A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [119]
Pilots on exploratory voyages carefully documented the progress of each expedition. When the leaders’ hopes were justified —when they reached strange lands and returned—these records, or rutters, became invaluable. Each was a detailed, step-by-step chronicle of the journey out and the journey back. Specific information included tides, reefs, channels, magnetic compass bearings between ports and headlands, the strength and direction of winds, the number of days a master kept his vessel on each tack, when he heeled it over for repairs, where he found fresh water, soundings measured in fathoms and speed in knots, measured by comparing the time required for a sandglass to empty with the progress of knots which were tied, at intervals, on a rope attached to a small log that was thrown overboard and paid out. Everything went in, everything—even the changing color of the sea—which might conceivably be useful to another pilot trying to reach the same destination.
Rutters were copied by hand and translated under supervision, but those opening new trade routes never reached the hands of printers. They were too precious. Some were sold. Others were declared to be state secrets; divulging their contents was punishable by death, for a rival captain with a rutter in his cabin could exploit another’s dearly bought knowledge. Once a way had been found, dangers were minimal, but the perils of the original explorers can scarcely be exaggerated.
It is a remarkable fact that virtually all of them came from one corner of Europe. Portugal and Spain had contributed little to Western civilization before then. In the five centuries since then they have produced several brilliant artists; apart from that, their achievements have been less than awesome. But this, incontestably, was Iberia’s hour. Within thirty years —a single generation—a few hundred small ships weighing anchor in Lisbon, Palos, and Sanlúcar discovered more of the world than had all mankind in all the millennia since the beginning of time.
THE FIRST probing voyages were cautious, even hesitant, and in perspective their accomplishments seem slight. In 1460, when Prince Henry died, Portuguese mariners had made only six unimpressive discoveries: three small archipelagoes off their own coast —the Azores, Madeiras, and Canaries—and, in northern Africa, Cape Verde’s fertile promontory, the Senegal River, and the port of Ceuta. The prince had been in his grave eleven years when João de Santarém became the first European to cross the equator and return unscathed. Another eleven years passed before Diogo Cão found the mouth of the Congo River. Finally, in 1486, a half-century after the prince’s first expedition, Bartolomeu Dias made a major discovery. Struggling through a mighty storm, he rounded the southern tip of Africa. He was anxious to sail on, convinced that India lay ahead, but his exhausted men forced him to return home. There King John II, after congratulating him, named the tip the Cape of Good Hope. To Dias’s dismay, however, his countrymen were indifferent to the implications of his rutter—an all-water route to India, outflanking the Middle Eastern merchants dealing in spices, perfumes, silks, drugs, gold, and gems.
Six years later the initiative passed to Spain, whose Castilian adventurers, having completed their conquest of the Moors’ last stronghold, were ready for new challenges. Because Arab traders had passed along fragments of Asian geography, Europeans had a general idea of the continent’s chief coastal features: India, China, Japan, the East Indies. Paolo Toscanelli, a Florentine scholar, had concluded that the Orient lay only 3,000 nautical miles west of Lisbon. Toscanelli strengthened the confidence of Genoa’s Christopher Columbus. Columbus had raised 500,000 maravedis for an expedition. He won over Louis de Santangel, Spain