The Story of Geographical Discovery | Page 3

from John Davis (1587) to Nansen (1895).

THE STORY OF
GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY

INTRODUCTION
How was the world discovered? That is to say, how did a certain set of
men who lived round the Mediterranean Sea, and had acquired the art
of recording what each generation had learned, become successively
aware of the other parts of the globe? Every part of the earth, so far as
we know, has been inhabited by man during the five or six thousand
years in which Europeans have been storing up their knowledge, and all
that time the inhabitants of each part, of course, were acquainted with
that particular part: the Kamtschatkans knew Kamtschatka, the
Greenlanders, Greenland; the various tribes of North American Indians
knew, at any rate, that part of America over which they wandered, long
before Columbus, as we say, "discovered" it.
Very often these savages not only know their own country, but can
express their knowledge in maps of very remarkable accuracy. Cortes
traversed over 1000 miles through Central America, guided only by a

calico map of a local cacique. An Eskimo named Kalliherey drew out,
from his own knowledge of the coast between Smith Channel and Cape
York, a map of it, varying only in minute details from the Admiralty
chart. A native of Tahiti, named Tupaia, drew out for Cook a map of
the Pacific, extending over forty-five degrees of longitude (nearly 3000
miles), giving the relative size and position of the main islands over
that huge tract of ocean. Almost all geographical discoveries by
Europeans have, in like manner, been brought about by means of
guides, who necessarily knew the country which their European
masters wished to "discover."
What, therefore, we mean by the history of geographical discovery is
the gradual bringing to the knowledge of the nations of civilisation
surrounding the Mediterranean Sea the vast tracts of land extending in
all directions from it. There are mainly two divisions of this
history--the discovery of the Old World and that of the New, including
Australia under the latter term. Though we speak of geographical
discovery, it is really the discovery of new tribes of men that we are
thinking of. It is only quite recently that men have sought for
knowledge about lands, apart from the men who inhabit them. One
might almost say that the history of geographical discovery, properly so
called, begins with Captain Cook, the motive of whose voyages was
purely scientific curiosity. But before his time men wanted to know one
another for two chief reasons: they wanted to conquer, or they wanted
to trade; or perhaps we could reduce the motives to one--they wanted to
conquer, because they wanted to trade. In our own day we have seen a
remarkable mixture of all three motives, resulting in the European
partition of Africa--perhaps the most remarkable event of the latter end
of the nineteenth century. Speke and Burton, Livingstone and Stanley,
investigated the interior from love of adventure and of knowledge; then
came the great chartered trading companies; and, finally, the
governments to which these belong have assumed responsibility for the
territories thus made known to the civilised world. Within forty years
the map of Africa, which was practically a blank in the interior, and, as
will be shown, was better known in 1680 than in 1850, has been filled
up almost completely by researches due to motives of conquest, of
trade, or of scientific curiosity.

In its earlier stages, then, the history of geographical discovery is
mainly a history of conquest, and what we shall have to do will be to
give a short history of the ancient world, from the point of view of how
that world became known. "Became known to whom?" you may ask;
and we must determine that question first. We might, of course, take
the earliest geographical work known to us--the tenth chapter of
Genesis--and work out how the rest of the world became known to the
Israelites when they became part of the Roman Empire; but in history
all roads lead to Rome or away from it, and it is more useful for every
purpose to take Rome as our centre-point. Yet Rome only came in as
the heir of earlier empires that spread the knowledge of the earth and
man by conquest long before Rome was of importance; and even when
the Romans were the masters of all this vast inheritance, they had not
themselves the ability to record the geographical knowledge thus
acquired, and it is to a Greek named Ptolemy, a professor of the great
university of Alexandria, to whom we owe our knowledge of how
much the ancient world knew of the earth. It will be convenient to
determine this first, and afterwards to sketch rapidly the course of
historical events which led to