The mariner's compass had become familiar in the European ports about the beginning of the 14th century, and the seamen of Italy, Portugal, France, Holland, and England entered upon a more enlightened and adventurous course of navigation. The Canary Islands were sighted by a French vessel in 1330, and colonized in 1418 by the Portuguese, who two years later landed on Madeira. In 1431 the Azores were discovered by a shipmaster of Bruges. The Atlantic was being gradually explored. In 1486, Diaz, a Portuguese, steering his course almost unwittingly along the coast of Africa, came upon the land's-end of that continent; and nine years afterwards Vasco de Gama, of the same nation, not only doubled the Cape of Good Hope, but reached Zanzibar. About the same period a Portuguese traveller penetrated to India by the old time-honoured way of Suez; and a land, which tradition and imagination had invested with almost fabulous wealth and splendour, was becoming more real to the European world at the moment when the expedition of Vasco de Gama had made an oceanic route to its shores distinctly visible. One can hardly now realize the impression made by these discoveries in an age when the minds of men were awakening out of a long sleep, when the printing press was disseminating the ancient classical and sacred literature, and when geography and astronomy were subjects of eager study in the seats both of traffic and of learning. But their practical effect was seen in swiftly-succeeding events. Before the end of the century Columbus had thrice crossed the Atlantic, touched at San Salvador, discovered Jamaica, Porto Rico, and the Isthmus of Darien, and had seen the waters of the Orinoco in South America. Meanwhile Cabot, sent out by England, had discovered Newfoundland, planted the English flag on Labrador, Nova Scotia, and Virginia, and made known the existence of an expanse of land now known as Canada. This tide of discovery by navigators flowed on without intermission. But the opening of a maritime route to India and the discovery of America, surprising as these events must have been at the time, were slow in producing the results of which they were a sure prognostic. The Portuguese established at Goa the first European factory in India a few years after Vasco de Gama's expedition, and other maritime nations of Europe traced a similar course. But it was not till 1600 that the English East India Company was established, and the opening of the first factory of the Company in India must be dated some ten or eleven years later. So also it was one thing to discover the two Americas, and another, in any real sense, to possess or colonize them, or to bring their productions into the general traffic and use of the world. Spain, following the stroke of the valiant oar of Columbus, found in Mexico and Peru remarkable remains of an ancient though feeble civilization, and a wealth of gold and silver mines, which to Europeans of that period was fascinating from the rarity of the precious metals in their own realms, and consequently gave to the Spanish colonizations and conquests in South America an extraordinary but unsolid prosperity. The value of the precious metals in Europe was found to fall as soon as they began to be more widely distributed, a process in itself at that period of no small tediousness; and it was discovered further, after a century or two, that the production of gold and silver is much like the production of other commodities for which they exchange, viz., limited, and only increased in quantity at a heavier cost, that is only reduced again by greater art and science in the process of production. Many difficulties, in short, had to be overcome, many wars to be waged, and many deplorable errors to be committed, in turning the new advantages to account. But given a maritime route to India and the discovery of a new world of continent and islands in the richest tropical and subtropical latitudes, it could not be difficult to foresee that the course of trade was to be wholly changed as well as vastly extended.
The substantial advantage of the oceanic passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope, as seen at the time, was to enable European trade with the East to escape from the Moors, Algerines, and Turks who now swarmed round the shores of the Mediterranean, and waged a predatory war on ships and cargoes which would have been a formidable obstacle even if traffic, after running this danger, had not to be further lost, or filtered into the smallest proportions, in the sands of the Isthmus, and among the Arabs who commanded the navigation of the Red and Arabian Seas. Venice had already begun to decline in her wars with the Turks, and could inadequately protect her own trade in the Mediterranean. Armed vessels sent out in strength from the Western ports often fared badly at the hands of the pirates. European trade with India can scarcely be said, indeed, to have yet come into existence. The maritime route was round about, and it lay on the hitherto almost untrodden ocean, but the ocean was a safer element than inland seas and deserts infested by the lawlessness and ferocity of hostile tribes of men. In short, the maritime route enabled European traders to see India for themselves, to examine what were its products and its wants, and by what means a profitable exchange on both sides could be established; and on this basis of knowledge, ships could leave the ports of their owners in Europe with a reasonable hope, via the Cape, of reaching the places to which they were destined without transshipment or other intermediary obstacle. This is the explanation to be given of the joy with which the Cape of Good Hope route was received in one age, as well as the immense influence it exerted on the future course and extension of trade, and of the no less apparent satisfaction with which it has been to some extent discarded in favour of the ancient line, via the Mediterranean, Isthmus of Suez, and the Red Sea in our own time.
