A World Lit Only by Fire (42 page)

Most medieval myths were set in Asia, which fascinated men then. Until the Tatar Peace of the mid-thirteenth century, no European
had traveled east of Baghdad. The crusades and pilgrimages had provided some grasp of Palestine and Syria, but the Orient
—“Cathay”—was considered magical, fantastic, and endowed with incredible wealth. Paradise was thought to be there somewhere,
and it says much for medieval knowledge of the mysterious East that long after the first reports of Genghis Khan’s terrible
campaigns reached the Continent in 1221, he was believed to be a great Christian monarch who was devoting his life to the
conversion of infidels.

Thus credulous men swallowed whole the stories of the giants Gog and Magog, of a jungle race with long teeth and hairy bodies,
of griffins, of storks who fought with pygmies, of people who created their own shade by lying down and blotting out the sun
with an enormous single foot, of men with dogs’ heads who barked and snarled, and of the opulent
patria
of Ophir, in whose storehouse lay King Solomon’s jewels and gold. Ophir was only one of many fabulous lands which existed
only in fantasy. Others were the lost continent of Atlantis, a legend dating back to Plato; El Dorado; Rio Doro, the River
of Gold; the Empire of Monomotapa; the Island of the Seven Cities of Cibola, said to have been discovered in the Atlantic
by seven bishops, fugitives from Moorish Spain; and St. Brendan’s Isle, based on the implausible tale of Saint Brendan, who
was said to have found an enchanted land in the waters northwest of Ireland. In Magellan’s time many of these places could
be found in atlases. Portugal’s Prince Henry the Navigator encountered a sea captain who said he had landed on the Island
of the Seven Cities. As late as 1755 St. Brendan’s Isle was believed to be situated five degrees west of the Canary Islands,
and Brazil Rock, also imaginative, was not stricken from Britain’s admiralty charts until 1873.

These were typical of the phantoms which confused and misled explorers sailing into unknown waters. Given the state of maps
then, it is hardly surprising that so many ships failed to return; the wonder is that any of them found anything. Africa was
shown as adjacent to India. The Indian Ocean and the Red Sea were small bodies of water. Egypt was placed in Asia; so was
Ethiopia. Navigators poring over charts found such bewildering legends as “India Ethiope” and “India Egyptii,” and the fourteenth-century
Catalan Atlas, which may be seen today in Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale, is a farrago of distortions and inventions, including
islands of griffins, the realm of Gog and Magog, a land of pygmies placed between India and China, an island called “Iana”
where Malaya should be, and another island, “Trapabona,” where there is nothing but open sea.

A
LTHOUGH
the rest of Europe was unaware of them, a few adventurous souls living on the western and northern edges of the continent
had been venturing into the unknown since the Dark Ages. Beginning in the sixth century, Irishmen had first visited, and then
settled, the Orkney, Shetland, and Faeroe islands. Undoubtedly the Irish reached farther than that, for Vikings occupying
Iceland in the ninth century found them already there. Then the Norsemen took over. After a thousand-mile voyage through some
of the most dangerous seas in the world, Norway’s Erik the Red landed on Greenland at the end of the tenth century. Circa
A.D
. 1000, Erik’s son Leif reached North America. These feats were a prelude to the expansion of Europe, but they cannot be regarded
as the first stages of that expansion. Ireland itself was virtually undiscovered, and to people south of Scandinavia the Vikings
were pagan plunderers, almost as remote as Orientals and certainly not part of the civilized world. Moreover, Norse and Celtic
medieval discoveries were never followed up. Since they were scarcely known outside the ranks of the explorers, they had no
impact on the rest of the continent.

The Middle East was another matter. While the vast majority of Europeans knew almost nothing of the real Asia, some of them
had been toiling busily on its fringes for three centuries. They were traders, which is significant; profit, not curiosity,
was to be the prime motive behind the age of exploration. Because they were Genoese, Venetian, and, to a lesser degree, Pisan,
and because they were highly successful, these merchants became major stokers of Italy’s prosperity. Their subsequent decline
—after audacious Spaniards and Portuguese had discovered new ways to reach the Orient—dealt a mortal blow to that boom.
The slump that followed was as responsible for the end of the Italian Renaissance as the religious rebellion against Rome.

Beginning with the crusades—from
A.D
. 1100 to nearly 1300—Oriental goods had reached the West through three main arteries. One was overland, on caravan roads
across northern China and central Asia to the shores of the Black Sea. The other two reached the Middle East via the Indian
Ocean. Cargoes were either sailed around the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, past Yemen, up the Red Sea, and from there
by land to Alexandria and Gaza; or—this way was favored by dealers in the highly profitable spice trade—up the Persian
Gulf and thence by caravan to the Levantine coast. The entrepreneurs who awaited them at the end of each route transshipped
the goods to Italy, southern France, and the Iberian Peninsula. There wagons took over, hauling the payloads to northern Europe.

Competition between the Italians for this lucrative traffic was fierce. Even if only one out of five dhows survived a three-year
voyage, the trader owning the fleet was enriched; a sack of pepper, cinnamon, ginger, or nutmeg was worth more than a seaman’s
life, and a shipment from Araby would include fragrant ambergris, musk, attar of roses, silks, damasks, gold, Indian diamonds,
Ceylonese pearls, and, very likely, hallucinogenic opiates. Shrewd merchants greased palms at every stage of a journey. In
Middle Eastern wars they chose sides, knowing they would be rewarded by the winners. The Venetians were granted trading privileges
during the fifty-seven-year Latin occupation of Constantinople, but they lost these after 1261, when the city fell to Greek
troops led by Michael Palaeologus—henceforth the Byzantine emperor Michael VIII. Enterprising Genoese then replaced the
Venetians by strengthening their ties with the Palaeologi. Using Constantinople as a base, they penetrated northern Persia,
the Crimea, and distant reaches of the Black and Caspian seas; so ingenious were they, and so vigorous, that their central
Asian contacts survived the breakup of the Mongol Empire. In Africa they sailed up the Nile as far as Dongola, in the Sudan;
thrusting out from Tunis, they explored the Sahara and the Niger basin. Meantime the Venetians had established a monopoly
in the Egyptian trade. Their cargoes came from South Asia—from the Moluccas, Malaya, and India’s Malabar Coast. Then, in
the fifteenth century, such Venetians as Niccolò de’ Conti and John Cabot (he was born Giovanni Caboto) began penetrating
the Orient directly from the west.

Yet even then the Atlantic beckoned. The traditional arteries of trade were cumbersome. Indian spices had to pass through
at least twelve hands before they reached the consumer. The farther merchants were from the Middle Eastern scene, the greater
their handicap. Spain and Portugal were particularly ill situated, but the Italians also suffered. Men groped toward a more
direct route. In 1291 Genoese vessels had become the first to sail through the Straits of Gibraltar, bypassing Iberian ports
and proceeding through the English Channel to Dutch anchorages. If the Portuguese and Spaniards were to harvest profits from
seaborne commerce, they would have to find a new route to Asia. It was a challenge, and not for the fainthearted. In the same
year that Gibraltar lost its virginity, two Genoese brothers, Ugolino and Guido Vivaldo, vowed to reach India by finding and
doubling Africa’s southern tip. Bravely sailing out through the straits, they headed south—and were never heard from again.
Another century would pass before the riddle of the Cape of Good Hope was solved, and by then Italy would have lost the baton
of leadership.

A
T THIS POINT
in the history of exploration an eminent fourteenth-century Englishman appears in an unexpected role. He is Geoffrey Chaucer
(1342–1400). Like most writers in all ages, Chaucer remained solvent by finding other employment from time to time. In 1368
he became an esquire of the royal household; later he was appointed clerk of the King’s Works. One of his royal admirers was
Philippa, daughter of John of Gaunt and granddaughter of King Edward III. Chaucer’s avocation was the study of navigation.
He modestly described himself as an “unlearned compiler of the labors of old astrologiens,” and in fact much of his
Treatise on the Astrolabe
was adapted from a Latin translation of the
Composito et operato astrolabii
of Messahala, an eighth-century Arabian astronomer. Nevertheless Chaucer was an enthusiast, and his enthusiasm was infectious.
Young Philippa caught it. She became intrigued by his lessons in navigation. Later, as queen of Portugal, she taught them
to one of her sons, Henry, who, sharing her enthusiasm, grew up to act upon it. He is remembered in history as Prince Henry
the Navigator (1394–1460). Although the prince himself did little navigating, he sponsored voyages of discovery, encouraged
seaborne commerce, developed the sailing vessel known as the Portuguese caravel, and designed a grand strategy to outflank
Islamic power by establishing contact, first with Africa south of the Sahara, and then with the Orient. Islam survived his
challenge, but in the process seamen inspired by Henry established the Portuguese overseas empire, which subsequently became
the most extensive in the world, dominating European trade with India and the East Indies for 150 years.

In retrospect, their accomplishments seem almost miraculous, for despite the efforts of men like Chaucer and Prince Henry,
navigation remained a highly inexact science. The prince is said to have improved the instruments used by navigators. One
can only wonder what they were like before him. To be sure, latitude could be measured with any one of several versions of
the astrolabe, chiefly the English cross-staff, a forestaff, or, in Magellan’s case, a calibrated backstaff. All, like their
Egyptian forerunner, were primitive quadrants that measured the angle between the sun and the horizon. First-rate astronomers
could also make an educated guess at longitude—if they were on land. But there was no way a man at sea could determine the
longitude of his ship. To do that, he needed to read the position of the stars, which required knowledge of the precise time
—an impossibility, since accurate clocks, with balance wheels and hairsprings, would not be invented until the middle of
the next century. Of course, every captain had a compass, and all could compute dead reckoning. None, however, knew the difference
between magnetic north and true north, or realized that dead reckoning suffered from disastrous errors arising from the drift
of the water.

In the days of al-Idrisi, the twelfth-century geographer, Arabs had taught Sicilians how to sail boats, and Sicilians had
passed the knowledge along to the Genoese, who had taught the Spaniards and Portuguese. But although the shores washed by
the Mediterranean had been mapped, few captains had ventured beyond it. Even where coastlines could be found on charts, water
depths were rarely shown. This massive lack of information, together with the abundance of misinformation, put a premium on
the experience of seamen who, venturing into unknown waters, hoped to make it home.

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.