men extended on the north to Iceland and Scandinavia, on the south to a
cape one hundred miles south of the Equator, and to the east as far as
China and Japan
The world that Columbus had heard about as being within the knowledge of
men extended on the north to Iceland and Scandinavia, on the south to a
cape one hundred miles south of the Equator, and to the east as far as
China and Japan. North and South were not important to the spirit of
that time; it was East and West that men thought of when they thought of
the expansion and the discovery of the world. And although they admitted
that the earth was a sphere, I think it likely that they imagined
(although the imagination was contrary to their knowledge) that the line
of West and East was far longer, and full of vaster possibilities, than
that of North and South. North was familiar ground to them–one voyage
to England, another to Iceland, another to Scandinavia; there was nothing
impossible about that. Southward was another matter; but even here there
was no ambition to discover the limit of the world. It is an error
continually made by the biographers of Columbus that the purpose of
Prince Henry”s explorations down the coast of Africa was to find a sea
road to the West Indies by way of the East. It was nothing of the kind.
There was no idea in the minds of the Portuguese of the land which
Columbus discovered, and which we now know as the West Indies. Mr.
Vignaud contends that the confusion arose from the very loose way in
which the term India was applied in the Middle Ages. Several Indias were
recognised. There was an India beyond the Ganges; a Middle India between
the Ganges and the Indus; and a Lesser India, in which were included
Arabia, Abyssinia, and the countries about the Red Sea. These divisions
were, however, quite vague, and varied in different periods. In the time
of Columbus the word India meant the kingdom of Prester John, that
fabulous monarch who had been the subject of persistent legends since the
twelfth century; and it was this India to which the Portuguese sought a
sea road. They had no idea of a barrier cape far to the south, the
doubling of which would open a road for them to the west; nor were they,
as Mr. Vignaud believes, trying to open a route for the spice trade with
the Orient. They had no great spice trade, and did not seek more; what
they did seek was an extension of their ordinary trade with Guinea and
the African coast. To the maritime world of the fifteenth century, then,
the South as a geographical region and as a possible point of discovery
had no attractions.
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