The Story Of Mankind - Part 18

This is part 18 of the story of mankind by Hendrik van Loon.

The Age of Expression The people began to feel the need of giving expression to their newly discovered joy of living.

They expressed their happiness in poetry and in sculpture and in architecture and in painting and in the books they printed.

In the year 1471 there died a pious old man who had spent 72 of his 91 years behind the sheltering walls of the cloister of Mount St.

Agnes,

Near the good town of Svala,

The old Dutch Hanseatic city,

On the river Iso.

He was known as Brother Thomas and because he had been born in the village of Kampen he was called Thomas A.

Kempis.

At the age of 12 he had been sent to Deventer where Gerard Grout,

A brilliant graduate of the universities of Paris,

Cologne and Prague,

And famous as a wandering preacher,

Had founded the Society of the Brothers of the Common Life.

The good brothers were a humble layman who tried to live the simple life of the early apostles of Christ,

While working at their regular jobs as carpenters and house painters and stone masons.

They maintained an excellent school that deserving boys of poor parents might be taught the wisdom of the fathers of the church.

At this school little Thomas had learned how to conjugate Latin verbs and how to copy manuscripts.

Then he had taken his vows,

Had put his little bundles of books upon his back,

Had wandered to Svala,

And with a sigh of relief he had closed the door upon a turbulent world which did not attract him.

Thomas lived in an age of turmoil,

Pestilence,

And sudden death.

In central Europe in Bohemia,

The devoted disciples of Johannes Huss,

The friend and follower of John Wycliffe,

The English reformer,

Were avenging with a terrible warfare the death of their beloved leader who had been burned at the stake by order of that same Council of Constans,

Which had promised him a safe conduct if he would come to Switzerland and explain his doctrines to the Pope,

The Emperor.

23 cardinals,

33 archbishops and bishops,

150 abbots,

And more than a hundred princes and dukes who had gathered together to reform the church.

In the West France had been fighting for a hundred years that she might drive the English from her territories,

And just then was saved from utter defeat by the fortunate appearance of Joan of Arc.

And no sooner had this struggle come to an end than France and Burgundy,

Who were at each other's throats,

Engaged upon a struggle of life and death for the supremacy of Western Europe.

In the South,

A Pope at Rome was calling the curses of heaven down upon a second Pope who resided Avignon,

In Southern France,

And who retaliated in kind.

In the Far East,

The Turks were destroying the last remnants of the Roman Empire,

And the Russians had started upon a final crusade to crush the power of their Tartar masters.

But of all this,

Brother Thomas in his quiet cell never heard.

He had his manuscripts and his own thoughts,

And he was contented.

He poured his love of God into a little volume.

He called it the Imitation of Christ.

It has since been translated into more languages than any other book saved the Bible.

It has been read by quite as many people as ever studied the Holy Scriptures.

It has influenced the lives of countless millions.

And it was the work of a man whose highest ideal of existence was expressed in the simple wish that he might quietly spend his days sitting in a little corner with a little book.

Good Brother Thomas represented the purest ideals of the Middle Ages,

Surrounded on all sides by the forces of the victorious Renaissance.

With the humanists loudly proclaiming the coming of modern times,

The Middle Ages gathered strength for a last sally.

Monasteries were reformed.

Monks gave up the habits of riches and vice.

Simple,

Straightforward,

And honest men,

By the example of their blameless and devout lives,

Tried to bring the people back,

To the ways of their righteousness and humble resignation to the will of God.

But all to no avail.

The New World rushed past these good people.

The days of quiet meditation were gone.

The great era of expression had begun.

Here and now,

Let me say that I am sorry that I must use so many big words.

I wish that I could write this history in words of one syllable.

But it cannot be done.

You cannot write a textbook of geometry without reference to a hypotenuse and triangles and a rectangular parallelopiped.

You simply have to learn what those words mean,

Or do without mathematics.

In history,

And in all life,

You will eventually be obliged to learn the meaning of many strange words of Latin and Greek origin.

Why not do it now?

When I say that the Renaissance was an era of expression,

I mean this.

People were no longer contented to be the audience and sit still while the emperor and the pope told them what to do and what to think.

They wanted to be the actors upon the stage of life.

They insisted upon giving expression to their own individual ideas.

If a man happened to be interested in statesmanship,

Like the Florentine historian Niccolo Machiavelli,

Then he expressed himself in his books,

Which revealed his own idea of a successful state and an efficient ruler.

If,

On the other hand,

He had a liking for painting,

He expressed his love for beautiful lines and lovely colors in the pictures which have made the names of Giotto,

Fra Angelico,

And the Raphael,

And a thousand other household words wherever people have learned to care for those things,

Which express a true and lasting beauty.

If this love for color and line happened to be combined with an interest in mechanics and hydraulics,

The result was a Leonardo da Vinci,

Who painted his pictures and painted the paintings of the people.

The painting of the people of the world is a work of art,

And the painting of the people of the world is a work of art.

The painting of the people of the world is a work of art,

And the painting of the people of the world is a work of art.

If this love for color and line happened to be combined with an interest in mechanics and hydraulics,

The result was a Leonardo da Vinci,

Who painted his pictures,

Experimented with his balloons and flying machines,

Joined the marshes of the Lombardian plains,

And expressed his joy and interest in all things between heaven and earth in prose,

In painting,

In sculpture,

And in curiously conceived engines.

When a man of gigantic strength,

Like Michelangelo,

Found the brush and the palette too soft for his strong hands,

He turned to sculpture and to architecture,

He hacked the most terrific creatures out of heavy blocks of marble,

And drew the plans for the Church of St.

Peter,

The most concrete expression of the glories of the triumphant church,

And so it went.

All Italy,

And very soon all of Europe,

Was filled with men and women who lived that they might add their might to the sum total of our accumulated treasures of knowledge and beauty and wisdom.

In Germany,

The city of Mainz,

Johann Zum Gonsflieg,

Commonly known as Johann Gutenberg,

Had just invented a new method of copying books.

He had studied the old woodcuts,

And had perfected a system by which individual letters of soft lead could be placed in such a way that they formed words on whole pages.

It is true he soon lost all his money in a lawsuit which had to do with the original invention of the press.

He died in poverty,

But the expression of his particular inventive genius lived after him.

Soon Aldous in Venice,

And Etienne in Paris,

And Plantin in Antwerp,

And Froben in Basel,

Were flooding the world with carefully edited editions of the classics painted in the Gothic letters of the Gutenberg Bible,

Or printed in the Italian type which we use in this book,

Or printed in Greek letters,

Or in Hebrew.

Then the whole world became the eager audience of those who had something to say.

The day when learning had been a monopoly of a privileged few came to an end,

And the last excuse for ignorance was removed from this world,

When Alvazir of Harlem began to print his cheap and popular editions.

Then Aristotle and Plato,

Virgil and Horace,

And Pliny,

All the goodly company of the ancient authors and philosophers and scientists,

Offered to become man's faithful friend in exchange for a few paltry pennies.

Humanism had made all man free and equal before the printed word.

The Great Discoveries But now that people had broken through the bonds of their narrow medieval limitations,

They had to have more room for their wanderings.

The European world had grown too small for their ambitions.

It was the time of the great voyages of discovery.

The Crusades had been a lesson in the liberal art of traveling.

But very few people had ventured beyond the well-known beaten track which led from Venice to Jaff.

In the 13th century the Polo brothers,

Merchants of Venice,

Had wandered across the great Mongolian desert,

And after climbing mountains as high as the moon,

They had found their way to the court of the great Khan of Cathay,

The mighty emperor of China.

The son of one of the Polos by the name of Marco had written a book about their adventures,

Which covered a period of more than twenty years.

The astonished world had gaped at his descriptions of the golden towers of the strange island of Zipangu,

Which was his Italian way of spelling Japan.

Many people had wanted to go east,

That they might find this gold land and grow rich,

But the trip was too far and too dangerous,

And so they stayed at home.

Of course,

There was always the possibility of making the voyage by sea,

But the sea was very unpopular in the Middle Ages,

And for many good reasons.

In the first place,

Ships were very small.

The vessels on which Magellan made his famous trip around the world,

Which lasted many years,

Were not as large as a modern ferryboat.

They carried from twenty to fifty men,

Who lived in dingy quarters,

Too low to allow any of them to stand up straight,

And the sailors were obliged to eat poorly cooked food,

As the kitchen arrangements were very bad,

And no fire could be made whenever the weather was the least beat rough.

The medieval world knew how to pickle herring and how to dry fish.

But there were no canned goods,

And fresh vegetables were never seen on the bill of fare as soon as the coast had been left behind.

Water was carried in small barrels.

It soon became stale and then tasted of rotten wood and iron rust,

And was full of slimy growing things.

As the people of the Middle Ages knew nothing about microbes,

Roger Bacon,

The learned monk of the thirteenth century,

Seems to have suspected their existence,

But he wisely kept his discovery to himself.

They often drank unclean water,

And sometimes the whole crew died of typhoid fever.

Indeed,

The mortality on board the ship of the earliest navigators were terrible.

Of the two hundred sailors who in the year 1519 left Seville to accompany Magellan on his famous voyage around the world,

Only eighteen returned.

As late as the seventeenth century,

When there was a brisk trade between Europe and the Indies,

A mortality of forty percent was nothing unusual for a trip from Amsterdam to Batavia and back.

The greater part of these victims died of scurvy,

A disease which is caused by a lack of fresh vegetables,

And which affects the gums and poisons the blood until the patient dies of sheer exhaustion.

Under those circumstances you will understand that the sea did not attract the best elements of the population.

Famous discoverers like Magellan and Columbus and Basco da Gama traveled at the head of crews that were almost entirely composed of ex-jailbirds,

Future murderers,

And pickpockets out of a job.

These navigators certainly deserve our admiration for their courage and the pluck with which they accompanied their hope for the future.

In the face of difficulties,

Of which the people of our own comfortable world can have no conception.

Their sheeps were leaky.

The rigging was clumsy.

Since the middle of the thirteenth century they had possessed some sort of a compass,

Which had come to Europe from China by way of Arabia and the Crusades.

But they had very bad and incorrect maps.

They set their course by god and by guess.

If luck was with them,

They returned after one or two or three years.

In other cases,

Their bleached bones remained behind on some lonely beach.

But they were true pioneers.

They gambled with luck.

Life to them was a glorious adventure.

And all the suffering,

The thirst and the hunger and the pain were forgotten when their eyes beheld the dim outlines of a new coast or the placid waters of the sea.

They had laid forgotten since the beginning of time.

Again,

I wish that I could make this book a thousand pages long.

The subject of the early discoveries is so fascinating.

But history,

To give you a true idea of past times,

Should be like those etchings which Rembrandt used to make.

It should cast a vivid light on certain important causes.

On those which are best and greatest.

All the rest should be left in the shadow or should be indicated by a few lines.

And in this chapter,

I can only give you a short list of the most important discoveries.

Keep in mind that all during the 14th and 15th centuries,

The navigators were trying to accomplish just one thing.

They wanted to find a comfortable and safe route.

To Empire of Cathay,

China.

To the island of Zimpagu,

Japan.

And to those mysterious islands where grew the spices which the medieval world had come to like since the days of the Crusades.

And which people needed in those days before the introduction of cold storage.

When meat and fish spoiled very quickly and could only be eaten after the liberal sprinkling of pepper and nutmeg.

The Venetian and the Genoese had been the great navigators of the Mediterranean.

But the honor for exploring the coast of the Atlantic goes to the Portuguese.

Spain and Portugal were full of that patriotic energy which their age old struggle against the Moorish invaders had developed.

Such energy,

Once it exists,

Can easily be forced into new channels.

In the 13th century,

King Alfonso III had conquered the kingdom of the Venetians.

King Alfonso III had conquered the kingdom of Algarve in the southwestern corner of the Spanish peninsula and had added it to his dominions.

In the next century,

The Portuguese had turned the tables on the Mohammedans,

Had crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and had taken possession of Ceuta.

Opposite the Arabic city of Tarifa,

A word which in Arabic means inventory.

And which by the way of the Spanish language had come to us as Tarif.

And Tangiers,

Which became the capital of the African addition to Algarve.

They were ready to begin their career as explorers.

In the year 1415,

Prince Henry,

Known as Henry the Navigator,

The son of John I of Portugal and Philippa,

The daughter of John of Gond,

About whom you can read in Richard II,

A play by William Shakespeare,

Began to make preparations for the semistimatic exploration of northwestern Africa.

Before this,

That hot and sandy coast had been visited by the Venetians and by the Norsemen,

Who remembered it as the home of the hairy wild man,

Whom we have come to know as the gorilla.

One after another,

Prince Henry and his captains discovered the Canary Islands.

We discovered the island of Madeira,

Which a century before had been visited by a Genoese ship,

Carefully charted the Azores,

Which had been vaguely known to both the Portuguese and the Spaniards,

And caught a glimpse of the mouth of the Senegal River on the west coast of Africa,

Which they supposed to be the western mouth of the Nile.

At last,

By the middle of the 15th century,

They saw Cape Verde,

Or the Green Cape,

And the Cape Verde Islands,

Which lie almost halfway within the coast of Africa and Brazil.

But Henry did not restrict himself in his investigation to the waters of the ocean.

He was Grand Master of the Order of Christ.

This was a Portuguese continuation of the crusading order of the Templars,

Which had been abolished by Pope Clement V in the year 1312,

At the request of King Philip,

The Theor of France,

Who had improved the occasion by burning his own Templars at the stake and stealing all their possessions.

Prince Henry used revenues of the domains of his religious order to equip several expeditions,

Which explored the hinterlands of the Sahara and of the coast of Guinea.

But he was still very much a son of the Middle Ages,

And spent a great deal of time and wasted a lot of money upon a search for the mysterious Presser John,

The mythical Christian priest,

Who was said to be the emperor of a vast empire,

Situated somewhere in the East.

The story of this strange potentate had first been told in Europe in the middle of the 12th century.

For 300 years people had tried to find Presser John,

And his descendants,

Henry,

Took part in the search.

Thirty years after his death,

The riddle was solved.

In the year 1486,

Bartholomew Dias,

Trying to find the land of Presser John by sea,

Had reached the southernmost point of Africa.

At first he called it the Storm Cape,

On account of the strong winds which had prevented him from continuing his voyage towards the East,

But the Lisbon pilots who understood the importance of this discovery,

In their quest for the India water route,

Changed the name into that of the Cape of Good Hope.

One year later,

Pedro de Covilhame,

Provided with letters of credit on the house of the Medici,

Started upon a similar mission by land.

He crossed the Mediterranean,

And after leaving Egypt he travelled southward.

He reached Aden,

And from there,

Travelling through the waters of the Persian Gulf,

Which few white men had been since all the days of Alexander the Great,

18 centuries before.

He visited Goa and Calicut on the coast of India,

Where he got a great deal of news about the island of the moon,

And about the which was supposed to lie halfway between Africa and India.

Then he returned,

Paid a visit to Mecca and Medina,

Crossed the Red Sea once more,

And in the year 1490 he discovered the realm of Presser John,

Who was no one less than the Black Negus,

Or King,

Of Abyssinia,

Whose ancestors had adopted Christianity in the 4th century,

700 years before the Christian missionaries had found their way to Scandinavia.

These many voyages had convinced the Portuguese geographers and cartographers that while the voyage to the Indies by an eastern sea route was possible,

It was by no means easy.

Then there arose a great debate.

Some people wanted to continue the explorations east of the Cape of Good Hope.

Others said no,

We must sail west across the Atlantic,

And then we shall reach Cathay.

Let us state right here that most intelligent people of that day were firmly convinced that the earth was not as flat as a pancake,

But was round.

The Ptolemian system of the universe,

Invented and duly described by Claudius Ptolemy,

The great Egyptian geographer,

Who had lived in the second century of our era,

Which had served the simple needs of the men of the Middle Ages,

Had long been discarded by the scientists of the Renaissance.

They had accepted a doctrine of the Polish mathematician,

Nicolaus Copernicus,

Whose studies had convinced him that the earth was one of a number of round planets which turned around the sun,

A discovery which he did not venture to publish for 36 years.

It was printed in 1548,

The year of his death,

From fear of the Holy Inquisition,

A papal court which had been established in the 13th century when the heresies of the Aubergines and the Waldenses in France and Italy,

Very mild heresies of the valtolipius people who did not believe in private property and preferred to live in Christ-like property,

Had for a moment threatened the absolute power of the bishops of Rome.

But the belief in the roundness of the earth was common among the nautical experts,

And,

As I said,

They were now debating the respective advantages of the eastern and western routes.

Among the advocates of the western route was a Genoese mariner by the name of Cristoforo Colombo.

He was the son of a wool merchant.

He seems to have been a student of the University of Pavia,

Where he specialized in mathematics and geometry.

Then he took up his father's trade,

But soon we find him in Chios in the eastern Mediterranean travelling on business.

Thereafter we hear of voyages to England,

But whether he went north in search of wool or as a captain of a ship we do not know.

In February of the year 1477 Colombo,

If we are to believe his own words,

Visited Iceland,

But very likely he only got so far as the Faroe Islands,

Which are cold enough in February to be mistaken for Iceland by anyone.

Here Colombo met the descendants of those brave Norsemen,

Who in the 10th century had settled in Greenland,

And who had visited America in the 11th century,

When Life's vessel had been blown to the coast of Vineland or Labrador.

What had become of those far western colonies no one knew.

The American colony of Thornefin Carlstafne,

The husband of the widow of Life's brother,

Thorne-stein,

Founded in the year 1003,

Had been discontinued three years later on account of the hostility of the Esquimawks.

As for Greenland,

Not a word had been heard from the settlers since the year 1440.

Very likely the Greenlanders had all died of the Black Death,

Which had just killed half the people of Norway.

However that might be,

The tradition of a vast land in the distant west still survived among the people of the Faroe and Iceland,

And Colombo must have heard of it.

He gathered further information among the fishermen of the northern Scottish islands,

And then went to Portugal,

Where he married the daughter of one of the captains who had served under Prince Henry the Navigator.

From that moment on,

The year 1478,

He devoted himself to the quest of the western route to the Indies.

He sent his plans for such a voyage to the court of Portugal and Spain.

The Portuguese who felt certain that they possessed the monopoly of the eastern route would not listen to his plans.

In Spain,

Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile,

Whose marriage in 1469 had made Spain into a single kingdom,

Were busy driving the Moors from their last stronghold,

Granada.

They had no money for risky expeditions.

They needed every peseta for their soldiers.

Few people were ever forced to fight as desperately for their ideas as this brave Italian.

But the story of Colombo,

Or Colón,

Or Columbus as we call him,

Is too well known to bear repeating.

The Moors surrendered Granada on the 2nd of January on the year 1492.

In the month of April of the same year,

Columbus signed a contract with the king and queen of Spain.

On Friday the 3rd of August he left Palos with three little ships and a crew of 88 men,

Many of whom were criminals who had been offered indemnity of punishment if they joined this expedition.

At 2 o'clock in the morning of Friday the 12th of October Columbus discovered land.

On the 4th of January of the year 1493 Columbus waved farewell to the 44 men of the little fortress of La Navidad,

None of whom was ever again seen alive,

And returned homeward.

By the end of middle of February he reached the Azores where the Portuguese threatened to throw him into the jail.

On the 15th of March 1493 the Admiral reached Palos,

And together with his Indians,

For he was convinced that he had discovered some outlying islands of the Indies,

And called the natives Red Indians,

He hastened to Barcelona to tell his faithful patrons that he had been successful,

And that the road to the gold and the silver of Cathay and Zipango was at the disposal of their most Catholic majesties.

Alas,

Columbus never knew the truth.

Towards the end of his life on his fourth voyage,

When he had touched the mainland of South America,

He may have suspected that all was not well with his discovery,

But he died in the firm belief that there was no solid continent between Europe and Asia,

And that he had found a direct route to China.

Meanwhile the Portuguese sticking to their eastern route had been more fortunate.

In the year 1498 Vasco da Gama had been able to reach the coast of Malabar,

And returned safely to Lisbon with a cargo of spice.

In the year 1502 he had repeated the visit,

But along the western route the work of exploration had been most disappointing.

In 1497 and 1498 John and Sebastian Cabot had tried to find a passage to Japan,

But they had seen nothing but the snow-bound coasts and the rocks of newfound land,

Which had first been sighted by the northman five centuries before.

Amerigo Vespucci,

The quarantine who became the pilot major of Spain,

And who gave his name to our continent,

Had explored the coasts of Brazil,

But had found not a trace of the Indies.

In the year 1513,

Seven years after the death of Columbus,

The truth at last began to dawn upon the geographers of Europe.

Vasco Núñez de Balboa had crossed the Isthmus of Panama,

Had climbed the famous peak in Darien,

And had looked down upon the vast expanse of water which seemed to suggest the existence of another ocean.

Finally,

In the year 1519,

A fleet of five small Spanish ships under command of the Portuguese navigator,

Ferdinand de Maggalon,

Sailed westward,

And not eastward since that route was absolutely in the hands of the Portuguese,

Who allowed no competition.

In search of the Spice Islands,

Maggalon crossed the Atlantic between Africa and Brazil and sailed southward.

He reached a narrow channel between the southernmost point of Patagonia,

The land of the people with the big feet,

And the Fire Islands,

Who so named an account of a fire,

The only sign of the existence of natives,

Which the sailors watched at night.

For almost five weeks the ship of Maggalon were at the mercy of the terrible storms and blizzards which swept through the straits.

A mutiny broke out among the sailors.

Maggalon suppressed it with terrible severity,

And sent two of his men on shore where they left to repent for their sins at leisure.

At last the storms quieted down,

The channel broadened,

And Maggalon entered a new ocean.

Its waves were quiet and placid.

He called it the Peaceful Sea,

The Mare Pacifico.

Then he continued in a western direction.

He sailed for ninety-eight days without seeing land.

His people almost perished from hunger and thirst,

And ate the rats that infested the ships.

And when these were all gone,

They chewed pieces of sail to still their gnawing hunger.

In March of the year 1521 they saw land.

Maggalon called it the land of the Ledrones,

Which means robbers,

Because the natives stole everything they could lay hands on.

Then further westward to the Spice Islands.

Again land was sighted.

A group of lonely islands.

Maggalon called them the Philippines,

After Philip,

The son of his master Charles V,

The Philip II of unpleasant historical memory.

At first Maggalon was well received,

But when he used the guns of his ships to make Christian converts,

He was killed by the Aborigines,

Together with a number of his captains and sailors.

The survivors burned one of the three remaining ships and continued their voyage.

They found the Moluccas,

The famous Spice Islands.

They sighted Borneo and reached Tidur.

There one of the two ships,

Too leaky to be further used,

Remained behind with her crew.

The Vittoria,

Under Sebastian del Cano,

Crossed the Indian Ocean,

Missed seeing the northern east of Australia,

Which was not discovered until the first half of the 17th centuries,

When ships of the Dutch East India Company explored this flat and inhospitable land,

And,

After great hardships,

Reached Spain.

This was the most notable of all voyages.

It had taken three years.

It had been accomplished at a great cost both of man and money,

But it had established the fact that the earth was round,

And that the new lands discovered by Columbus were not a part of the Indies,

But a separate continent.

From that time on,

Spain and Portugal devoted all their energies to the development of their Indian and American trade,

To prevent an armed conflict between the rivals.

Pope Alexander VI,

The only avowed heathen who was ever elected to this most holy office,

Had obligingly divided the world into two equal parts by a line of demarcation,

Which followed the 15th degree of longitude west of Greenwich,

The so-called Division of Tortus Sedilius,

Of 1494.

The Portuguese were to establish their colonies to the east of this line.

The Spaniards were to have theirs to the west.

This accounts for the fact that the entire American continent,

With the exception of Brazil,

Became Spanish,

And that all of the Indies and most of Africa became Portuguese,

Until the English and the Dutch colonists took these possessions away in the 17th and 18th centuries.

When news of the discovery of Columbus reached the Rialto Venice,

The Wall Street of the Middle Ages,

There was a terrible panic.

Stocks and bonds went down 40 and 50 percent.

After a short while,

When it appeared that Columbus had failed to find the road to Cathay,

The Venetian merchants recovered from their fright,

But the voyages of Dagrama and Magellan proved the practical possibilities of an eastern water route to the Indies.

Then the rulers of Genoa and Venice,

The two great commercial centers of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,

Began to be sorry that they had refused to listen to Columbus.

But it was too late.

Their Mediterranean became an inland sea.

The overland trade to the Indies in China dwindled to insignificant proportions.

The old days of Italian glory were gone.

The Atlantic became the new center of commerce,

And therefore the center of civilization.

It has remained so ever since.

See how strangely civilization has progressed since those early days.

Fifty centuries before,

When the inhabitants of the Valley of the Nile began to keep writing records of history,

From the River Nile it went to Mesopotamia,

The land between the rivers.

Then came the turn of Crete,

And Greece and Rome.

An inland sea became the center of trade,

And the cities along the Mediterranean were the home of art,

And science and philosophy and learning.

In the 16th century,

It moved westward once more,

And made the countries that bordered upon the Atlantic become the masters of the Earth.

There are those who say that the World War and the suicide of the great European nations has greatly diminished the importance of the Atlantic Ocean.

They expect to see civilization across the American continent and find a new home in the Pacific,

But I doubt this.

The westward trip was accompanied by a steady increase in the size of ships and the broadening of the knowledge of the navigators.

The flat-bottomed vessels of the Nile and the Euphrates were replaced by the sailing vessels of the Phoenicians,

The Aegeans and the Greeks,

The Carthaginians and the Romans.

These in turn were discarded for the square-rigged vessels of the Portuguese and the Spaniards,

And the latter were driven from the ocean by the full-rigged craft of the English and the Dutch.

At present,

However,

Civilization no longer depends upon ships.

Aircraft has taken and will continue to take the place of the sailing vessels and the steamer.

The next center of civilization will depend upon the development of aircraft and water-power,

And the sea once more shall be the undisturbed home of the little fishes,

Who once upon a time share their deep residence with the earliest ancestors of the human race.