Christopher Columbus and the New World of His Discovery | Page 5

but we may be sure they never ceased to wonder at what might
lie beyond the sea. How much more must they have wondered if they
looked west upon the waters, and saw the sun of each succeeding day
sink upon a couch of glory where they could not follow? All pain
aspires to oblivion, all toil to rest, all troubled discontent with what is
present to what is unfamiliar and far away; and no power of knowledge
and scientific fact will ever prevent human unhappiness from reaching
out towards some land of dreams of which the burning brightness of a
sea sunset is an image. Is it very hard to believe, then, that in that
yearning towards the miracle of a sun quenched in sea distance, felt and
felt again in human hearts through countless generations, the westward
stream of human activity on this planet had its rise? Is it unreasonable
to picture, on an earth spinning eastward, a treadmill rush of feet to
follow the sinking light? The history of man's life in this world does not,
at any rate, contradict us. Wisdom, discovery, art, commerce, science,

civilisation have all moved west across our world; have all in their
cycles followed the sun; have all, in their day of power, risen in the
East and set in the West.
This stream of life has grown in force and volume with the passage of
ages. It has always set from shore to sea in countless currents of
adventure and speculation; but it has set most strongly from East to
West. On its broad bosom the seeds of life and knowledge have been
carried throughout the world. It brought the people of Tyre and
Carthage to the coasts and oceans of distant worlds; it carried the
English from Jutland across cold and stormy waters to the islands of
their conquest; it carried the Romans across half the world; it bore the
civilisation of the far East to new life and virgin western soils; it carried
the new West to the old East, and is in our day bringing back again the
new East to the old West. Religions, arts, tradings, philosophies, vices
and laws have been borne, a strange flotsam, upon its unchanging flood.
It has had its springs and neaps, its trembling high-water marks, its
hour of affluence, when the world has been flooded with golden
humanity; its ebb and effluence also, when it has seemed to shrink and
desert the kingdoms set upon its shores. The fifteenth century in
Western Europe found it at a pause in its movements: it had brought the
trade and the learning of the East to the verge of the Old World, filling
the harbours of the Mediterranean with ships and the monasteries of
Italy and Spain with wisdom; and in the subsequent and punctual
decadence that followed this flood, there gathered in the returning tide
a greater energy and volume which was to carry the Old World bodily
across the ocean. And yet, for all their wisdom and power, the Spanish
and Portuguese were still in the attitude of our primitive man, standing
on the sea-shore and looking out in wonder across the sea.
The flood of the life-stream began to set again, and little by little to rise
and inundate Western Europe, floating off the galleys and caravels of
King Alphonso of Portugal, and sending them to feel their way along
the coasts of Africa; a little later drawing the mind of Prince Henry the
Navigator to devote his life to the conquest and possession of the
unknown. In his great castle on the promontory of Sagres, with the
voice of the Atlantic thundering in his ears, and its mists and sprays

bounding his vision, he felt the full force of the stream, and stretched
his arms to the mysterious West. But the inner light was not yet so
brightly kindled that he dared to follow his heart; his ships went south
and south again, to brave on each voyage the dangers and terrors that
lay along the unknown African coast, until at length his captains saw
the Cape of Good Hope. South and West and East were in those days
confusing terms; for it was the East that men were thinking of when
they set their faces to the setting sun, and it was a new road to the East
that they sought when they felt their way southward along the edge of
the world. But the rising tide of discovery was working in that moment,
engaging the brains of innumerable sages, stirring the wonder of
innumerable mariners; reaching also, little by little, to quarters less
immediately concerned with the business of discovery. Ships carried
the strange tidings of new coasts and new islands from port to port
throughout the Mediterranean; Venetians