Las Casas and Vitoria. The sense of responsibility which lay behind them, though intermittent and imperfect, was an essential charac- teristic of the Reconnaissance, and must have its place in the story along with the curiosity, the ingenuity, the vanity, the courage and the greed.