Читать книгу The Beginners of a Nation - Eggleston Edward - Страница 3

The Elizabethan age. The age of Elizabeth and James – the age of Spenser, of Shakespeare, and of Bacon – was a new point of departure in the history of the English race. All the conditions excited men to unwonted intellectual activity. The art of printing was yet a modern invention; the New World with its novelties and unexplained mysteries was a modern discovery; and there were endless discussions and agitations of spirit growing out of the recent reformation in religion. Imagination was powerfully stimulated by the progress of American exploration, by the romantic adventures of the Spaniards in the West Indies, and their dazzling conquest of new-found empires in Mexico and Peru. It was an age of creation in poetry, in science, and in religion, and men of action were everywhere set on deeds of daring. The world had regained something of the vigor and spontaneity of youth, but the credulity and curiosity of youth were not wanting. The mind of the time accepted and reveled in marvelous stories. The stage plays of that drama-loving age reflected the interest in the supernatural and the eager curiosity about far-away countries. Books of travel fitted the prevailing taste. He who could afford to buy them regaled himself with the great folios of Hakluyt's Voyages and Purchas his Pilgrimes. General readers delighted in little tracts and pamphlets relating incidents of far-away travels, or describing remote countries and the peoples inhabiting them, or the "monstrous strange beasts" found in lands beyond the bounds of Christendom.

Credulity about America. America excited the most lively curiosity as a world by itself and the least known of all the "four parts" into which the globe was then divided. There were those, indeed, who made six parts of the world by adding an arctic continent, which included Greenland and a vast southern land supposed to stretch from Magellan's Strait southward to the pole. George Beste, First Voyage of Sir Martin Frobisher. It was easy to believe in these two superfluous continents; they were mirages of the New World. Every great discovery excites expectation of others like it. And in a time when vague report or well-worn tradition counted for more than observation or experimental knowledge, it was inevitable that current information about America should be distorted and mixed with fable. In that age, still pre-Baconian, men had few standards by which to measure probabilities, and to those shut in by the narrow limits of mediæval knowledge the mere uncovering of a new continent whose existence contravened the fixed beliefs of the ages was so marvelous that nothing told about it afterward seemed incredible.

Illusions of discoverers. The history of American exploration is a story of delusion and mistake. The New World was discovered because it lay between Europe and the East Indian Spice Islands by the westward route. Columbus, seeking the less, found the greater by stumbling on it in the dark. Zuan Caboto – in English, John Cabot – who is described by a contemporary as "a Venetian fellow with a fine mind, greatly skilled in navigation," discovered North America in 1497. But he did not exult that he was the finder of a vast and fertile continent in which great nations might germinate, for he believed that his landfall at Cape Breton was within the dominions of the Grand Cham of China, and he sailed down the coast again the next year, "ever with the intent to find said passage to India." 1 It was announced on his return from his first voyage that Henry VII had "won a part of Asia without a stroke of the sword."

The discovery of the Pacific by Balboa in 1513, and the voyage of Magellan's ship across that ocean in 1520, were not sufficient to remove the illusion that America was connected with Asia. The notion that the New World was an Asiatic peninsula died lingeringly about the middle of the sixteenth century; but to reach Asia was still the main purpose of western exploration, and America was for a long time regarded mainly as an obstruction. The belief in a passage to the Pacific by means of some yet-to-be-discovered strait severing the continent of America, survived far into the seventeenth century, and the hope of coming by some short cut into a rich commerce with the Orient led to a prying exploration of all the inlets, bays, and estuaries on the American coast and so promoted discovery, but it retarded settlement by blinding men to the value of the New World. 2