The Expansion Of Europe | Page 9

great Marco, undertook still more daring and
long-continued journeys, which made India and Cathay less unreal to
Europeans, and stimulated the desire for further knowledge. The later
mediaeval maps of the world, like that of Fra Mauro (1459),[Footnote:
Simplified reproductions of this and the other early maps alluded to are
printed in Philip's Students' Atlas of Modern History, which also
contains a long series of maps illustrating the extra-Europeans activities
of the European states.] which incorporate this knowledge, are less
wildly imaginative than their predecessors, and show a vague notion of
the general configuration of the main land-masses in the Old World.
But beyond the fringes of the Mediterranean the world was still in the
main unknown to, and unaffected by, European civilisation down to the
middle of the fifteenth century.
Then, suddenly, came the great era of explorations, which were made
possible by the improvements in navigation worked out during the
fifteenth century, and which in two generations incredibly transformed
the aspect of the world. The marvellous character of this revelation can

perhaps be illustrated by the comparison of two maps, that of Behaim,
published in 1492, and that of Schoener, published in 1523. Apart from
its adoption of the theory that the earth was globular, not round and flat,
Behaim's map shows little advance upon Fra Mauro, except that it gives
a clearer idea of the shape of Africa, due to the earlier explorations of
the Portuguese. But Schoener's map shows that the broad outlines of
the distribution of the land-masses of both hemispheres were already in
1523 pretty clearly understood. This astonishing advance was due to
the daring and enterprise of the Portuguese explorers, Diaz, Da Gama,
Cabral, and of the adventurers in the service of Spain, Columbus,
Balboa, Vespucci, and--greatest of them all--Magellan.
These astonishing discoveries placed for a time the destinies of the
outer world in the hands of Spain and Portugal, and the first period of
European imperialism is the period of Iberian monopoly, extending to
1588. A Papal award in 1493 confirmed the division of the
non-European world between the two powers, by a judgment which the
orthodox were bound to accept, and did accept for two generations. All
the oceans, except the North Atlantic, were closed to the navigators of
other nations; and these two peoples were given, for a century, the
opportunity of showing in what guise they would introduce the
civilisation of Europe to the rest of the globe. Pioneers as they were in
the work of imperial development, it is not surprising that they should
have made great blunders; and in the end their foreign dominions
weakened rather than strengthened the home countries, and contributed
to drag them down from the high place which they had taken among
the nations.
The Portuguese power in the East was never more than a commercial
dominion. Except in Goa, on the west coast of India, no considerable
number of settlers established themselves at any point; and the Goanese
settlement is the only instance of the formation of a mixed race, half
Indian and half European. Wherever the Portuguese power was
established, it proved itself hard and intolerant; for the spirit of the
Crusader was ill-adapted to the establishment of good relations with the
non-Christian peoples. The rivalry of Arab traders in the Indian Ocean
was mercilessly destroyed, and there was as little mercy for the Italian
merchants, who found the stream of goods that the Arabs had sent them
by way of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf almost wholly intercepted.

No doubt any other people, finding itself in the position which the
Portuguese occupied in the early sixteenth century, would have been
tempted to use their power in the same way to establish a complete
monopoly; but the success with which the Portuguese attained their aim
was in the end disastrous to them. It was followed by, if it did not cause,
a rapid deterioration of the ability with which their affairs were directed;
and when other European traders began to appear in the field, they were
readily welcomed by the princes of India and the chieftains of the Spice
Islands. In the West the Portuguese settlement in Brazil was a genuine
colony, or branch of the Portuguese nation, because here there existed
no earlier civilised people to be dominated. But both in East and West
the activities of the Portuguese were from the first subjected to an
over-rigid control by the home government. Eager to make the most of
a great opportunity for the national advantage, the rulers of Portugal
allowed no freedom to the enterprise of individuals. The result was that
in Portugal itself, in the East, and in Brazil, initiative was destroyed,
and the brilliant energy which this gallant little nation had displayed
evaporated within a century. It was