These navigators certainly deserve our admiration for the
courage and the pluck with which they accomplished their
hopeless tasks in the face of difficulties of which the people of
our own comfortable world can have no conception. Their
ships were leaky. The rigging was clumsy. Since the middle
of the thirteenth century they had possessed some sort of a
compass (which had come to Europe from China by way of
Arabia and the Crusades) but they had very bad and incorrect
maps. They set their course by God and by guess. If luck
was with them they returned after one or two or three years.
In the other case, their bleeched bones remained behind on
some lonely beach. But they were true pioneers. They gambled
with luck. Life to them was a glorious adventure. And
all the suffering, the thirst and the hunger and the pain were
forgotten when their eyes beheld the dim outlines of a new coast
or the placid waters of an ocean that had lain forgotten since
the beginning of time.
Again I wish that I could make this book a thousand pages
long. The subject of the early discoveries is so fascinating.
But history, to give you a true idea of past times, should be
like those etchings which Rembrandt used to make. It should
cast a vivid light on certain important causes, on those which
are best and greatest. All the rest should be left in the shadow
or should be indicated by a few lines.
Pages:
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246