 Introduction to Prince Henry the Navigator, the hero of Portugal and modern discovery. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Prince Henry the Navigator by Charles Raymond Beasley. Introduction. The Greek and Arabic ideas of the world as the chief inheritance of the Christian Middle Ages in geographical knowledge. Arabic science constitutes one of the main links between the older learned world of the Greeks and Latins and the Europe of Henry the Navigator and of the Renaissance. In geography it adopted in the main the results of Ptolemy and Strabo and many of the Muslim travelers and writers gained some additional hints from Indian, Persian and Chinese knowledge. But however much of the fact they added to Greek cartography they did not venture to correct its postulates. And what were these postulates? In part they were assumptions of modern draftsmen but in some important details they differed and first as to agreement. Three continents, Europe, Asia and Africa and in circling ocean, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and Caspian the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, the South Asiatic and North and West European coasts were indicated with more or less precision in the science of the Antonines and even of Hannibal's age. Similarly the Nile and Danube, Euphrates and Tigris, Indus and Ganges, Jakartes and Oxus, Rhine and Ebro, Don and Volga, with the chief mountain ranges of Europe and Western Asia find themselves pretty much in their right places in Strabo's description and are still better placed in the great chart of Ptolemy. The countries and nations from China to Spain are arranged in the order of modern knowledge but the differences were fundamental also. Never was there a clearer outrunning of knowledge by theory, science by conjecture than in Ptolemy's scheme of the world circa AD 130. His chief predecessors, Eratosthenes and Strabo had left much blank space in their charts and had made many mistakes in detail but they had caught the main features of the old world with fair accuracy. Ptolemy in trying to fill up what he did not know from his inner consciousness evolved a parody of those features. His map from its intricate falsehood backed as it was by the greatest name in geographical science paralyzed all real enlargement of knowledge till men began to question not only his facts but his theories. And as all modern science in fact followed the progress of world knowledge or geography we may see how important it was for this revolution to take place for Ptolemy to be dethroned. The world according to Ptolemy the Arabs commanding most of the centers of ancient learning Ptolemy's old Alexandria above all riveted the pseudoscience of their predecessors on the learned world along with the genuine knowledge which they handed down from the Greeks. In many details they corrected and amplified the Greek results but most of their geographical theories were mere reproductions of Ptolemy's and to his mistakes they added wilder though less important confusions or inventions of their own. The result of all this by the 10th century AD was geography based not on knowledge but on ideas of symmetry. It was a scheme fit for the Arabian knights. And how did Ptolemy lend himself to this? His chief mistakes were only two but they were mistakes from which at any rate Strabo and most of the Greek geographers are free. He made the Indian Ocean an inland sea and he filled up the southern hemisphere with Africa or the unknown Antarctic land in which he extended Africa. The dark continent in his map ran out on the one side to the southeast of China and on the other to the indefinite west though there was here no hint of America or an Atlantic continent. It was a triumph of learned imagination over humdrum research. Science under Hadrian was ambitious to have its world settled and known. It was not yet settled or fully known and so a great student constructed a melange of fact and fancy mainly based on guesswork of imaginary astronomical recordings. On the far east Ptolemy joined China and Africa and on this imaginary western coast fronting Malacca and further India he placed various gratuitous towns and rivers. Coming to smaller matters he cut away the whole of the Indian Peninsula proper though preserving the further or golden Cherinesius of the Malays and he enlarged Taprobane or Ceylon to double the size of Asia Minor. Thus the southern coast of Asia from Arabia to the Ganges ran almost due east with a straight of sea coming through the modern Carnatic between the continent and the Great Spice Island which included most of the Deccan. The Persian Gulf much greater on this map than the Black Sea was made equal in length and breadth. The shape of the Caspian was so to say turned inside out and its length given as from east to west instead of from north to south. While the coastline even of the familiar Yooksen, Aegean and southern Mediterranean was anything but true. Scandinavia was an island smaller than Ireland. Scotland represented a great eastern bend of Britain with the Shetlins and Pharaohs Thule lying a short distance to the north but on the left hand side of the Great Island. The Sea of Azov, hardly inferior to the Yooksen, stretched north halfway across Russia. All central Africa and the great southern or Antarctic continent was described as pathless desert, a land uninhabitable from the heat. And the sources of the Nile were accounted for by the marshes and mountains of the moon. Thus all of the problems of ancient geography were explained. Where Ptolemy's knowledge failed him altogether, no western of that time had ever been or was likely to go. The whole realized and unrealized world was described with such clearness and consistency man thought that what was lacking in Aristotle is now supplied. Yet it is worthwhile observing how centuries before Ptolemy in the ages nearer to Aristotle himself the geography of Eratosthenes and Strabo by a more balanced use of knowledge and by a greater restraint of fancy had composed a far more reliable chart. The earlier and discredited map avoided all the more serious perversions of Ptolemy. Africa was cut off at the limit of actual knowledge and caped non on the west and caped guard of fee on the east. And the cinnamon bearing coast between these points was fringed by the mountains of Ethiopia where the Nile rose. This was the theory which revived on the decline of the Ptolemaic and which encouraged the Portuguese sailors with hopes of a quick approach to India round Africa as the great eastern bend of the Guinea coast seemed to suggest. Further on this pre Ptolemaic map of the southern ocean was left untouched by a supposed southern continent and except for an undue shrinkage of the old world in general as an island in the midst of the vast surrounding ocean a reliable description of Western Asia and Central Europe and North Africa was in the hands of the learned world 200 years before Christ. It is true that Strabo's China is cramped and cut short that his salon Taprobane is even larger than Ptolemy's that Ireland appears to the north of Britain and that the Caspian joins the North Sea by a long and narrow channel but the true shape of India of the Persian Gulf and the Yuxin of the Sea of Azov and the Mediterranean is marked rightly enough in general outline. This earlier chart has not the elaborate completeness of Ptolemy's but it is free from his enormous errors and it has all the advantage of science however imperfect over brilliant guessing of course even in Ptolemy this guesswork pure and simple only comes in at intervals and does not so much affect the central and for his day far more important tracks of the old world but we have yet to see how in the medieval period and under Arabic imagination all geography seemed likely to become an exercise of fancy the chief Greek descriptions of the world we must clearly remember were before the medieval workers Christian and Muslim from the first these men took their choice with the rare exception the last of these the Ptolemy system because it was the more ambitious symmetrical and pretty let us trace for a moment the gradual development of this geographical mythology starting with the notion of the world as a disc or a ball the center of the universe round which moved six celestial circles of the meridian the equator the ecliptic the two tropics and the horizon the Arab philosophers on the side of the earth's surface worked out a doctrine of a cupola or summit of the world and on the side of the heavens a pseudo science of the Anoa or settings of the constellations connected with the 12 pillars of the zodiac and the 28 mansions of the moon with Arabic astrology we are not here concerned it is only worth noting in this connection as the possible source of early Christian knowledge of the southern cross and other stars familiar in the story of exploration such as Dante shows in the first canto of his purgatorio but the geographical doctrines of Islam compounded from the Hebrew pentatook and the theoretical parts of Ptolemy had a more immediate and reactionary effect on knowledge the symmetrical Greek divisions of land into seven zones climates and of the world's surface into three parts water and one part terra firma the Indian fourfold arrangement of Rome land and the east the similar fourfold Chinese partition of China India, Persia and Tartary all these reappeared confusedly in Arabic geography from India and the Sanskrit Lanka they seem to have got their first start on the myth of Ogyne, Aaron or RM the world's summit from Ptolemy the sacred number of 360 degrees of longitude was certainly derived beautifully corresponding to the days of the year and neatly divided into 180 of land or habitable earth and 180 of sea or unharvested desert with the seven climates they made correspond the great empires of the world chief among which they reckoned the caliphate or Baghdad, China Rome, Turkestan and India the sacred city of Ogyne had been the center of most of the earlier oriental systems in the Arabic form of a rim the cupola of the earth it became the fixed point round which circled medieval theories of the world's shape somewhere in the Indian ocean between Cormoran and Madagascar became the compromise when the mountain could not be found off any of the known coastlines it was mixed up with notions of the rock and the moon mountains in Africa of the magnet island and of the eastern kingdom made out of one vast pearl and even in Roger Bacon it serves as an algebraic sign for a mathematical center of the world the enlargement of knowledge though forcing upon Arabic science a conviction of Ptolemy's mistake in over extending the limits of the world known to him only led to the invention of a scholastic distinction between the real and the traditional east and west while the confusion was made perfect by the travestied history always so popular among orientals the gates of Alexander and Hercules the farthest points east and west were named after the mythical conquest of the real ice scander and the mythical hero of Greeks and Phoenicians are in the middle with the pillars of Hercules and Alexander and the north and south poles at equal distance from it the center and the four corners of the world as neatly fixed as geometry could define this was the map first of the Arabs and then of their Christian scholars to form an idea of the complete spell thus cast overthought both in Islam and Christendom we may look at the words of European scholars of the 12th and 13th centuries living far from Islam long after its intellectual glory had begun to decay and at a time when Christian scholastic philosophy had reached an independent position Gerard of Karamona and Adelaide of Bath the translator of the great Arabic geographer Muhammad al-Karizmi in the 12th century Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus in the later 13th are all as clear about their geographical postulates as about their theological or ethical rules and what concerns us here is that they exactly reflect the mind of the Arabic science or pseudo science of the time just proceeding so that their words may represent to us the state of Muhammad and thought between the 8th and 12th centuries between the writers at the court of Caliph al-Mamun 813 to 833 and Adresi at the court of King Roger of Sicily 1150 Adelaide summarizing Muhammad al-Karizmi with the results of his Paris education tells us of the Arabic examination of planets and of time starting from the center of the world called Arim from which place to the fore ends of the earth the distance is equal V 90 degrees answering to the fourth part of the world circumference it is tedious and unending to attempt to place all the countries of the world to fix all the marks of time so the meridian is taken as the measure of the latter and Arim of the former and from the starting point it is not hard to fix other countries Arim he concludes is under the equator at the point where there is no latitude and he plainly implies that there were then existing among Arabs tables calculating all the chief places of every country from the meridian to Gerard of Cremona who though for some time a resident of Toledo is essentially an Italian tells us about the middle of the world from which longitudes were calculated called Arim and said to be in India whose longitude from west to east or from east to west is 90 degrees in his theory of the planets Gerard tells us still more wonderful things Arim was a geographical center known and used by Hermes, Trismegistus and by Ptolemy as well as by the great Arab geographers Alexander of Macedon marched just as far to the east of Arim as Hercules to the west both reached to the encircling ocean and accordingly Arim is equidistant from both the gates 90 degrees likewise from each pole north and south the same 90 degrees this all in the tables of Alfonso the wise of Castile about AD 1260 and two of the greatest of medieval thinkers Albert and Roger Bacon reproduced the essential points of this doctrine its false symmetry and its balance of the true and the traditional with variations of their own three Albert the great Albertus Magnus second only to Aquinas among the continental schoolmen in his astronomy repeats Adelaard upon the question of Arim where there is no latitude while four Roger Bacon discusses not only the true and the traditional east and west but even a two-fold Arim one under the solstice the other under the equinoctial zone Arim he finds not to be in the center of the real world but only of the traditional in another passage of the opus mages Bacon our first English worker in the exact sciences allows the world summit not only to be 90 degrees from the east although so placed by mathematicians yet there is no contradiction he urges because the men of theory are speaking of the habitable world known to them according to the true understanding of latitude and longitude and this true understanding is not as great as has been realized in travel by Pliny and others the longitude of the habitable world is more than half of the whole circuit this reproduced into the Imago Mundi of Cardinal Peter Ailey 1410 fell into the hands of Columbus and helped fix his doctrines of the shape of the world in the form of a pair of the terrestrial paradise and of the earth's circumference so enormously contracted as practically to abolish the pacific to return to the Arabs we have seen how they not merely followed Greek theories which their own experience as conquerors in the further east went to discredit but in the great outlines of geography added to earlier errors put prejudice in the place of knowledge and handed on to Christendom a half fanciful map of the world it only remains for us to illustrate their leading fault of a vivid fancy with a few details on my error points one, Ptolemy's habitable quarter of the world amounting to just half the longitude of the globe was literally accepted by the Muslim world as it accepted the Pentateuch from the moment when it began its study of signs of the court of Alma Moon 813-833 but as the conquest of the Caliphs disclosed districts in the east far Ptolemy's limits it was necessary in case of keeping his data for the whole to compress the part which alone was to be found fully described in his chart on the west unhappily there were no countries newly discovered to compensate for this abridgment by Masoudi's time by the 10th century fact and theory were thus hopelessly at variance two, on the shape of Africa the mass of Arabic opinion confirmed Ptolemy, but among the more enlightened there is traceable from Masoudi's time a tendency either to react towards Strabo's partly agnostic position or to invent some new theory rather more in harmony with the known facts that is either their later map makers cut off Africa at Cape Naan or Bojador and Cape Guardafi and gave away the rest to the green sea of darkness or like Masoudi they sketched a great southern continent divided from Africa by a narrow channel which connected the western ocean with the sea of Hasbakh of Abyssinia or India in either case Africa was left an island. Three the words Gog and Magog from Jeremiah describing the nomads of central Asia appear in the Quran as Yaduj and Maduj the complete story in the 10th century and in Idrisi's day connects them with Alexander the Great who is also found in the Quran as dual carnain and with the wall of China. When the conqueror said the Arabs reached the place near where the sun rose he was implored to build a wall to shut off the marauders of Yaduj and Maduj from the rich countries of the south so he built a rampart of iron across the pass by which alone Tehran joined Iran and henceforth Turks and Tartars were kept outside. When the Arabs reached the Caucasus they generally supposed this to answer to Alexander's wall when facts dispelled this theory the unknown Ural or Altai mountains served instead. Finally as the Muslims became masters of Central Asia the wall of China beyond the Gobi desert alone satisfied the conditions of shadowy but historic grandeur beyond all practical danger of verification. Four striking contrast with the steady advance of Arabic exploration and trade in the eastern sea is the Muslim horror of the western ocean beyond Europe and Africa the green sea of darkness or at the Atlantic. And what we have to note is that they imparted much of this paralyzing cowardice to the Christian nations only the Northmen of Scandinavia living a life apart and forced to make their way over the wild North Sea were untouched by the southern superstition and ventured across the ocean by the pharaohs Iceland and Greenland to the coast of Labrador. The doctors of the Quran indeed thought that a man mad enough to embark for the unknown even on a coasting voyage should be deprived of civil rights. Even Said goes further and says no one has ever done this rural pools always destroy any adventurer as late as the generation immediately before Henry the Navigator about AD 1390 another light of Muslim science declared the Atlantic to be boundless so that ships dare not venture out of sight of land for even if the sailors knew the direction of the winds they would not know whether those winds would carry them and as there is no inhabited country beyond they would run a risk of being lost in mist fog and vapor the limit of the west Atlantic Ocean. This was the final judgment of the Arabic race and its subject allies upon the western limits of the world and in two ways they helped fix this belief derived from the timid coasting traders of the Roman Empire on Greek and Latin Christendom. First the Spanish caliphate cut off all access to the western sea beyond the Bay of Biscay from the 8th to the 12th centuries. Not till the capture of Lisbon in 1147 could Christian enterprise on this side gain any basis or starting point. Not till the conquest of the Algarve in the extreme southwest of the peninsula at the end of the 12th century was this enterprise free to develop itself. Secondly in the darkest ages of Christian depression the 7th the 8th the 9th the 10th centuries when only the brief age of Charlemagne offered any chance of an independent and progressive Catholic empire in the west. The Arabs became recognized along with the Byzantines as the main successors of Greek culture. The science the metaphysic the abstract ideas of these centuries came into Germany, France and Italy from Cordova and from Baghdad as much as from Byzantium and on questions like the South Atlantic or Indian Ocean or the shape of Africa where Islam had all the field to itself and there was no positive and earlier discovery which might contradict a natural reluctance to test tradition by experiment. Christendom accepted the Arabic verdict with deference in the same way on still more difficult points such as the theory of a canal from the Caspian to the Black Sea or from the Caspian to the Arctic Circle or from the Black Sea to the Baltic Paris and Rome and Bologna and Oxford accepted the Arabic descriptions. It has been necessary for us to attend to the defects of Arabic geography in order to understand how in the long Saracen control of the world's trade routes and of geographical tradition science and seamanship were so little advanced. Between Ptolemy and Henry of Portugal between the second and the 15th centuries the only great extension of men's knowledge of the world was one in the extreme north where the semi-christian semi-pagan Vikings reached perhaps as far as the present site of New York and founded on another side the medieval kingdom of Russia two on the southeast coast of Africa from Cape Guadafi to Madagascar which was opened up by the trading interest of the Ammo Said family 800 to 1300 in the far east in central and further Asia by the discoveries of Marco Polo and the friar preachers following on the tracks of the earlier Muslim travelers the first of these was a northern secret soon forgotten or an abortive development cut short by the Tartars the second was an Arabic secret jealously guarded as a commercial right the third alone added much direct new knowledge to the main part of the civilized world but throughout their period of commercial rule from the 8th to the 12th centuries the Arabs took a keen interest in land traffic conquest and exploration they were of small account at sea it took them some time to turn to their own purposes Hippoleus's discovery in the second century AD of the monsoon in the Indian ocean but on land Muslim travelers and writers generally following in the wake of their armies but sometimes pressing on ahead of them did little to enlarge the horizon of the Mohammedan world though it was not till Marco Polo and the Franciscan missionaries of the 13th and 14th centuries that Christian Europe shared in this game as the early Caliphs conquered they made surveys of their new dominions thus after Tariq and Musa had overrun Spain while lead at Damascus required from them to account of the land and its resources the universal obligation of the Mecca pilgrimage compelled every Muslim to travel once in his life and many an Arab after the Caliphate was settled in power from the oxes to the Pyrenees journeyed to and fro with the joy of a master going over vast estates showing his dreaded turban to the subjects of every nation this however was not geographical science or even pseudo science before Mohammed the Arabs had possessed some knowledge of the stars and used it for astrology but it was at the court of Al-Mamun 813 to 833 that their inquiring spirits first set themselves to answer the great question of geography where? through the 9th and 10th centuries there arose a succession of travelers and thinkers who with all their wild dreamings preserved the best results of Greek maps and would have made much greater advances but for their helplessness and original work as they could not recast Aristotle and philosophy so they could not with all their new knowledge of the further east recast the geography of Ptolemy and Strabo a few great ages the age for instance of Al-Mamun in Baghdad AD 830 of Mahmud in Ghazna AD 1000 of Abdamaran the 3rd in Cordova AD 950 give us the history of Arabic geography beginning in the latter years of the 8th century Muslim science was reformed and organized in the new empire by the patronage of the Caliphs of the 9th itineraries of victorious generals plans and tables prepared by governors of provinces and a freshly acquired knowledge of Greek and Indian and Persian thought made up the subject matter of study the barbarism of the first believers was passing away and Muhammad's words were recalled seek knowledge even in China by the end of the 8th century Ptolemy's geography and the now lost work of Marinus of Tyre had already been translated Al-Mamun drew to his court all the chief mathematicians or philosophers of Islam such as Muhammad Al-Kharizmi, Al-Farghani and Suleiman the merchant further he built two observatories one at Baghdad one at Damascus and procured a chart fixing the latitude and longitude of every place known to him or his savants Al-Kharizmi interpolated the new Arabic Ptolemy with additions from the Sanskrit and made some use of Indian trigonometry Al-Farghani wrote the first Arab treatise on the Astrolabe and adopted the Greek division of the seven climates to the new learning Suleiman at the time of the closest intercourse between China, India and the Caliphate traveled in every country of the further east sailed in the sea of pitchy darkness on the east coast of Asia and by his voyages became the prototype of Sinbad the sailor the impulse given by Al-Mamun did not die with him about 850 Al-Kendi made a fresh version of Ptolemy as early as 840 the Caliph Vatakbilla explored the countries of Central Asia and his results have been preserved by Adresi a few years later, circa 890 Ibn Cordoba son of the Magi described the principal trade routes the Indians by the Red Sea from Jeddah to Sinday the Russians by the Volga in North Caspian the Persian by way of the Balkh to China it was by this last that some have thought the envoys of the English king, King Alfred went in 883 till they turned south to seek India and the Christians of Santome the early scientific movement in Islam reached its height in Albatini and Massoudi at the beginning of the 10th century the former determined more exactly than before various problems of astronomical geography the latter visited every country from further India to Spain even China and Madagascar seemed to have been within the compass of his later travels and his voyages in the Indian Ocean bring us to the real Sindbad Saga of the 10th century Sindbad, as his story appears in the Arabian Nights has been traced to an original in the Indian tales of the Seven Sages in the voyages of the age of the Krosros Nusravan or of Harun Al Rashid but the tale appears to be an Arabic original account with a little more of mystery and exaggeration than usual of the 9th and 10th century travelers from Suleiman to Massoudi reproduced in form in a series of novels with Massoudi begins also the formal discussion of geographical problems affecting Islam. Was the Caspian a landlocked sea? Did it connect with the Uxen? Did either or both of these joined the Arctic Ocean? Was Africa an island? If so, was there also an unknown southern continent? What was the shape of southeastern Asia? Was Tolimi's longitude to be wholly accepted? And if not, how was it to be bettered? By a use of Strabo and of Albatini, rather than of Tolimi, Massoudi arrived at fairly accurate and very plausible results. His chief novelties were the long river channel from the Sea of Azov to the North Sea and the strait between Africa and the shadowy southern continent. On his scheme, the Indian Ocean, or Sea of Hasbach contains most of the water surface of the world and the Sea of Erol appears for the first time in Muslim geography. Lastly is a count of the Arab coasting voyages from the Persian Gulf to Sokotra and Madagascar proves implicitly that as yet there was no use of the compass. Massoudi cut down the girth of the world even more than Tolimi. The latter had left an ocean to the west of Africa. The former made the canaries or fortunate islands the limits of the known western world, a but upon India, the limits of the eastern. The first age of Arabic geography ends with Massoudi, its greatest name in the middle of the 10th century. The second age is summed up in the work of the eastern sage Al Bruni and of Adresi, the Arabic Sumi, AD 1099 to 1154, who found a home at the Christian court of Roger of Sicily. In the far east and west alike in Spain and Morocco, in Karasen and India, Muslim science was now driven to take refuge among strangers on the decay of the caliphates of Baghdad and Cordova. The Ghaznavitis, Mamoud and Massoud, in the first half of the 11th century attracted to their court not only Ferdousi and Avicenna but Al Bruni, whose canon became a textbook of Muhammadian science and who for the range of his knowledge and the trained subtlety of his mind stands without a rival for his time. The Spanish school, as resulting directly in Adresi, half Muslim half Christian, like his teachers, is of still more interest. One of its first traces may be found in the Latin translation of the Arab Almanac made by Bishop Harib of Cordova in 961. It was dedicated and presented to Caliph Hakim, one of the clearest proofs of the conscious interworking of Catholic and Muhammadian philosophy in the age of Pope Sylvester II and of our own Saint Dunstan. A century later, on the recapture of Toledo by Alfonzo VI, 1084, an observatory was built, served by Jews and Muslims who had been steadily producing through the whole of the 11th century astronomical and geographical tables and dictionaries. The whole tribe of commentators on place names on the climates and constellations and on geographical instruments was at work in this last age of the Spanish Caliphate and their results are brought together by Abu Hamid of Granada and by Adresi. Born at Suta in 1099 this great geographer traveled through Spain, France, the western Mediterranean and North Africa before settling at the Norman court of Palermo. Roger, the most civilized prince in Christendom, the final product of the great race of Robert Giscard and William the Conqueror, valued Adresi at his proper worth, refused to part with him and employed men in every part of the world to collect materials for his study. Thus the more gained, not only for the Muslim world but for the southern Europe as well and approximate knowledge even of Norway, Sweden, Finland and the coasts of the White Sea, his work dedicated to Roger and called after him, Al-Rujari was rewarded with a peerage and it was as a Sicilian count that he finished his celestial sphere and terrestrial disc of silver on which was inscribed all circuit of the known world and all the rivers thereof. Each of his great Arabic predecessors along with Eratosthenes, Ptolemy and Strabo was welded into his system. The result of 15 years of abstract study following some 30 of practical activity in travel. A special note may be made on Adresi's account of the voyage of the Lisbon Wanderers, Magarenes, sometime before 1147, the date of the final Christian capture of the Portuguese capital. For this is the earliest recorded voyage since the rise of Islam definitely undertaken on the western ocean to learn what it was on it and what were its limits. The Wanderers, Adresi tells us, were eight in number all related to one another. They built a transport boat, took on board water and provisions for many months and started with the first east wind. After 11 days they reached a sea whose waters exhaled a fetid odor, concealed numerous reefs and were but faintly lighted. Fearing for their lives they changed their course, steered southward 12 days and so reached an island, possibly Madeira, which they called El Ganam for the sheep found there, without shepherd or anyone to tend to them. On landing they found a spring of running water and some wild figs. They killed some sheep but found the flesh so bitter that they could not eat it and only took the skins. Sailing south 12 more days they found an island with houses and cultivated fields, but as they neared it they were surrounded, made prisoners and carried in their own boats to a city on the seashore, to a house where were men of tall stature and women of great beauty. Here they stayed three days and on the fourth came a man, the king's interpreter, who spoke Arabic and asked them who they were and what they wanted. They replied they were seeking out the wonders of the ocean and its limits. At this the king laughed heartily and said to the interpreter tell them my father once ordered some of his slaves to venture out on that sea and after sailing across the bread of it for a month they found themselves deprived of the light of the sun and returned without having learned anything. Then the wanderers were sent back to their prison till a west wind arose, when they were blindfolded and put on board a boat and after three days reached the mainland of Africa. Here they were put ashore, with their hands tied and so left. They were released by the burbers and after their reappearance in Spain a street at the foot of the hot bath in Lisbon took the name of street of the wanderers. On the other extremity of the Muslim world on the southeast coast of Africa there was more real progress. By Idrisi's day that important addition of Arabic travelers and merchants to the geographical knowledge of the world by the remarkable trade ventures of the M.O. Said's had already been made. The world according to Idrisi. About AD 742 ten years after the battle of Tours the M.O. Said family descended from Ali, cousin and son in law of Muhammad, tried to make Said their clan chieftain Ali's great-grand son Caliph at Damascus. The attempt was foiled and the whole tribe fled, sailed down the Red Sea and African coast and established themselves as trader in the sea of India. First of all, Sokotra seems to have been their mart in capital but before the end of the 10th century they had founded different colonies at Melinda, Mombasa and Mozambique which, in their turn, led to settlements on the opposite coast of Asia. Thus, the trade of the Indian Ocean was secure for Islam. The first Muslim settlements arose in Malabar and when the Portuguese broke into this Mare Closam in 1497-8 they found a belt of Moorish coast towns from Madagacso to Quiloa. Controlling both Indian and the inland African trades as Ibn Battuta had found in 1330. By Idrisis Day, more over, the steady persistent and self-evident results of Arabic overland exploration had become recognized by a sort of traveler's doctorate. It was not enough for the highest knowledge to study the Quran and the Sunnah and the Greek philosophers at home. For a perfect education a man must have traveled at least the length and breadth of Islam. All the successors of Idrisis in the 12th and 13th centuries show this mingling of science and religion, of practical and speculative energy. Traditions still governed Muslim thought, but there had come into being a sort of half acknowledged appendix to tradition made up of real observations on men and things, and in these observations, geographical interest was the main factor. The life of Al-Harevi of Harat, 1173 to 1215, the doctor ubiquitous of Islam in the age of the Crusades, gives us a picture of another Masoudi, the friend of the emperor Manuel Comeninus, the first man among Christians. Haravi seems able in his own person to break down the partition wall of religious feud by the common interest of science. In 1792 he was offered the patronage of the Crusading Princess and Richard Courdillon begged for the favor of an interview and begged in vain. Haravi, who had been on one of his exploring journeys, angrily refused to see the king whose men had broken his quiet and wasted his time. Before his death he had run over the world, men said, from China to the Pyrenees and from Abyssinia to the Danube, with a name on every wall, and his survey of the eastern empire was the single matter in which Turks and Romans made common cause, for Greeks and Latins at Byzantium alike read Haravi like a Christian doctor. Another example of the same Catholic spirit is Yakut the Roman, whose dictionary finished in the earlier half of the 13th century was a summary of geographical advance since Edrici, like the similar work in Syed of the same period. But as a matter of fact the balance both of knowledge and power was now shifting from Islam to Christendom. The most daring and successful travelers after the rise of the Mongols were the Venetian Marco Polo and the friar preachers who revived Chinese Christianity 1270 to 1350. Madeira and the Canaries off Muslim Africa were finally rediscovered not by Arabic Enterprise but by the Italian Malicello in 1270 by the English Machum in the reign of our Edward III and by Portuguese ship under Genoese captains in 1331. In 1291 the Vivaldi ventured beyond Cape Bojador where no more had ever been except by force of storm as in the doubtful story of Ibn Fatima who first saw the white headland Blanco between Cape Bojador and Cape Verde. In the 14th century the map of Idrissi was superseded by the new Italian plans and coast charts or Portolani as the Muslim world fell into political disorder. It's science declined. Judicial astrology seemed gaining a stronger and stronger hold over Islam and the eruption of the Turks gradually resulted in all the higher Muslim culture. Superstition and barbarism shared the honor and the spoils of this victory. But two great names closed the 500 years of Arab learning. One Ibn Battuta circa 1330 who made himself as much at home in China as in his native Morocco is the last of Muhammadian travelers of real importance. Though we have only abridgments of his work left to us, Ibn Battuta is well within his rights in his deliberate judgment that it must rank at least one of the four chief guide books of the Middle Ages along with the book of Sermarkopolo and the journals of the two friar travelers, friar Odiric and friar William de Rebruque. Two, with Abul-Feda the eastern school of Muslim geography comes to an end as the western does with Ibn Battuta. In the early years of the 14th century he rewrote the story and description of the land of Islam with a completeness quite encyclopedic. But his work has all the failings of a compilation however careful in that or any age it is based upon information not upon inspection it is in no sense original. As it began an imitation so it ended if it rejects Ptolemy it is only to follow Strabo or someone else on all the mathematical and astronomical data its doctrine is according to the Alexandrians of 1200 years before and this last precise of the science of a great race and a great religion can only be understood in the light of its model in Greek geography. End of introduction. Chapter 1 of Prince Henry the Navigator the hero of Portugal in discovery This is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Prince Henry the Navigator by Charles Raymond Beasley Chapter 1 Early Christian Pilgrims circa 333 to 867 The special interest of the life and work of Henry the Navigator 1394 to 1460 lies in the relation it bears to the general expansion of Europe and Christendom an expansion that had been slowly gathering strength since the 11th century but even before the tide had turned in the age of Hildebrand and the first crusade even from the time that Constantine founded the Christian Empire of Rome the Christian capital on the Bosphorus and the state church of the western world pilgrimage trade conquest and colonization had been successfully calling out the energies of the moving races the motor muscles of Europe it is through the generous Henry Prince of Portugal that this activity is brought to its third and triumphant stage to the time of Columbus and Degama and Magellan but it is only by tracing the earlier progress of that outward movement which has made Europe the ruling civilization of the world that we can fairly grasp the import of that transition in which Henry is the hero more than any other single man he is the author of the discovering movement of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries and by this movement India has been conquered America re-peopled the world made clear and the civilization which the Roman Empire left behind had overshadowed every one of its old rivals and superiors Islam India, China Tartary but before the 15th century before the birth of Prince Henry Christendom Greek and Latin was at best only one of the greater civilizing and conquering forces struggling for mastery at the age of the Crusades before the 11th century it was plainly weaker than the Muslim powers it seemed unable to fight against Slav or Scandinavian Heathendom it was only saved by distance from becoming a province of China India, the world's great prize was cut off from it by the Arabs even before the rise of Islam under Constantine or Theodosius or Justinian the church state of the Byzantine Caesars though then ruling in almost every province of Trajan's Empire was in a splendid but sure decline from the exhaustion of the southern races Our story then begins naturally with the worst time and climbs up for a thousand years from the heathen and Mohammedan conquests of the 5th and 7th centuries to the reversal of that judgment of those conquests in the 15th the expansion of Europe is going on all this time but at our beginning in the years before and after Pope Gregory the Great even the legacy of Greece and Rome in wide knowledge of the world and practical exploring energy seem to have passed from sight and in the decline of the old empire while Constantine and Justinian are said to receive and exchange embassies with the court of China there is no real extension of geographical knowledge or outlook Christian enterprise in this field is mainly one of pilgrimage and the pilgrims only cease to be important when the North men first heathen then Christian begin to lead in a very different manner the expansion of Europe into this folk wandering of the Vikings the first great outward movement of our Europe in the middle ages is absorbed the reviving energy of trade as well as the ever growing impulse of pilgrimage the Vikings are the highest type of explorers they do not merely find out new lands and trade with them but conquer and colonize them they extend not merely the knowledge but the whole state and being of Europe to a new world lastly the partial activity of commerce and religion made universal and political by the leading western race for itself only is taken up by all Christendom in the Crusades borrowed in idea from Spain borrowed with the spirit of the Norse rovers and made universal for the Latin world for the whole federation of Rome in the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries we have the preparation for the discovery and colonization of the outside world by Europeans in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries of the Christian era from the conversion of Constantine to the Reformation the story of Christendom is unbroken the later Roman Empire is the church state of a Christian prince as modern Europe is the church state of a nominally Christian society medieval Europe thought of itself as nothing but the old world state under religion from Spain to Russia men were living under a holy Roman Empire of an Italian or Teutonic or Byzantine or independent type England and Russia were not parts of the Germanic revival of Charlemagne but they had just the same two elements dominant in their life the classical tradition and the Christian church and so throughout this time the expansion of this society by whatever name we may call it discovery, exploration geographical knowledge has a continuous history but before the rise of Islam in the 7th century throws Christendom into its proper medieval life before the new religion begins the really new age at the end of which lived Henry himself we are too far from our subject to feel for instance in the 4th and 5th century pilgrims and in Kosmos Indicoplasties anything but a remote preparation for Henry's work it is only with the 7th century and with the time of our own bead and Wilfred that the necessary introduction to our subject really begins yet as an illustration of the general idea that discovery is an early and natural outlet of any vigorous society and is in proportion to the universal activity of the state is not without interest to note that Christian pilgrimage begins with Constantine this the first department of exploring energy at once evidences the new settlement of religion and politics Helena the emperor's mother helped by her visit to Palestine her church at Bethlehem and her discoveries of relics in Jerusalem to make a ruling fashion out of the custom of a few devotees and 8 years after the council of Nicaea in 333 appeared the first Christian geography as a guide book or itinerary from Bordeaux to the holy places of Syria modeled upon the imperial survey of the colonizers the route followed in this runs by north Italy Aquileia Cermium Constantinople and Asia Minor and upon the same course thousands of nameless pilgrims journeyed in the next 300 years besides some 809 who have left an account mainly religious in form remaining in substance the widest view of the globe than possible among westerns most of the pilgrims like Jerome's friend Paula Bishop Eucharist and Melania tread the same path and stop at the same points but 3 or 4 of them distinctly add some fresh knowledge to the ordinary results Saint Sylvia of Aquitaine circa 385 not only travels through Syria she visits lower Egypt and Stony Orsainidic Arabia and even Edessa in northern Mesopotamia on the very borders of hostile and heathen Persia to see the monks she wanders through Osroheen to Heron near which was the home of Abraham and the farm of Laban and the well of Rachel to the environs of Nacebus and Ur of the Caldees lost to the Roman Empire since Julien's defeat thence by Padan Aram back to Antioch when crossing the Euphrates the pilgrims saw the river rush down in a torrent like the Rhone but greater and on the way home by the great military road then untraveled by Saracens between Tarsus and the Bosphorus Sylvia makes a passing note on the strength and brigand habits of the Azarian mountaineers who in the end saved Christendom from the very Arabs with whom our pilgrim couples them again Cosmus Indicoplastes in the time of Justinian is at the end as Sylvia is at the beginning of a definite period the period of the Christian Empire of Rome while still Caesarean and not merely Byzantine patrician and not papal consular and not Carolingian and contemporary with Cosmus are two of the chief among the earlier or primitive pilgrims Theodosius and Antoninus the martyr the first named indulges in a few excursions in fancy beyond his known ground of Palestine going as far east as Suza and Babylon to live for the serpents and hippocintars and south to the Red Sea and its two arms of which the eastern is called the Persian Gulf and the western or Arabian runs up to the 13 cities of Arabia destroyed by Joshua but for the rest his knowledge is not extensive or peculiar Antoninus of Placentia on the other hand is very interesting a sort of older Mandeville who mixes truth and its opposite in fairly even proportions and with a sort of resolute partiality to favorite legends he tells us how Tripolis has been ruined by the late earthquake July 9th 551 how silk and various woven stuffs are sold at tire how the pilgrims scratch their names on the relics shown in Cana of Galilee and here I, center that I am, did inscribe the names of my parents how Bethshawn the metropolis of Galilee is placed on a hill though really in the plane how the Samaritans hate Christians and will hardly speak to them and beware of spitting in their country for they will never forgive it how the dew comes down upon Herman the little as David says the dew of Herman that fell upon the hill of Zion how nothing can live or even float in the dead sea but is instantly swallowed up as exact and untruth as was ever told by traveler how the Jordan opens away for pilgrims and stands up in a heap every year at the epiphany during the baptism of catechumans as David told the sea saw that and fled Jordan was driven back how at Jericho he was held sown by the Lord with his own hand a report had been spread that the salt pillar of Lot's wife had been lessened by licking it was false said Antoninus the statue was just the same as it had always been in Jerusalem the pilgrims first went up the tower of David where he sang the salter and into the Basilica of Zion where among other marvels they saw the cornerstone that the builders rejected which gave out a sound like the murmuring of a crowd we come back again to fact with rather a start when told in the next section of the hospitals for three thousand sick folk near the church of St. Mary close to Zion then with the footprints and relics of Christ and the miraculous flight of the column of scourging carried away by a cloud to Caesarea we are taken through a fresh set of impressions the same wild notions of place and time and nature follow the martyr through Galilee to Gilboa where David slew Goliath and Saul died where no dew or rain ever falls and where devils appear nightly world about like fleeces of wool or the waves of the sea to Nazareth where was the beam of Christ the carpenter to Elua where fifteen consecrated contained a lion and trained it to live with them in a cell to Egypt where the pyramids become for him the twelve barns of Joseph for the legend had not yet insisted that the actual number should be made to fit the text of the seven years of plenty but with all this Antoninus now and then gives us glimpses of a larger world in Jerusalem he meets Ethiopians with nostrils slit and rings about their fingers and their feet they were so marked they told him by the emperor Trajan for a sign in the Sinai desert he tells us of Saracen bagers and idolaters in the Red Sea ports he sees ships from India laden with aromatics he travels up the Nile to the cataracts and describes the Nylometer at Aswan and the crocodiles in the river Alexandria he finds splendid but frivolous a lover of pilgrims but swarming with heresies but far more wonderful than the practical jumble of Antoninus Martyr is the systematic nonsense of Kosmos who invented or worked out a theory and scheme of the world a Christian topography which required nothing more than a complete disuse of human reason his assurance was equal to his science it may have been his voyage to India or his monastic profession or his study of Scripture or something unknown that made him take up the part of a Christian Aristotle in any case he felt himself called into the field to support the cause of St. Augustine against infidelity and to refute the anile fable of the antipodes Kosmos referred men back to revelation on such matters and his system was demonstrated from Scripture concerning which a Christian is not allowed to doubt man by himself could not understand the world but in the Bible it was all clear enough and from the Bible this much was beyond dispute the universe is a flat parallelogram and its length is exactly double of its breadth in the center of the universe is our world surrounded by the ocean and by an outer world or ring where men lived before the flood Noah and his ark came over sea from this to the present earth to the north of our world is a great hill like the later Muslim and older Hindu cupola of the earth which perhaps was Kosmos own original round this the sun and moon revolve making day and night as they appear or disappear behind it the sky consists of four walls meeting in the dome of heaven over the floor on which we live and this sky is glued to the edges of the outer world the world of the patriarchs but this heaven is also cut in two by the firmament lying between our atmosphere and that new heaven and new earth where in dwelleth righteousness and the floor of this upper world is covered by the earth that be above the firmament above this is paradise and below the firmament live the angels as ministers and flaming fires and servants of god to men the proofs of this are simple mainly resting on some five texts from the old testament and two passages of saint paul first the book of genesis declared itself to be the book of the generation of the heaven and the earth that is of everything in the heavens and the earth but the old wives fable of the antipodes would make the heaven surround and contain the earth and god's word would have to be changed these are the generations of the sky for the same truth the twofold and independent being of heaven and earth cosmos quotes the additional testimony of abraham david, hosea isaia zachariah and melchizedek who clinched the case against the antipodes for how indeed could even reign be said to fall or to descend as in the psalms and the gospels in those regions where it could only be said to come up again the world cannot be a globe or sphere or be suspended in midair or in any sort of motion for what say the scriptures earth is fixed on its foundations thou hast laid the foundations of the earth and it abideth thou hast made the round world so sure that it cannot be moved thou hast made all men to dwell upon the face of the whole earth not upon every face or upon any more than one face upon the face not the back or the side but the broad flat face we know who then with these passages before him ought even to speak of antipodes so much against false doctrine to establish the truth is simpler still for the same saint paul who disposes of science falsely so called we speak like david like saint peter and saint john of our world as a tabernacle if our earthly house of this tabernacle be dissolved we that are in this tabernacle do groan being burdened which points to the natural conclusion of enlightened faith that moses tabernacle was an exact copy of the universe see thou make all things according to the pattern shown thee in the mount so the four walls the covered roof the floor the proportions of the tent of the wilderness showed us in small compass all that was in nature if any further guidance were needed it was ready to hand in the prophet isaia in the patriarch Job that stretches out the heavens as a curtain and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in also can any understand the spreadings of the clouds or the noise of his tabernacle the whole reasoning is like the theological arguments on the effects of man's fall and the vegetable world or the atmospheric changes due to angels but though kosmos states his system with the claims of an article of faith there were not wanting man and even saints who stood out on the side of reason in geography in the most traditional of times Isidore of Seville and Virgil the Irish and Mary of the 8th century both maintained the old belief of Basil and Ambrose that the question of the antipodes was not closed by the church and that error in this point was venial and not mortal for the positive tabernacle system of the man who sailed to India there was never much support his work was soon forgotten though it has been called by some paradox makers the great authority of the middle ages in the face of the known facts that this was the real position of Ptolemy and Strabo that no one can speak of the middle ages in this unqualified way any more than of the modern or ancient worlds Cosmos is almost unnoticed in the great age of medieval science from the 12th century and whatever we may think of Cosmos and his Christian system of the whole world evolved out of holy scripture he is of interest to us as the last of the old Christian geographers closing one age which however senile in the truest sense civilized and preparing us to enter one that in comparison is literally dark from the age of Justinian and from the rise of Islam in the early years of the 7th century the geographical knowledge of Christendom is on a par with its practical contraction and apparent decline there are travelers but for the next 500 years there are no more theorists, cosmographers or map makers of the universe or habitable globe from the time that Islam after a century of world conquest began to form itself into an organized state or federation of states in the later 8th and earlier 9th centuries AD thus making itself until the 13th century the principal heir of the older eastern culture Christendom was content to take its geography its ideas of the world in general from the Arabs who in their turn depended upon the pre-Christian Greeks the relation of Ptolemy and Strabo to modern knowledge is best seen through the work of the Arabic geographers but the Saracens did much to destroy before they began to build up once more as the northern barbarians of the 5th century interrupted the hope of a Christian revival of pagan literature and science so the Muslims of the 7th and 8th cut short the Catholic and Roman revival of pagan and Heraclius in which the new faith and the old state had found a working agreement between Kosmos and the Viking age Christian, Roman western exploration falls within very narrow limits the few pilgrims whose recollections represent to us the whole literature of travel in the 7th, 8th and 9th centuries add nothing fresh even of practical discovery theory and theoretical work has ceased altogether and the first stirrings of the new life in the commerce and voyages of Amalfi and in the sudden and splendid outburst of Norse life in its age of piracy are not yet are not really before the world until the time of Alfred of England of Charles the Bald of Pope Nicholas the First the Great yet such as it is this pilgrim stage of European development stands for something religion as it is the first agent informing our modern nations is the first impulse towards their expansion and to us there is a special interest for the best known of western travelers in this darkest of the Christian ages 600 to 870 AD are Colf and Willebald are both connected with England and the beginnings of English science in the age of bead are Colf a Frank or Gallican Bishop 90 visited first of Latin writers since the Mohammedan conquest Jerusalem the Jordan Valley Nazareth and the other holy places of Syria was driven by storms on his return to the great Irish monastery of Iona there he described his wonders to the Abbott Adam non who then sat in the seat of the Irish apostles Patrick and Colombo and by Adam non this narrative was presented and dedicated to alt frith the wise last of the great Northumbrian kings in his court at York circa AD 701 not only does the original remain to us but we have also two summaries of it one longer another shorter made by Beda the venerable bead as a useful manual for Englishman concerning the holy sites we are again reminded by this how constantly fresh life is growing up under an appearance of death the conversion of England which Gregory the Great Theodore and the Irish monks had carried through in the seventh that darkest of Christian centuries was now bearing its fruit in the work of Bede who was really the sign of a far more permanent intellectual movement than his own and in that of Boniface, Will Brod and Willibald who began to win for Christendom in Germany more than a counter poise for her losses in the south east from Armenia to Spain our cult is full of the mystical unscientific spirit of the time he notes in Jerusalem a lofty column which at midday casts no shadow thus proving itself to be the center of the earth for as David says God is my king of old working salvation in the midst at the roots of Lebanon he comes to the place where the Jordan has its rise from two fountains Jor and Dan whose waters unite in the single river Jordan in the dead sea a lighted lamp would float safely and no man could sink if he tried the bitumen of this place was almost indissoluble the only fruit here about were the apples of Sodom which crumbled to dust in the mouth the three churches on the top of Tabor were according to the three tabernacles described by Peter from Damascus our cult made for the port of Tyre and so came by Jaffa to Egypt Alexandria he found so great he was one entire day in merely passing through it's poor he thought difficult of access and something like the human body in shape with a narrow mouth and neck then stretching out far and wide the great pharaoh's tower was still lit up every night with torches here was the emporium of the whole world countless merchants from all parts the country rainless and very fertile the Nile was navigable to the town of elephants beyond this at the cataracts the river runs in a wild ruin down a cliff its embankments its canals and even its crocodiles not so large as ravenous are all described and our cult returning home by Constantinople concludes with an account of the capital of Christendom beyond doubt the metropolis of the Roman Empire and by far the greatest city therein lastly as the pilgrim sails by Sicily he sees the Isle of Vulcan vomiting smoke by day and flame by night the noise like thunder which is always fiercer on Fridays and Saturdays Willibald a nephew of Saint Boniface and related through his mother to King Aina of Wessex started for the east about 721 past ten years in travel and on his return followed his countrymen to mission work among the heathen of Upper Germany he went out by Southampton and Rouen by Luca and the Alps to Naples and Catania where is Mount Etna and when this volcano casts itself out they take Saint Agatha's veil and hold it towards the fire which ceases at once thence by Samos and Cyprus to Antoritas and Domesda in the region of the Saracens where the whole party who had escaped the Muslim brigands of Southern Gaul were thrown into prison on suspicion of being spies a Spaniard made intercession for them and got their release but Willibald went up country 100 miles and cleared himself of all suspicion before the caliph at Damascus we have come from the west where the sun has his setting and we know of no land beyond nothing but water this was too far for spies he pleaded and the caliph agreed and gave him a pass for all the sites of Palestine with which he traversed the length and breadth of the Holy Land four times finding the same trouble in leaving as he had found in entering like Arkolf he saw the fountains of Jordan the glorious church of Helena at Bethlehem the tombs of the patriarchs at Hebron the wonders of Jerusalem especially was he moved at the side of the columns in the church of the Ascension on Olivet for that man who can creep between those columns and the wall is freed from all his sins Tyre and Sidon he passed again and again on the coast of the Adriatic Sea as he calls the Levant six miles from one another at last he got away to Constantinople with some safely smuggled trophies of pilgrimage and some balsam in a calabash covered with petroleum but the customs officers would have killed all of them if the fraud had been found out so Willibald believed after two years of close intercourse with the Greek Christians of New Rome living in a cell in the church possibly St. Sophia the first of English-born travelers returned to old Rome as our Gulf had done by sea noticing, like him Theodoric's Hell in the Lipperis he could not get up the mountain though curious to see what sort of a hell it was where the Gothic tyrant was damned for the murder of Aethius and Semicus and for his own impenitent Arianism but though he could not be seen or heard all the pilgrims remarked how the pumice that riders use was thrown up by the flame from the hell and fell into the sea and so was cast upon the shore and gathered up such was the philosophy of Catholicism about the countries of the known world in the 8th century for Willibald's account was published with the imprimatur of Gregory the Third and with our Gulf's took rank as a satisfactory comment on the old Bordeaux itinerary of 400 years ago again the impression given by our two chief guide books our Gulf and Willibald is confirmed by the monk Fidelis who traveled in Egypt about 750 and by Bernard the Wise of Montse Michel who went over all the pilgrim ground a century later 867 Fidelis sailing up the Nile was astonished at the sight of the seven barns of Joseph the pyramids looking like mountains but all of stone square at the base rounded in the upper part and twisted at the summit like a spire on measuring a side of one of them it was found to be 400 feet from the Nile Fidelis sailed by the freshwater canal of Niko, Hadrian and Amru not finally blocked up till 767 direct to the Red Sea near where Moses crossed with the Israelites the pilgrim wanted to go and look for Pharaoh's chariot wheels but the sailors were obstinate and took him round the peninsula of Sinai down one arm of the sea and up another to Ezion Geber and Edom Bernard the French monk of Mons and Michel took the straight route overland by Rome to Bari then a Saracen city whose emir forwarded the pilgrims in a fleet of transports carrying some 9000 Christian slaves to Alexandria here, like Willibald Bernard found himself suspect thrown into prison till the siege had been paid then only allowed to move stage by stage as fees were prompt and sufficient for a traveler must pay as an infidel not only the ordinary tribute of the subject Christians of Egypt but the money of the road as well Islam has always made of strangers a fair mark for extortion safe at last in Jerusalem the party Bernard himself and two friends one a Spaniard the other a monk of Beneventum were lodged in the hostel of the glorious Emperor Charles founded for all the pilgrims who speak the Roman tongue and after making the ordinary visits of devotion and giving us their account of the Easter miracle of the Holy Fire at the church of the sepulchre they took ship for Italy and landed at Rome after 60 days of misery at sea Bernard's account closes with the Roman churches the lateran where the keys of the whole city are given every night into the hands of the apostolic Pope and Saint Peter's on the west side of Rome that for size has no rival in the world at the same time or a little earlier than the Breton Traveler circa 808 to 850 another Latin had written a short tract on the houses of God in Jerusalem which with Bernard's notebook is our last geographical record before the age of the Northmen a new time was coming a time not of timid creeping pilgrims only but of sea kings and sea men who made the ocean their home and for the north of Europe at least broke the tradition of land journeys and coasting voyages but the early pilgrims after all have their place it is of no use insisting that the mental outlook of these men is infantile that is best proved by their own words their own scale of things but it is necessary to insist that in these travelers we have comparatively enlarged experience and knowledge and as comparison is the only test of any age or of any man therein the very blunders and limitations of the past as we see them to be have a constant as well as an historical value to us that is we are always being reminded first how we have come to the present mastery over nature over ourselves over all being and secondly how imperfect how futile our work is still and seems always doomed to be if judged from a really final standpoint or rather from our own dreams of the ultimately possible so if in the case of our medieval travelers their interests are the very reverse of ours if they take delight in brooding over thoughts which to us do not seem worth the thinking if their minds seem to rest much on fable implicitly accepted as on the little amount of experienced fact necessary for a working life it will not be for us to judge or to pity or to despise the men who were making our world for us and through whose work we live especially we cannot afford to forget this as we reach the lowest of the fortunes the mental and material work and position and outlook of Europe and Christendom a half-barbarized world had entered upon the inheritance of a splendid past but it took centuries before that inheritance was realized by the so altered present in this time of change we have men writing the language of Caesar and Augustine of Alexander and Plato and Aristotle who had been themselves or whose fathers had been pirates, brigands, nomads wolves of the land or of the sea to Greeks or Romans of the south who had been even to the romanized provincials of the north and with many such and a lot of such and a lot of such and heritage but in the same time we realize that the same and how we see the same and how we canす and how we can see how we can see the overworked and outworn masters of the western world, to learn of them and to make of them a more enduring race.