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READINGS IN AMERICAN

HISTORY

PART I. THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH

PART I. THE ESTABLISHMENT

OF THE ENGLISH

CHAPTER I

THE NEW WORLD

THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA

before

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Although Ptolemy's "Geography," which was regarded 1. Geography as the highest authority, perpetuated through the Middle Columbus Ages the tradition that the western boundary of the world. was the "River Ocean," into whose forbidden waters daring sailors sometimes ventured through the Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar), nevertheless hints occur in ancient as well as in medieval writers that these waters were the same as those which washed the eastern coast of Asia, and that new lands might be found to the west of the Pillars of Hercules. Strabo, a Greek geographer of the first century A.D., Says:

The temperate zone makes a continuous circle by uniting with itself, so that, if the great size of the western sea did not prevent, we might sail from Spain to India on the same parallel [of latitude] . . . and it is possible that within the same temperate zone there may be two or even three inhabited lands, and particularly in the neighborhood of the parallel drawn through Athens.

...

Shortly after Strabo, the Roman philosopher and poet Seneca (3 B.C.-63 A.D.) wrote the following prophetic lines in his play "Medea":

In late years the time will come when Ocean will loose the bands of nature, and the earth will stretch out huge, and the

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sea will disclose new worlds, nor will Thule [the northern British islands] be the last [remotest] of lands.

Only a few years before Columbus sailed, a Florentine poet, named Pulci, wrote the following striking prophecy of a western voyage: his bark

The daring mariner shall urge far o'er

The western wave, a smooth and level plain.

And Hercules might blush to learn how far
Beyond the limits1 he had vainly set

The dullest sea-craft soon shall wing her way.
We shall descry another hemisphere.

At our antipodes are cities, states,

And thronged empires ne'er divined of yore.

The following extract shows how ecclesiastical authority discouraged scientific speculation and experimentation in the Middle Ages. Ambrose, Archbishop of Milan and one of the four great fathers of the Latin Church, warns his generation of the futility of scientific inquisitiveness in these words (389 A.D.):

To discuss the nature and position of the earth does not help us in our hope of the life to come. It is enough to know what Scripture states, that "He hung up the earth on nothing" (Job xxvi, 7). Why then argue whether He hung it up in air or upon the water, and raise a controversy as to how thin air could sustain the earth; or why, if upon water the earth does not go plunging down to the bottom. . . . The earth endures stable upon the unstable and void because the majesty of God sustains it by the law of His will.

At no time during the Middle Ages did educated men lose the tradition, derived from the ancient Greeks, that

1 The Pillars of Hercules, or Strait of Gibraltar.

the earth was a sphere. "The Venerable Bede" of North-
umbria, the first of the English historians, declared in his
work "On the Nature of Things," in the eighth century,
that "the earth . . . is not perfectly round, owing to the
inequalities of mountains and plains," but that, "if all its
lines be considered, it has the perfect form of a sphere
(ch. xlvi). In an Anglo-Saxon treatise of the tenth cen-
tury, based on Bede, we read:

On the second day God made the heaven, which is called the firmament, which is visible and corporeal; and yet we may never see it on account of its great elevation and the thickness of the clouds, and on account of the weakness of our eyes. The heaven encloses in its bosom all the world, and it ever turns about us, swifter than any mill-wheel, all as deep under this earth as it is above. It is all round and entire and studded with stars.

Truly the sun goes by God's command between heaven and earth, by day above and by night under the earth. . . . The sun is very great as broad she is, from what books say, as the whole compass of the earth; but she appears to us very small, because she is far from our sight. . . . The moon and all the stars receive light from the great sun.

...

Another Englishman, Alexander of Neckam, writing at the close of the twelfth century, gives us the following description of the compass:

The sailors, as they sail over the sea, when in cloudy weather they can no longer profit by the light of the sun, or when the world is wrapped in the darkness of night, and they are ignorant whither the ship's course is directed, touch a needle to the magnet; the needle will then whirl around in a circle until, when its motion ceases, its point is directed to the north.

The voyages of Columbus roused tremendous enthusi- 2. The "Caasm among his contemporaries. Mr. Henri Harrisse has pitulation" of April 17, 1492 collected five hundred and seventy titles of histories,

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