significance of any historical event we must look at it in perspective, and the greater the event the more is the need of such perspective,

Now, the discovery of America was simply a part of a great and sudden outburst of maritime activity the like of which had never been seen before, and which within the limits of a single century discovered not only America, but nearly all the rest of the world outside of Europe. Down to that time the great wanderings of mankind had been by land; no people except the Northmen had ventured far into the trackless ocean, and the knowledge of civilized Europeans extended but little way beyond their own continent. Perhaps it is not always remembered that the first European ship crossed the equator in 1471, when Columbus was a man grown, and that no European ship ever sailed to the eastern coast of Asia until 1517, after Columbus had been eleven years in the grave. When that great navigator was in his childhood, European knowledge of the surface of our planet was bounded on the south by the Tropic of Cancer, and to the west it was extremely hazy about everything beyond the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf. The globe made in 1492 by Martin Behaim, one of the most learned geographers of his time, may still be seen in the Town Hall of Nuremberg. It cuts off two-thirds of Hindustan, and puts in place of it an island of Ceylon magnified tenfold. But within half a century after 1492, the Antarctic Ocean had been visited, the earth had been circumnavigated once, the flag of Portugal was supreme in the East Indies, and Spaniards ruled in Mexico and Peru.

It is an interesting question, why should this wonderful outburst of maritime activity have come just at that time? why should the discovery of America by Columbus have happened in the Fifteenth century? and why did Europe have to wait until then for such an event? The answer is easy to find; but first we shall do well to ask another question, and then we may answer the two_together. There is no doubt that toward the end of the Tenth century people from Iceland founded a colony in Greenland, or that ships from Greenland a few years later made voyages along the American coast, chiefly for the purpose of cutting timber, and in all probability came as far south

as Massachusetts Bay. Icelandic chronicles have fortunately preserved the story of these interesting voyages, but Europe took no heed of them whatever, and they lapsed into utter oblivion until about the time of Henry Hudson, when the Arctic world began again to be explored, and long after the death of Columbus. Now, why was this? What was the difference between the Eleventh century and the Fifteenth, such that in the latter case a visit to the western shores of the Atlantic Ocean soon led to the revelation of a new world, while in the former case it did not? The differences between the two ages were many, but the chief difference with which we are concerned is this: in the time of Columbus there was a propelling power at work which in the earlier time was absent, and that propelling power was furnished by a great and unprecedented disturbance of trade between Europe and Asia. That disturbance was caused by the Ottoman Turks. There is one other date in the Fifteenth century almost as famous as 1492; that is, 1453, that year of mourning and humiliation when the grandest city of Christendom was captured by the robber bands whose descendants have to this day been allowed to hold it. But for nearly a century before Constantinople fell, the Turks had been strangling trade on the eastern shores and in the eastern waters of the Mediterranean. Their aggressions closed up old routes of trade and forced Europe to seek new routes; and thus, I say, it was chiefly and primarily the Turks that set in motion the current of events that carried Columbus across the Atlantic. Aggressions from Asia as formidable as that of the Ottoman had occurred more than once before, but never had they encountered and displaced anything like so large a volume of commerce; and never had they been met with so highly developed a spirit of commercial enterprise. This point is very important and deserves a few more words of explanation.

Traffic between the Mediterranean and remote parts of Asia had been carried on from very early times, and some of its routes were doubtless in use before the dawn of history. During two thousand years preceding the time of Columbus three principal routes were used. One was through the Black and Caspian seas, the route associated

with the commercial greatness of Constantinople and Genoa; a second was through Syria and the Persian Gulf, a route illustrious for such cities as Antioch, and Damascus, and Bagdad; the third was through Egypt and the Red Sea, especially associated with the glorious days of Alexandria and of Venice. By such routes as these, after variously changing hands, did the goods of Eastern Asia make their slow way to European seaports—aromatic spices, black pepper, ivory, cotton fabrics, diamonds, sapphires, and pearls, silk thread and silk stuffs, richly woven mats and shawls, in exchange for such European commodities as light woolen cloths, linens, coral, black lead, glass vessels of divers shapes and uses, brass, tin, and wrought silver, and Greek and Italian wines. It was probably seldom that the same persons traveled from end to end of the long routes that led toward the rising sun; still fewer were those commercial travelers who wrote an account of their experiences for the general increase of knowledge. So things went on for many generations.

But after the Crusades had brought Western Europe into closer contact with the luxury and refinement of the Eastern Empire, there was a change. The volume of trade with Asia began steadily to increase, and curiosity about Oriental countries and peoples was greatly stimulated. In the Thirteenth century the Mongol conquests brought the whole vast territory from China to Poland, from the Yellow Sea to the Euphrates, under the sway of a single monarch; the Mongol policy was liberal to foreigners, and in the course of a hundred years, from 1250 to 1350, a good many Europeans-chiefly merchants and Franciscan monks-visited China. Now came the first step toward the discovery of America. Soon after 1250 it became positively known, as a matter of personal experience, that China was a maritime country with seaports looking out upon an open ocean. By those Europeans who pondered upon this information it was at once assumed that this ocean must be the Atlantic, because of the spherical shape of the earth. Here I must pause for a moment to remark upon a gross historical blunder which vitiates most of the talk and a good deal of the popular writing about Columbus. It is evidently supposed by many people that the spherical shape of the earth was a

new idea in his time; some seem to think that he originated it, or that it was opposed and ridiculed by most of his learned contemporaries and especially by the clergy. Nothing could be further from the truth. The globular form of the earth was proved by Aristotle, and after him accepted by nearly all the ancient philosophers; and seventeen hundred years before Columbus the geographer Eratosthenes declared that it would be easy enough to sail from Spain to India on the same parallel were it not for the vast extent of the Atlantic Ocean. But that vast extent was all a matter of guesswork, and other ancient writers, such as Seneca, maintained that the distance was probably not so very great, and that with favoring winds a ship might make the voyage in a few days. This question of distance, as we shall see in a few moments, was the main difficulty which Columbus had to meet. Objections arising from a belief in the earth's flatness were made by ignorant clergymen, as by uneducated people in general; but learned clergymen, familiar with Aristotle and Ptolemy, did not for a moment call in question the roundness of the earth. Knowledge of such scientific points, however, was in those days apt to lie stagnant, and some striking experience was needed to vivify it. When the news of Chinese seaports was first brought to Europe, that far-sighted monk, Roger Bacon, in 1267 suggested that a ship might sail westward across the Atlantic to China, and he fortified his opinion by extracts from Aristotle and other ancient writers. There is nothing to show that Columbus ever saw Roger Bacon's book; but in 1410 a certain archbishop of Cambrai, named Pierre d'Ailly, wrote a book called "The Image of the World," which was widely circulated in manuscript and was printed in 1483; and in this very popular book that passage about sailing westward to China was cribbed-or perhaps it would be more amiable to say quoted-from Bacon. This book was diligently read by Columbus, and his own copy of it, with marginal notes in his own handwriting which show how powerfully it influenced him, may be seen to-day in the Columbian Library at Seville.

Thus we see that Roger Bacon's suggestion, though it found no practical response in his own time, was transmitted to Columbus two centuries later and sank deep into

his heart. Things changed greatly between the Thirteenth century and the Fifteenth. So long as Asia was more accessible than ever by the old routes, men had no motive for undertaking the strange and difficult work of finding new ones. Such new and strange work must wait until men were in a measure driven to it. Meanwhile, among the educated Europeans who found their way to the eastern ocean, there was one, the Venetian Marco Polo, who lived in the service of the Mongol emperor for five and twenty years and made journeys to and fro in the heart of Asia. In 1299, after his return to Europe, he wrote down his experiences in what is doubtless the greatest book of travels that has ever been written. It carried European thought still farther eastward than the Chinese seaports, for Marco Polo had heard a good deal about Japan, an island kingdom a thousand miles out in the ocean, which he called Cipango, and about which he told things which led many of his readers to set him down as a liar, but which we now know to have been for the most part true.

During the next century Marco Polo's book was widely read, curiosity about the East was strongly stimulated, and the trade along the old routes was rapidly increasing year by year, when the face of things was somewhat suddenly changed. In 1368 the Mongols were driven out of China, and that country was once more shut up. But that was a small calamity compared to the rise of the Turks who had entered Europe and taken Adrianople by 1365. Their corsairs swarmed in the Levant waters till the peril and cost of Christian voyages in that direction were increased manifold. The blow fell first and most heavily upon Genoa, which had profited most by the Black Sea route; but Venice also suffered gravely, and every town in the Netherlands felt the effects, which presently reverberated from end to end of Europe.

Thus upon men's minds began to dawn the question whether an outside route, an indirect path over the ocean, could be found to the lands whence silks and spices came. Perhaps civilized mankind had never asked of itself a more startling question. It involved a radical departure from the grooves in which the minds of sailors and merchants had been running ever since the days when Solomon's ships were laden with treasure brought from Ophir. The