Читать книгу Winged Peace - William Avery Bishop - Страница 12

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Before the days of Columbus it was the average person’s opinion that if you sailed west from the coast of Europe, sooner or later you would pass over the edge of the world and fall into bottomless space. Indeed, some of the scientific gentlemen of the day were convinced they were living on a flat, or wafer-like, world and everybody else took their word for it. Times have not changed as much as you think.

True, our young people today are taught in the schools that the world is globular in shape. They know that if you set off from Montreal, or New York, or San Francisco, and travel either east or west, ultimately you will return to your point of departure without turning back on your tracks. That is about all of the global conception of geography which schools teach them. Fundamentally their elders, who should be also their betters, visualize the world on which we live as they see it on a plane, with here and there colored areas and black pin-points indicating the locations of countries and cities. Our children are still being taught what may be called the geography of the flat map, a map which has no relation of any sort to the world in which they will live their lives—the world of the Air Age. They are given the idea of circumnavigation of the globe, provided it occurs east-west or west-east. But it does not seem to have come to the attention of their teachers that similar navigation is possible north-south over the poles—and that it revolutionizes our whole way of life.

Fortunately for our hopes for tomorrow, the youngsters have sources of knowledge outside the schoolroom. They gaze into the skies whenever they hear the purring roar of an airplane overhead, and their eyes and ears are keen to catch, and their minds quick to evaluate, the significance of Air Age news. The typically alert boy of twelve or fifteen is today—thanks to knowledge he has gained outside the schoolroom—so much further advanced in matters of global, curved-map geography than are his parents and schoolteachers, that he has set a strenuous task for us oldsters to perform before we shall ever have caught up with him.

Maps are not geography. A map is never anything more than a picture of what man thinks at the time when he commits his map to paper. In Homer’s day, for example, the world of the map was a flat disc on which sections of dry land surrounded the Mediterranean Sea. About the circumference flowed a boundless body of water which the ancient geographers called the Ocean River, and where it came from or where it went nobody had the slightest idea. Later Ptolemy saw a picture of the world as a wafer with curved edges. A little more land had been found here and there and the Ocean River idea was pretty much discarded, but it was still accepted as axiomatic that you would sail off the edge if you ventured too far. So it went for centuries.

Then came Columbus, and as far as sensible people were concerned, the Genoese who was forever talking about sailing into the West was completely mad. Before he was lucky enough to interest the Queen of Spain in his enterprise, the Republics of Genoa and Venice, the two great maritime powers of the day, had turned down the opportunity to buy into his project. The merchants of Venice and Genoa, judged by today’s business standards, were no fools. They owned fleets of ships, built for the carrying trade of the enclosed Mediterranean Sea and the coastal waters of the Atlantic. In the event that Columbus’s theories might turn out to be correct, the result would be that the Venetian and Genoese fleets would have to be scrapped and new ships built, capable of sailing the open oceans. That, primarily, was why Columbus encountered so much difficulty in finding backers. In other words, the old geography was too convenient to be discarded in favor of new ideas. Hence the gentlemen of commerce in Genoa and Venice refused to take Columbus seriously, whereas it was comparatively simple to interest Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, because they were seeking a way to get into maritime trade in a big way and Columbus looked like a good long-odds gamble. So he sailed west and in due course came upon what was later called the New World. (My friend the late Stephen Leacock once said that it was a great mistake to give the gentleman so much credit for his discovery of the Americas, inasmuch as he could not avoid bumping into them somewhere between Hudson Strait and the Straits of Magellan.)

Columbus’s discovery immediately brought a new general conception of geography into being according to which the earth was divided naturally into western and eastern land masses separated by vast stretches of water.

Since distances were great and ships not merely slow but at the mercy of wind and sea, nations became collectors of islands in the oceans, places where ships could put in for supplies, fresh water and sanctuary, and were ready to fight to hold these islands at the drop of a belaying pin.

Once more men were convinced they had come to the be-all and end-all of world geography, and that nothing could happen to change it.

Then came the ocean-going steamship which broadened men’s concepts and enlarged their freedom. Canals were dug across isthmuses, as at Suez and Panama. Voyages around the Horn and the Cape of Good Hope became more and more rare. Men no longer were at the mercy of the winds. Hence the islands which their storm-tossed sailing ships had visited for refit, water, and provisions became liabilities, not assets, to the nations which owned them. Moreover the discovery had been made that the shortest distance between two points on the world’s surface is not a straight line, as it had seemed to be in the earlier conception, but a curved line following the contour of the globe.

Now, instead of mid-ocean islands, what may be called the geographical bottlenecks, of which there were no more than a dozen in the seagoing world, became the valued possessions of the trading nations. For example, a ship could not get into or out of the Indian Ocean without passing the Cape of Good Hope, Southeast Australia, the Strait of Malacca, or the Strait of Bab el Mandeb and the Suez Canal. That meant that Cape Town, Sydney, Singapore, Aden, and Alexandria became places of extreme strategic importance, in which respect it is interesting to note that the British, already the world’s greatest sea traders, managed to get hold of all these, as they did with most of the others.

It was through the medium of these great ocean bottlenecks and the tremendous naval strength which Britain developed to control them, that mankind sailed the seas for more than a hundred years under the protection of the “Pax Britannica.” It was a traders’ world and it was a sea world, but it was still very much a flat world as most people saw it. Moreover, as in Homer’s day, in Ptolemy’s and Columbus’s, it was a world the geography of which would never change; so everybody, including the seafaring British, staunchly believed. America, convinced that the world’s geography had been settled for all time, dreamed of majestic isolation without “foreign entanglements.” Its people, regarding the oceans as insurmountable barriers between themselves and any possible invader, assured each other that they could live their own lives without danger of interference from any outside power or powers when, as a matter of fact, their isolation was made possible primarily by the fact that Britain, a friendly sea power, controlled virtually all the strategic bottlenecks and made no attempt to prevent peaceful use of them by her friends. That, perhaps, is neither here nor there. The point in all this is to bring before the reader the concept of the world as it was before the arrival of the Air Age and to impress on him that mankind accepted as axiomatic the view that nothing could happen to change geography again. Then suddenly geography underwent a revolution as great as, if not greater than, that which it experienced on the return of Columbus from the West.

Let us think for just a moment of what happened to the Atlantic Ocean. The Mayflower made the crossing in sixty-five days. The first transatlantic steamship reached New York from Britain in fifteen days, cutting the width of the Atlantic by 75 per cent. The Queen Mary reduced the width again by almost 75 per cent by shuttling between Sandy Hook and Southampton Water in a matter of four days. Today the crossing is made in less than twenty-four hours by multi-engined aircraft, and the Atlantic has become little more than a millpond. Yet the people of the democracies, most of their statesmen, and even some of their aviation experts still relate the oceans to the geography of the flat map and the tramp steamer.

What has happened to create the new geography of the Air Age?

In preceding paragraphs I have mentioned the great bottlenecks interposed between the oceans and have shown how the seas were dominated by the people who controlled these gateways. The coming of global aviation, while it has not completely destroyed the value of these key points, nevertheless has gone far toward doing so. In order to reach the Far East today, for example, it is not necessary to pass through the Strait of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal. Those who are hostile to the controllers of these gateways can simply fly over them and by-pass them. Conceivably, as the Air Age develops (and I am speaking now in the military sense), it will be possible to move huge forces of men and supplies by air with complete or almost complete disregard for the strategic sea junctions, and to land and maintain invasion forces far behind them. That has happened in some degree in this war. What will happen if ever we find ourselves involved in World War III almost beggars the imagination.

On the day before these lines were written an airplane whisked across the curved map non-stop from the British Isles and landed in Montreal sixteen hours after its take-off in Britain. Five years ago Montreal, the Montreal of the old flat map, though one of the world’s great seaports, was icebound and closed for several months in the year. Today, because global aviation has become an accomplished fact and has brought us face to face with the new geography, Montreal is an all year port from which it is possible to travel to anywhere in the world without regard to the conditions of climate which formerly kept its gates tightly closed for almost half of each twelve-month period.

At the commencement of the present war, Moscow was a city which, in the average North American mind, lay somewhere east from New York, across the Atlantic and over the other side of France and Germany. The Moscow of the Air Age is no longer there. Now Moscow is a city reached by flight north from New York around the top of the world via Reykjavik and down on the other side, a matter of a few hours’ flying time from any center in the eastern United States or Canada. So it is with all the distant places we used to take endless weeks to reach. Today they are just across the street. The great polar ice barrier has ceased to exist. Now we can be almost anywhere in the world between sun-up and sun-up.

That is what is meant in speaking of “The New Geography.” All the old concepts of Eastern and Western Hemispheres, of tremendous ocean barriers behind which we thought we could hide from potential enemies and behind which we believed we could live our own lives in splendid isolation—all these have disappeared. The new geography brings into being a new world. It was created by the airplane and what we do about the new world depends on what we do about aviation, now and tomorrow. Meanwhile men still think in terms of the world they knew during the last interval between wars; the world which placed Russia a full hemisphere away from

The average person, thinking of the route from Washington to Moscow, would envisage a fortnight’s journey eastward—probably from New York to London, from London across the English Channel, and then by rail across Germany, before the border of Russia is crossed—a distance of almost 6000 miles. The time and distance traveled have been made necessary by the facilities of the past; the thought that Northern Europe can be most directly approached by traveling eastward is a misconception based upon the Mercator projection (above) on which the shortest actual route cannot be represented as a straight line save at the equator or in north and south directions. The curved line on this map, which looks longer, actually represents the shortest distance between Washington and Moscow.

America, which thought of Tokyo as a strange place beyond the Pacific, a world in which Africa was still a dark and distant continent.

What will be the impact of the new geography on the life of man? I cannot answer that question completely because I do not know what men are going to do about it. But this much I do know: if people living in one part of the world pattern their lives on the new geography and people living in another part of the world fail to do so, then, sooner or later, those who orient themselves to the geography of the Air Age will rule those who fail to do so. I think that puts the matter in a nutshell. At least it should make clear to anyone that the first problem which faces us in our consideration of postwar aviation is not who is going to fly from where to where, and how much money he is going to make by doing so, but how we are going to organize the world to meet the new way of life imposed upon us by this new geography. The airplane created it. The airplane already has revolutionized every concept of life we held when we embarked upon the great adventure of World War II.

On this map (a Washington-centered azimuthal equidistant projection) all lines radiating from Washington are great circles. Here the straight line actually represents the shortest way to Moscow and shows the route of the Air Age—from Washington northward to Newfoundland, across the tip of Greenland and through Iceland, a distance of less than 5000 miles which can be flown in twenty-three hours—while the old sea and land route is shown by the curved line to be far longer.